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.

Omar Siddiqi, MD named Educator of the Year

Congratulations to Dr. Omar Siddiqi, Assistant Professor of Medicine in Cardiovascular Medicine, to be one of four people to be named Educator of the Year. To read more about Dr. Siddiqi outstanding work, click here.

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:

1^st Place: Anukul Shenoy

2^nd Place: Khaliun Enkhbayar

3^rd Place: Rhiannon Werder

Clinical Oral Presentation Winners:

1^ST Place: Eduardo Nunez

2^nd Place: Yusuke Koga

3^rd Place: Brooke Rice

Basic Poster Winners

1^st Place:  Neelou Etesami

2^nd Place: Liang (Martin) Ma

3^rd Place: Megan Snyder

Clinical Poster Winners:

1^st Place Tie: Kate Bloch

1^st Place Tie: Hamza Hassan

3^rd Place: Mengjie Yuan

BUMC Toastmasters Open House & 10 Year Anniversary Celebration!

Visit our OPEN HOUSE Meeting!

Have fun and warm up with us to find out more about BUMC Toastmasters

Thursday, October 21, 2021

5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

Refreshments will be provided

For more info and to RSVP email BUMCToastmasters@gmail.com

BUMC Toastmasters

Evans Biomedical Research Building, 7^th Floor, Room 715,

650 Albany Street, Boston, MA 02118

For more information visit our website: BUMCToastmasters.toastmastersclubs.org

DOM Reads Next Book

For our second year of DoM Reads, we will read and discuss the book: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington.

Program Information:

• The book will be discussed in 3 sections 2x per academic year
• All meeting dates will be held virtually
  • Register here for the Fall Dates - Wednesday's from 12pm-1pm
    • September 29^th (Part 1 – Chapters 1-7)
    • October 27^th (Part 2 – Chapters 8-11)
    • December 8^th (Part 3 – Chapters 12-15)
  • Register here for the Spring Dates - Thursday's from 5pm-6pm
    • February 3^th (Part 1 – Chapters 1-7)
    • March 31^st (Part 2 – Chapters 8-11)
    • May 12^th (Part 3 – Chapters 12-15)

Please contact: bumcfdd@bu.edu if you have any questions.