Installation of the inaugural David J. Salant, MD, Professor of Nephrology

You are cordially invited to join us for the installation of

Laurence H. Beck, MD, PhD as the

David J. Salant, MD, Professor of Nephrology

 

Program: Installation Ceremony and Celebratory Reception

Date: Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Time: 6 p.m. EST

Place: Hiebert Lounge, BUSM, 14th Floor, 72 E. Concord Street, Boston, MA

Register at trusted.bu.edu/Salant

 

The professorship installation ceremony will feature a program of speakers, and will be followed by a celebratory reception.

The ceremony will also be accessible to a virtual audience, zoom link to be provided upon registration.

Visit the BUSM website to learn more about professorships or to support the Salant Professorship campaign.

Send any questions to busmdev@bu.edu

Laurence Beck, Jr. Named Inaugural Incumbent, David J. Salant Professor of Nephrology

We are delighted to announce that Laurence H. Beck, Jr., MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Nephrology, has been selected as the inaugural incumbent of the David J. Salant Professor of Nephrology. A hybrid installation ceremony and reception will be held on June 15 at 6 p.m. Register here.

Dr. Beck graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Molecular Biology from Princeton University and obtained his MD-PhD from Harvard Medical School in 2000. He completed his medical residency and clinical fellowship in Nephrology at Boston Medical Center and trained as a research fellow with Dr. David Salant. Appointed to the faculty in 2006, he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015.

Dr. Beck’s research accomplishments include the seminal 2009 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine with Drs. Salant and colleagues that the M-type phospholipase A2 receptor (PLA2R) is the major antigen in idiopathic membranous nephropathy (MN), an organ-specific autoimmune kidney disease and a common cause of nephrotic syndrome in adults. The discovery was awarded international patents and led to licensing and approval by the United States FDA (2014) of two commercial immunodiagnostic assays for MN that are used by nephrologists around the world.

In addition to his contributions as a bench scientist, Dr. Beck is a knowledgeable and caring clinician and outstanding teacher. He leads a clinical and translational program in glomerular diseases that has attracted patient referrals from throughout the Northeast and beyond. Dr. Beck’s research has been supported by NIH and several foundations. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers and several influential reviews, editorials, guidelines and book chapters in major journals and textbooks. In recognition of his accomplishments, Dr. Beck received the Midcareer Distinguished Researcher Award from the American Society of Nephrology, one of only two recipients of this inaugural award in 2019.

With the establishment of this Professorship, the Department of Medicine honors the remarkable contributions and legacy of David J. Salant, MD, Professor of Medicine and Vice Chair for Research for the Department of Medicine. He received his medical degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and completed his clinical training at Johannesburg General Hospital. He received his research training at Boston University with Dr. William Couser and joined the Nephrology faculty in 1979. He rose through the ranks to become Professor of Medicine in 1988 and Chief of Nephrology, a position he held for 32 years before stepping down from the inaugural Norman G. Levinsky Chair in Nephrology in 2019 to serve in his current role. He was most recently named as a Robert Dawson Evans Distinguished Professor of Medicine for his exceptional impact in research and clinical care.

Dr. Salant is an internationally renowned physician-scientist and an acclaimed educator. He has authored over 180 scientific publications, reviews and book chapters, often reporting seminal and groundbreaking findings in kidney disease. His research has explored the immune basis for glomerular diseases and the mechanisms of podocyte injury. He was among the first to identify podocytes as the primary target of injury in antibody-mediated glomerular diseases. In a landmark New England Journal of Medicine paper in 2009, Drs. Salant, Beck and colleagues described their discovery of the target antigen in membranous nephropathy (MN). Due to the translational impact of his research program, Dr. Salant was named the Boston University Innovator of the Year in 2015. Dr. Salant is a past chair of the ABIM Sub-specialty Board of Examiners in Nephrology, and recipient of several national and international awards for his scientific contributions, including election to the American Society of Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, fellowship in the AAAS, an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, the John P. Peters Award from the American Society of Nephrology, the Jean Hamburger Award from the International Society of Nephrology, the Donald W. Seldin Award from the National Kidney Foundation, the Marilyn Farquhar Award at the 11th Annual Podocyte Conference, and the Edward N. Gibbs Award and Lectureship from the New York Academy Sciences.

Dr. Salant’s influence extends beyond his groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting work in the field of membranous nephropathy. In addition to his scientific achievements and accolades, Dr. Salant is a beloved teacher, a caring mentor, and a compassionate physician with exceptional clinical acumen. He has trained several generations of medical practitioners and dozens of physician-scientists, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, many of whom today play leadership roles in distinguished nephrology centers around the world.
The Department of Medicine and Boston University School of Medicine are privileged to be able to recognize the example and the contributions of Drs. Beck and Salant through this professorship. Please join us in thanking and congratulating them on this honor.

DoM Faculty Promotion – May 2022

Congratulations to Dr. Larochelle on his promotion to Associate Professor!

