BU Researcher Receives National Honor from the American Society for Clinical Investigation

(Boston)—Titilayo Omolara Ilori, MD, MSc, assistant professor of medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, is one of 50 recipients of its 2023 Young Physician-Scientists Awards from the American Society for Clinical Investigation. The award recognizes physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.

Ilori is a physician-scientist with expertise in nephrology, epidemiology, nutrition, genetics and global health whose goal is to be an independent, patient-oriented researcher, skilled in conducting mechanistic and interventional studies on the modifiers of kidney disease.

“My various experiences and training have resulted in a strong desire to improve outcomes and survival of individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD), particularly in disadvantaged populations,” says Ilori, who also is a renal medicine physician at Boston Medical Center.

Ilori completed medical school in the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and moved to the U.S. for her internal medicine residency training at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta. Her formal training in clinical research includes an MS degree from Emory University and certificate courses from Columbia and Harvard, all in clinical research.

During fellowship training in nephrology at Emory University, she completed a basic science post-doctoral research fellowship where she discovered that the urea transporter, (UT-A1) can be phosphorylated by tacrolimus, a calcineurin inhibitor, an important finding because it showed that tacrolimus could phosphorylate UT-A1 independent of vasopressin.

Because of her passion to find solutions to the intricate drivers of health disparities among individuals of African descent, she then switched gears to patient-oriented research. Ilori has worked with various population and CKD cohorts in the U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa. She rose to assistant professor at Emory and then transitioned to the University of Arizona (UA). As a co-investigator in the National Institutes of Health All of Us Research Program and UA associate director of Clinical Research and Global Health Initiatives, she led a team that enrolled more than 20,000 individuals underrepresented in biomedical research.

At Boston University, she received a K23 career development grant from the National Institutes of Health studying diet by gene interactions in Apolipoprotein L1 (APOL1) kidney disease, caused by a powerful genetic risk variant affecting individuals of African descent. Ilori's lab recently discovered that dietary potassium intake may modify CKD progression in those with the APOL1 high-risk genotypes, a finding that her lab is confirming in clinical and mechanistic studies.

The American Society for Clinical Investigation seeks to support the scientific efforts, educational needs, and clinical aspirations of physician-scientists to improve the health of all people.

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.

BUMC Faculty Appointments and Promotions – December 2022

Professor

Gustavo Mostoslavsky, MD, PhD, Medicine/Gastroenterology and Microbiology, is a pioneer in nuclear reprogramming, establishing one of the first methodologies for the generation of induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC) and co-founder and co-director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) at BU, a world recognized stem cell institution. His laboratory has published seminal discoveries describing the mechanisms of nuclear reprogramming and their use in cell lineage specification and disease modeling. He received the BU Innovator of the Year Award in 2017 and is recognized for his open-source approach to science, having shared his reagents with more than 1000 laboratories worldwide. More recently, he reported the use of human iPSC for disease modeling of the gastrointestinal tract, establishing a novel platform for the generation of intestinal organoids and studying mechanisms of intestinal epithelial injury by SARS-CoV-2 as well as liver damage by Ebola Virus. His lab recently demonstrated a novel role for Notch signaling in the specification of the T-cell lineage specification of human iPSC. Dr. Mostoslavsky’s work has led to two BU patents, which were licensed and commercialized.

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.