2023 Dahod Awards – Dahod Assistant Professorship

We are pleased to announce the 2023 recipients of the Dahod Assistant Professorship, Mollie Barnard, ScD. In August 2008, Shamim Dahod (CGS’76, CAS’78, CAMED’87) and her husband Ashraf gave $10.5M to the School to establish the Shamim and Ashraf Dahod Breast Cancer Research Center, as well as these programs and endowments.

Mollie Barnard, ScD, assistant professor of medicine, joined the Section of Hematology/Oncology and the Slone Epidemiology Center in July 2022. Under the Dahod assistant professorship, she will expand on the epidemiologic breast cancer research she began while at Harvard University and the Huntsman Cancer Institute. Aggressive breast cancer subtypes disproportionately affect Black women, contributing to racial disparities in breast cancer incidence and outcomes. This award will support Dr. Barnard's efforts to molecularly-characterize breast cancers in the Black Women's Health Study and will advance her goal of discovering pathways by which chronic inflammatory conditions influence the risk of breast tumor types. Results of her research may lead to a better understanding of reasons for the higher prevalence of aggressive breast cancer subtypes in U.S. Black women.

2023 Sexual Medicine Research Fund Award – Jai Marathe, MBBS, MS

We are pleased to announce that Jai Marathe, MBBS, MS is one of the recipients of the 2023 Sexual Medicine Research Fund award.

Jai Marathe, MBBS, MS, assistant professor of medicine/infectious diseases, and Deborah Anderson, professor of medicine/infectious diseases, are developing products using topical monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) for contraception and STI prevention. Vaginal films containing anti-HIV and anti-HSV mAbs, and a contraceptive mAb, HCA, showed promise in recent Phase I clinical trials evaluating feasibility, safety and ex vivoefficacy. They propose to now evaluate the feasibility of delivering anti-HIV mAbs in sexual lubricants for on-demand pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention.

DoM “Top Docs” 2023!

Cardiac Electrophysiology

Robert Helm

Kevin Monahan

Cardiovascular Disease          

Gary Balady

Sheilah Bernard

Robert Eberhardt

Alice Jacobs

Ashvin Pande

Clinical Genetics

Jodi Hoffman

Endocrinology, Diabetes & Metabolism

Sara Alexanian

Sonia Ananthakrishnan

Alan Farwell

Stephanie Lee

Elizabeth Pearce

Gastroenterology

David Lichtenstein

Robert Lowe

David Nunes

Geriatric Medicine

Heidi Auerbach

Lisa Caruso

Hollis Day

Won Lee

Hematology

Vaishali Sanchorawala

Infectious Disease

Sabrina Assoumou

Internal Medicine

Thomas Barber

Melissa DiPetrillo

Warren Hershman

Angela Jackson

Susan Phillips

Jeffrey Samet

Charles Tifft

Interventional Cardiology

Claudia Hochberg

Medical Oncology

Gretchen Gignac

Matthew Kulke

Adam Lerner

Nephrology

Laurence Beck

Jasvinder Bhatia

Jean Francis

Andrea Havasi

Lauren Stern

Pulmonary Disease

Jeffrey Berman

John Bernardo

Finn Hawkins

Elizabeth Klings

Frederic Little

George O'Connor

Radiation Oncology

Ariel Hirsch

Minh-Tam Truong

Rheumatology

David Felson

Eugene Kissin

Tuhina Neogi

Michael York

Read more here

Shoumita Dasgupta, PhD Named Assistant Dean for Diversity & Inclusion

Shoumita Dasgupta, PhD, has been selected by an advisory search committee comprising faculty and staff to serve alongside Karin Schon, PhD, Alexis Ramirez, MD, and Ebonie Woolcock, MD, as Assistant Deans for Diversity & Inclusion at the Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine.

They replace Drs. Rafael Ortega, Thea James, Ali Guermazi, Samantha Kaplan and David Henderson, who have stepped down from this role.

The assistant deans will serve as liaisons for faculty, staff, students and alumni for DEIA-focused needs or inquiries; help support programming and activities, as well as tracking and advancing DEIA-focused resources. Specifically, Dasgupta will provide support around programming and activities for some of our pathway and pipeline programs. Schon will support the Reads Program and will help develop and advise discussion-based programming. Ramirez will provide support around networking events, including Encuentro Latino and the Student Mixer.

Angelique Harris, PhD, Associate Dean for Diversity & Inclusion welcomed the new assistant deans and thanked previous ones for their service to our community.