Marc Larochelle, MD, BUSM, Medicine/GIM, is a clinician investigator with nationally recognized expertise in the use of large secondary data sources to study outcomes of individuals prescribed opioid analgesics for chronic pain and the identification and treatment of individuals with opioid use disorder. He serves as associate editor of Alcohol, Other Drugs and Health: Current Evidence, an online newsletter that summarizes important substance use research findings. He recently was named director of the General Internal Medicine Fellowship at Boston Medical Center (BMC), through which he mentors fellows and moderates works-in-progress sessions. Larochelle teaches medical students during their inpatient and ambulatory medicine clerkships and residents while on the inpatient GIM service at BMC.

DoM Faculty Promotions – February 2022

Congratulations to the following faculty on their recent appointment or promotion!

Professor

Sondra Crosby, MD, BUSM, Medicine/GIM and SPH, Health Law, Ethics and Human Rights, specializes in human rights, medical ethics, torture and refugee health. She has worked as a medical expert on torture for the Military Commissions Defense Organization (MCDO) and been an expert consultant on torture evaluation in countries around the world and to the U.S. Congress. She is co-founder of the Immigrant and Refugee Health Program in Primary Care at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and co-chair of BMC’s Immigrant Task Force. Crosby has made significant contributions to trauma documentation and providing care to refugees who have suffered human rights violations. Her scholarship has been fundamental to the development of the academic field of refugee health and human rights, and includes articles in the New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA on medical ethics and force-feeding, separation of families at the border, and prisoner abuse at Guantanamo and the CIA black sites.

 

Clinical Professor

Robert Eberhardt, MD, BUSM, Medicine/Cardiovascular Medicine and Surgery, directs the vascular medicine service and non-invasive vascular imaging laboratories at Boston Medical Center (BMC), positioned critically between medical and surgical service lines. He has served key roles on national credentialing and accrediting organizations involved in vascular medicine and vascular laboratory testing. His expertise is recognized in practice guidelines documents and clinical training standards. Eberhardt has mentored 12 fellows in vascular medicine, including many active in academic medicine, and trained numerous physicians in vascular diagnostic imaging. An attending on BMC’s inpatient vascular medicine consult service, cardiac intensive care unit and general cardiology inpatient services, he also supervises both cardiology fellows and internal medicine residents through his outpatient continuity clinics. He has been recognized annually as one of the best cardiovascular clinicians in Boston magazine’s Best Doctors since 2016. In addition, he lectures locally and nationally, and co-authored more than 70 articles and book chapters on vascular related topics.

 

Associate Professor

Jennifer Beane-Ebel, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/Computational Biomedicine, applies computational methods to characterize molecular alterations associated with smoke exposure and lung disease. She has characterized the molecular and cellular response to chronic smoke exposure and smoking cessation in the airway field of injury and developed a clinicogenomic biomarker for early lung cancer detection. She also studies the molecular alterations associated with development and progression of bronchial premalignant lesions, precursors to lung squamous cell carcinoma and markers of increased lung cancer risk. She uses integrative analyses of genomic, spatial proteomic, and pathology imaging data to identify mechanisms of early immune suppression in premalignant lesions.

 

Francesca Seta, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/Vascular Biology, focuses on the biology of vascular smooth muscle and its contribution to maladaptive vascular remodeling associated with arterial stiffness and aortic aneurysms/dissections, two vascular conditions with no current therapies. She has identified novel vascular smooth muscle-specific molecular mechanisms, which could be targeted therapeutically to prevent vascular diseases and established methods to assess arterial stiffness in experimental animals. Seta directed the BUMC Metabolic Phenotyping and IVIS Core since 2018 and has mentored undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs. She serves as an advisor for the MSc program in Bioresearch Core Technologies and on the admissions committees for MSc/PhD programs.

 

Kaku So-Armah, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/GIM, is an epidemiologist with expertise in analyses of cohort studies and use of electronic health record data for research. His lab uses data on health behaviors, risk factors and disease diagnoses coupled with molecular biology to identify and explain novel epidemiological associations and identify novel intervention targets. His research focuses on substance use and chronic infections like human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and tuberculosis (TB) and how these exposures impact the heart, liver and lungs. So-Armah is committed to making his lab, GIM and BU leaders in inclusive excellence, such that all who work in these spaces can be who they are, rather than who they think they need to be to fit in.

 

Clinical Associate Professor

Lisa Caruso, MD, MPH, BUSM, Medicine/Geriatrics, specializes in improving care for older adults and developing innovative geriatrics clinical education models, particularly in dementia and diabetes in older adults. She received a Geriatric Academic Career Award in 2002 to study an older, underserved and frail population with diabetes and cardiovascular disease using evidence-based skills. She co-developed the Chief Resident Immersion Training Program in the Care of Older Adults, which has been disseminated nationally. She directs quality and patient safety for the Department of Medicine, to transform Boston Medical Center into an Age-Friendly Health System using the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s 4M framework. Caruso also leads the Quality Improvement elective for the fourth-year medical students, and co-leads the yearly Quality Improvement and Patient Safety curriculum for internal medicine residents in their PGY1 and PGY2 years.

