39th Annual Evans Days Celebrates the Breadth, Depth of Medical Research

For 39 years, the department of medicine’s Evans Days has showcased the breadth and depth of medical and science research. David Salant, MD, the Robert Dawson Evans Distinguished Professor of Medicine, took a minute to contemplate the hundreds milling around 70 large screen monitors in Hiebert Lounge. The big screens displayed the progress of nearly 150 projects that represent the research work of trainees and faculty in the department and their collaborators, on the Medical and Charles River campuses.
To Salant, the two-day annual event, held on Oct. 10-11 this year, celebrates the efforts of a new generation of young investigators, trainees and the mentors who help bring their research to a high standard and potentially launch careers.
“It prepares them to give the same presentations at national meetings (and) helps them when they are applying for jobs and preparing for their own grant submissions,” Salant said.
Evans Days includes competitions in oral presentation and poster display as well as lectures by faculty and distinguished visiting professors. George Murphy, PhD, was one of the judges for the poster contest, roaming among the brightly lit monitors with a tablet in hand.
“Trainee interaction with the faculty is one of the exceptional things that’s happening today,” said Murphy, an associate professor of medicine and cofounder of the Center for Regenerative Medicine. “It’s a protected space that allows them to show off their research in whatever stage of development, and that prepares them to go out into the world, present at outside scientific conferences and really do well in presenting their data.

Kelley Anderson is a fifth-year MD/PhD student heading back into the MD program next spring to finish her long journey to a dual degree. Her PhD will be in bioinformatics and her poster presentation focused on using gene expression to identify features of precancerous lesions. Her research may eventually help predict different clinical characteristics of lung adenocarcinoma tumors and will be part her PhD dissertation.
“Both in clinical medicine and in academic research, presenting is such a huge part of the process,” Anderson said. “Any opportunity to present, especially to people who aren’t…experts in the field, is very helpful.”
“I was nervous when I was presenting,” admitted Amulya Shastry, a fourth-year mathematics PhD student in computational biomedicine department. She was glad she had a script to read from and took second place in the oral presentation contest in her first presentation before a group outside her lab or classmates of research into treatment options for pneumonia that will likely be her doctoral thesis.

A third-year internal medicine resident at Boston Medical Center, Maria Florencia Martins, MD, came here from her native Argentina, drawn by what she saw as a culture of collaborative, supportive research and education.
“I think BU does a lot of research, with very interesting people doing very varied projects,” she said. “Everyone is very welcoming, collaborative and willing to work together.”
Her poster outlined research into how to improve patient compliance with tuberculosis treatment.
“There’s a lot of ways to be a good doctor, and the clinical part is really important. But we are also responsible for advancing science so that we can provide better clinical care for our patients,” Martins said.
The medical school has been actively encouraging and advocating for more medical students to do research with the idea that they’ll be more complete doctors.
“I think it’s a great opportunity to share what we’re doing, to reach out to our community and let them know what’s going on,” said second-year medical student Adjoa Fosuhema-Kordie. Her project focused on how to attract Black populations, particularly veterans, to undergo lung cancer screening, which they currently do at half the rate of white populations in the U.S.
“I think sometimes research seems so far away from the people it’s actually supposed to help,” Fosuhema-Kordie said. “This is an opportunity to bridge that gap.”
Evans Days also included lectures by two visiting professors and by the winner of the David L. Coleman, MD, Junior Faculty Prize, as well as talks by three researchers working in Affinity Research Collaboratives (ARC) that utilize support from the Evans Endowment to facilitate interdisciplinary approaches across the University.
The three ARC presenters included Emelia Benjamin, MD, ScM, the Jay and Louise Coffman Professor of Vascular Medicine, on “Mentoring and Sponsoring the Next Generation of Women’s Health Leaders;” Elisha Wachman, MD, professor of pediatrics, on “Advancing Research Regarding Substance Use Disorders in Women;” and Joyce Wong, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering and materials science & engineering. on “Biomaterials Science and Engineering for Reproductive Health.”
The David L. Coleman Junior Faculty Prize was awarded to Jean Liew, MD, MS, assistant professor of medicine in rheumatology, citing the volume and quality of her publications and grant support as well as her exemplary citizenship and mentorship.
“I congratulate all the trainees, the students, the fellows for the fantastic science we saw presented this morning. It was uniformly excellent and extremely impressive,” said Wilkins Visiting Professor Daniel Drucker, MD, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and senior scientist at the Lunenfeld Tanenbaum Research Institute at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

Drucker was among the first to demonstrate that acute intracerebroventricular administration of the glucagon-like peptide GLP-1 reduced food intake. That led to the use of a whole class of medicines like Ozempic to produce significant weight loss with benefits to diabetics and cardiovascular patients.
Drucker said research has produced even more effective medicines, now largely in late trial phases, that promised greater weight loss and were effective for a higher percentage of the population. That might help in the struggle to combat a worldwide epidemic of childhood obesity where diet and exercise aren’t having an impact.
“The huge challenge is that most people in the world cannot afford these medicines, and most cannot access them,” Drucker said.
Ingelfinger Visiting Professor Michelle Albert, MD, MPH, FACC, FAHA, and the Walter A. Haas-Lucie Stern Endowed Chair in Cardiology and professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, spoke about transforming medicine to address the unmet needs in health care.
“What will move the needle forward with actionable items in terms of potential solutions is really studying and deconstructing what the barriers are to entry into our systems,” she said.
For a list of the 2024 awards and poster winners go to: Evans Day Research Awards.