BUMC Faculty Promotions – July-September 2022

Congratulations to the following Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine faculty on their recent appointment or promotion.

Professor

Tracy Battaglia, MD, MPH, Medicine/GIM; School of Public Health, Community Health Sciences, is a primary care clinician-investigator internationally recognized for her collaborative, innovative approaches to addressing health disparities among women historically marginalized. As director of the Women’s Health Unit and Women’s Health Interdisciplinary Research Center, associate chief of research for GIM and co-director of community engagement for the BU Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI), she has led the development of foundational infrastructure to support community-engaged methods in translational science. Her own research focuses on engaging with community to increase access to care for at-risk women, including ground-breaking work on the role of oncology patient navigators. Through her participation on several National Cancer Institute cooperative groups, she contributed to the 2012 Commission on Cancer Accreditation Standard requiring navigation services in cancer centers. As founding chair of the National Navigation Roundtable, she partners across sectors for sustainable navigation workforce. She currently leads a city-wide NIH study connecting multiple hospitals to reduce breast cancer disparities in Boston and contributed to two BU CTSI funding cycle renewals as well as Boston Medical Center’s participation in the HEALing Communities Study, an $89m award from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to evaluate community-driven approaches to reduce opioid deaths in Massachusetts communities.

Anthony Hollenberg, MD, Medicine, is the John Wade Professor and chair of the Department of Medicine and physician-in-chief at Boston Medical Center. Internationally known for his contributions to endocrinology, especially in the thyroid field, his laboratory has made seminal discoveries relating to how thyroid hormones work to regulate human physiology, identifying new pathways that have implications for body weight regulation and metabolism in general. Additionally, he and his team have made significant progress in understanding thyroid gland development. Continuously funded by the NIH since 1995, he is an elected member of the American Association of Physicians and has been recognized by a number of international and national awards for his research. Dr. Hollenberg is associate editor of Goldman-Cecil Textbook of Medicine.

Clinical Professor

Alan Farwell, MD, Medicine/Endocrinology, Diabetes & Nutrition, is among the country’s top senior clinician-educators in endocrinology, who specializes in thyroid disease, thyroid cancer and patient education and advocacy. He is the founding chair of the Patient Education and Advocacy Committee of the American Thyroid Association (ATA), founding chair of the ATA Alliance for Thyroid Patient Education and editor-in-chief of Clinical Thyroidology for the Patient (now Public), a monthly online journal that presents summaries of research studies written in lay language to allow the rapid dissemination of thyroid research to the widest possible audience.

Associate Professor

Geoffrey Oxnard, MD, Medicine/Hematology & Medical Oncology, is a clinician-scientist who has published and educated extensively on molecular mechanisms of resistance to targeted therapies in lung cancer, development of precision therapies for molecular subtypes of lung cancer, and clinical cancer genomics. His research on resistance mechanisms in EGFR-mutant lung cancer led to the first description in patients of EGFR C797S resistance mutations, which now are a prevalent clinical challenge. He has described numerous rare, targetable alterations in lung cancer toward developing better therapies, and most recently co-led the development of a recently FDA-approved, RET inhibitor for RET-positive lung cancer. He is clinical expert on the application of circulating tumor DNA genomics to advance cancer care, is referred patients from across the region and the nation for his insights and assistance in managing challenging lung cancer cases. He also leads Clinical Development at Foundation Medicine (a Roche-funded diagnostics company), where he develops the utility of genomic assays and biomarkers.

Seppo Rinne, MD, PhD, Medicine/Pulmonary, Allergy, Sleep & Critical Care Medicine, is a pulmonary/critical care physician, clinical informaticist and health services researcher with expertise in organizational factors influencing health information technology uptake and use. His research spans three overlapping areas: organization of care for patients with chronic pulmonary diseases; individual and organizational factors impacting clinician burnout; and application of technology to improve healthcare delivery. A leader in clinician morale, he has published the largest study on physician burnout nationally and some of the only studies to examine longitudinal changes in burnout. He was nominated to the American Thoracic Society Membership Committee to champion member well-being, and he led a Critical Care Societies Collaborative task force to determine the role of professional societies in addressing burnout. He is based at the Bedford VA-Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Hospital.