 

Frederic Little, MD, BUSM, Medicine/Pulmonary, Allergy, Sleep & Critical Care Medicine, studies airway inflammation in allergic asthma, and translational approaches to diagnostics of allergic disease. He was PI of a clinical study to develop a rapid saliva diagnostics platform to determine the causes of deterioration in asthma control. Little directs the Allergy/Immunology Fellowship Training Program and was medical director of the Pulmonary, Allergy and Sleep Clinics. He has directed several clinical care improvement initiatives including antibiotic stewardship and Boston Medical Center's COPD Readmission Reduction Program and serves as an Allergy/Immunology subject matter expert for the CDC Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment program.

 

The Center for Cross Organ Vascular Pathology (COVP)

The Department of Medicine and Section of Nephrology are delighted to announce the creation of the Center for Cross Organ Vascular Pathology (COVP), directed by Dr. Vipul Chitalia. The COVP will focus on unlocking the underpinnings of vascular pathophysiology in different organs (peripheral vasculature, heart, kidneys, lungs, brain, and eye, and others) in patients suffering from systemic diseases such as chronic kidney disease and cancer. Vascular disease can originate from and cause injury to a wide range of organs and conditions, including uremia- or malignancy-associated peripheral and central vascular diseases; hemodialysis vascular access dysfunction; peritoneal dialysis membrane failure; uremic calcemic arteriolopathy (calciphylaxis); and ocular pathologies.

Collaborating with a rich network of local, national and international researchers and clinicians including surgeons, radiologists and biomedical engineers from academia and industry, COVP has a tripartite structure: Basic Science, Translational/Clinical science, and Biomedical Engineering/Machine Learning. The COVP will build a unique infrastructure within the Department of Medicine to interrogate pre-clinical models and establish a biorepository that will systematically gather tissue and biosamples relevant for cross-organ pathologies.

Dr. Chitalia’s experience in multidisciplinary and highly translational research make him uniquely qualified to create this Center and resource. We expect the COVP to be a major locus of collaborative research throughout Boston University and beyond.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Chitalia on this leadership position.

Jai Marathe, MBBS, MS Recipient of the 2022 Sexual Medicine Research Award

Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Medicine/Infectious Diseases Jai Marathe, MBBS, MS for being one of four recepiets of the 2022 Sexual Medicine Research Award. Jai Marathe, MBBS, MS and her team develop products that prevent both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STI), including HIV-1. The monoclonal antibody (mAb), Human Contraception Antibody (HCA), rapidly agglutinates and immobilizes sperm and anti-HIV and anti-Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV) mAbs neutralize HIV-1 and HSV-2. They will evaluate the feasibility of delivering these antibodies using sexual lubricants and bioadhesive gels for on-demand non-hormonal male contraception and STI protection.

Robert Dawson Evans Distinguished Professors of Medicine Named

Congratulations to this year's Robert Dawson Evans Distinguished Professors of Medicine! The goal of this honorific designation is to acknowledge faculty at the Professorial rank whose academic achievements have had an exceptional impact on their field in research, education, or clinical care. The 2021 professors are:

View Evans Day Content On-Demand!

The 36th Annual Department of Medicine Evans Days celebrated and showcased the research activities of the department's faculty, trainees and researchers. This year's event featured 170 posters and 12 oral presentations.

The poster session features 170 unique posters, a record high for the event and included virtual poster displays on the ePosterBoards platform.

The Awards Ceremony Dinner celebrated trainee winners of both the Basic and Clinical Research Poster Sessions and Oral presentations, and honored faculty recipients of the department's annual awards. This year's event featured live music by Boston University Alumni and violinist Anna Harris and pianist Nick Laudani.

Thank you to all who helped make this year's event so special!

View Evans Day Content On-Demand HERE *ONLY AVAILABLE THROUGH 11/25*

To view the Thursday Ingelfinger Visiting Lecture by Dr. Drew Weissman click HERE

To view the Friday Wilkins Visiting Professor Grand Rounds click HERE

Congratulations Evans Day Award Winners!!!!

Please take a moment to recognize and congratulate these trainees who won awards at this year's Department of Medicine Virtual Evans Days!!!

 

Basic Oral Presentation Winners:

1st Place: Anukul Shenoy

2nd Place: Khaliun Enkhbayar

3rd Place: Rhiannon Werder

 

Clinical Oral Presentation Winners:

1ST Place: Eduardo Nunez

2nd Place: Yusuke Koga

3rd Place: Brooke Rice

 

Basic Poster Winners

1st Place:  Neelou Etesami

2nd Place: Liang (Martin) Ma

3rd Place: Megan Snyder

 

Clinical Poster Winners:

1st Place Tie: Kate Bloch

1st Place Tie: Hamza Hassan

3rd Place: Mengjie Yuan