Vanessa Xanthakis, PhD, Medicine/Preventive Medicine & Epidemiology, is a biostatistician cum clinical investigator, providing a unique liaison between the Section of Preventive Medicine & Epidemiology, BUSPH Biostatistics Department and the Boston Medical Center Residency Program in Internal Medicine. She has been instrumental in shaping new data-sharing procedures and related guidelines via her leadership of the Framingham Heart Study (FHS) Early-Stage Investigators Committee, and her membership of the FHS Research Review, Biostatistics and Data Management, and Ancillary Investigators Steering committees. Dr. Xanthakis’ research focuses on the ideal cardiovascular health, and she was the first to publish on this concept across the lifespan using FHS data.

Clinical Associate Professor

Daniel Chen, MD, MSc, Medicine/GIM, is a clinician-educator whose scholarship focuses on evaluation and measurement of medical student empathy. He serves as an assistant dean for student affairs and course director for the Research Elective in Biomedical Sciences. He mentors medical residents and students regularly and teaches medical students rotating through internal medicine clerkship. Dr. Chen has made instrumental contributions to medical education in establishing and advancing the study of empathy among medical students. He was one of the first researchers to use the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy and his work demonstrating a decrease in medical student empathy has resulted in medical curriculum changes.

Christine Pace, MD, MSc, Medicine/GIM, is a primary care physician at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and senior medical director of Population Health Services for BMC Health System. She has held leadership roles focused on the design, implementation and evaluation of programs to improve integration of mental health services and substance use treatment with primary care, and improve health-related outcomes among patients with complex needs. Dr. Pace provides primary care and addiction treatment within General Internal Medicine and is an attending on the Addiction Consult Service. She is a recipient of a HRSA Primary Care Medicine and Dentistry Clinician Educator Career Development Award.

Lauren Stern, MD, Medicine/Nephrology, is a clinician-educator who specializes in home dialysis therapies. She is the medical director of the home dialysis program at Boston Medical Center, which is the largest of its kind in Boston. She has established a number of protocols for the outpatient and inpatient care of peritoneal dialysis patients and developed the first formal home hemodialysis curriculum for fellows at the School. Dr. Stern created an “Urgent Start Program” for peritoneal dialysis, which enables emergency initiation of peritoneal dialysis rather than hemodialysis (the usual default modality). She has been the director of the second-year renal pathophysiology course since 2016.

Message from Dr. Hollenberg – New Chair of Medicine

As Chair of the Department of Medicine I look forward to our journey ahead. While the Covid-19 pandemic has changed and will continue to change medicine our Department will remain committed to its missions including: A. outstanding and equal care for all; B. health equity; C. research that spans all domains from the laboratory bench to local and global health and D. educational programs that position the next generation for success.

We remain indebted to our history as a Department and the outstanding achievements of our faculty and staff. Now with close to 500 faculty, 14 Sections 15 research centers we are poised to broaden and expand our excellence. Our location in Boston provides the ideal backdrop to care for our community and to expand our basic, translational and clinical research programs.

Home to one of the country’s leading residency programs our Department is able to provide outstanding clinical and research opportunities to our housestaff, fellows-in training and medical students. Our faculty provide outstanding and diverse mentorship to our trainees allowing them to succeed both in their field of choice and type of career they seek whether it be clinically focused or as a physician-scientist.

We appreciate your interest and hope you will contact us if we can provide any additional information about Boston University’s Department of Medicine.

Goals of the Department of Medicine

We believe that our success as a department is dependent upon exceptional achievement in each of our core missions of research, clinical care, and education.

In order to continue our leadership role as one of the country’s leading research-intensive Departments of Medicine, we expect to:

• Expect, support and reward both high aspiration and exceptional achievement;
• Vigorously support a departmental community characterized by curiosity; collegiality, openness, mutual respect, diversity, integrity, generosity, and  service;
• Provide sustained and meaningful mentorship;
• Seek continuously higher achievement relative to historical and external benchmarks with a particular aversion to complacency;
• Be attentive to the special obligation and honor in providing exemplary care for all members of the community, especially our underserved patient population;
• Create discoveries that inspire our peers, establish new paradigms for future discovery, and ultimately improve the health of individuals and populations of patients;
• Establish and continuously refine new models for achieving excellence by working across disciplines in our research, education, and clinical programs;
• Develop responsive, supportive and challenging educational programs that enable our trainees and faculty to acquire outstanding, broad-based competencies;
• Create policies and operations characterized by effectiveness, efficiency, integrity, equity, responsiveness, and value to patients, internal stakeholders, regulatory agencies and our institutional affiliates.

Ultimately, we seek to be a department that leads through the impact of our work, the generosity of our actions, the example we provide, and the value we bring to our profession and to the public.

Anthony Hollenberg, M.D.
John Wade Professor and Chairman, Department of Medicine