DoM in the Media: First Referral Guide Issued for Axial Spondyloarthritis
SAN DIEGO — The Spondyloarthritis Research and Treatment Network (SPARTAN) has created the first referral recommendations for axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA).
The draft recommendations use a points scoring system, with the goal that at least 1 in 3 patients referred would be diagnosed with axSpA, an inflammatory arthritis that affects the central skeleton and shares a genetic overlap with skin psoriasis, inflammatory bowel disease, and inflammatory eye disease.
Patients with axSpA can wait 10 years after symptom onset to be diagnosed with the condition. There are currently no guidelines to advise clinicians on when to refer to a rheumatologist, and with the rheumatology workforce shortage, "it is impossible for rheumatologists to evaluate the 20% of adults in the US who have chronic back pain," said Maureen Dubreuil, MD, a rheumatologist at Boston University. She presented the work at the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) 2023 Annual Meeting.
DoM Faculty Promotions!
Clinical Associate Professor
Gopala Yadavalli, MD, Infectious Diseases, is a clinician-educator focused on the care of inpatients. He splits his clinical time at Boston Medical Center (BMC) between attending on inpatient infectious diseases ward and consult services. Shortly after joining the faculty in 2011, Dr. Yadavalli co-created BMC’s inpatient infectious diseases ward team (MP ID) and the current version of the inpatient “Advanced Acting Internship” teams. The department’s current vice chair for education and former director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program, he has recruited and mentored faculty to co-create and implement numerous educational innovations, including eight individualized career pathways to augment traditional internal medicine training. He served as founding program director of the Ravin Davidoff Executive Fellowship in Health Equity, has served on the Council of the Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine and chaired the Wellness Committee for the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine.
Associate Professor
Finn Hawkins MBBCh, Pulmonary, Allergy, Sleep & Critical Care Medicine, is a Principal Investigator (P.I.) in the Center for Regenerative Medicine and The Pulmonary Center. His research focus is studying human lung development and disease using human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Dr. Hawkins is currently using iPSC technology to study airway biology with a focus on Cystic Fibrosis.
Professor
Vipul C. Chitalia M.D., Ph.D., Nephrology, is a faculty member with a focuses on the role of post-translational modifications of proteins, especially polyubiquitnation of the key mediators of vascular pathologies in diseases such as cancer and renal failure. While these diseases are discrete, several fundamental biological processes remain similar. Through a highly collaborative network, our laboratory harnesses the power of various cellular and molecular biological tools, relevant animal models (zebrafish and mice), computational methods and machine-learning techniques and strives to validate these findings and hypotheses in humanized models or human samples from large data bases, which highlights the translational nature of our approach.
DoM’s Mark Logue, PhD: They Served Their Country. Now, They’re Serving Their Fellow Veterans
James Whitworth traces the path to his military service in simple terms: “I heard the call, and I answered,” says the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine assistant professor of psychiatry. It was just after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Whitworth recalls, and he enlisted in the Army “to serve in the global war on terror.”
Whitworth deployed to Iraq, part of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, along with nearly two million of his compatriots, all told. Just 21 years old and thrust into an unknown landscape with daily threats to his life, Whitworth says he exercised at his base to cope with the stressful situation.
It was certainly a DIY gym setup: rusty weights and heavy tires in a military tent.
“Anything and everything just to stay fit,” Whitworth says. “It was a source of de-stressing; a coping strategy to deal with the rigors of combat. And it just kind of stuck with me, it was like a kernel on the back of my head—I always knew that exercise was a helpful tool for dealing with stress.”
After Whitworth was honorably discharged, this kernel grew into full-fledged research questions for his graduate and then doctoral research. But that research took on new urgency when Whitworth’s close friend, a “battle buddy,” died by suicide, he says.
“It surprised a lot of us. And it really shook things up for me. I wanted to do something, anything,” he says. So, Whitworth refocused his exploration from the human-performance side of exercise, to its potential protective qualities against mental illness, stress, and trauma—particularly post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Mark Logue was a sophomore at the University of Oregon, preparing for his final exams, when he received his call to service—quite literally.
“The phone rang, and they told me to pack my bags,” he recalls. “‘Your unit has been activated and you’re going to Operation Desert Storm,’” an official told him.
As a young person in the late 1980s, Logue registered for the US Army Reserve as a way to cover the cost of college and gain some worthwhile experience at basic training. It seemed like a fairly good deal: the reserves hadn’t been activated in nearly 20 years, since the Vietnam War. That changed in 1990, however, when reservists were ordered to active duty to serve in the Gulf War.
Logue, who worked in the reserves as a medical supply specialist, was sent to Stuttgart, Germany, to help expand a medical facility for combat soldiers wounded in the Gulf. Luckily, he says, the large-scale casualties his unit prepared for never materialized and, soon enough, Logue returned home, where his studies resumed. He remained in the US Army Reserve until 1997, when he was honorably discharged.
Trained as a mathematician and statistician, Logue charted a course for a career in genetics during his doctoral program. He found he could apply his mathematical and programming skills to address real health problems, a deeply gratifying experience.
Logue, currently an associate professor of psychiatry and biomedical genetics at BU’s medical school and of biostatistics at the University’s School of Public Health, was working on genetic studies of anxiety disorders and dementia when he was approached by Mark W. Miller, a researcher in the US Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for PTSD. Miller, a professor of psychiatry at BU’s medical school, had asked for Logue’s help in analyzing a set of genetic data from veterans.
He agreed. “I am a veteran and I’m always up for finding out new and interesting things,” Logue says.
Now, Logue and Whitworth both also work at the VA Medical Center in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. They’re each seeking answers about PTSD by asking vastly different questions.
What Is PTSD?
Stress responses to traumatic situations are completely normal—a person’s natural flight, fight, or freeze response helps them respond to danger appropriately. For some, however, particularly combat veterans or people who’ve experienced physical or sexual assault, these natural physiological responses linger long after the danger is gone. This is PTSD.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a condition that “impairs your functioning globally,” Whitworth says. People with PTSD may experience flashbacks or distressing thoughts, avoid people or places that remind them of the traumatic event, experience physical sensations like a higher heart rate or sweating, can have trouble sleeping, and more. It’s an embodied experience.
“This is not just a disorder that makes you sad, depressed, anxious. It impacts your behaviors, your ability to participate in your role in society,” Whitworth says. “And this translates to avoidance and isolation. And so people wind up staying away from a lot of the activities they used to enjoy; maybe they don’t feel safe going to a gym or a park.”
People with PTSD may also avoid exercise because the physiological sensations—elevated heart rate, breathing heavily, sweating—feel similar to a stress response, and they fear it will trigger a panic attack, or worse, Whitworth says.
But his research indicates that this avoidance is often the exact opposite of what will ultimately help.
How Can Exercise Help with PTSD Symptoms?
In a widely cited 2019 trial, Whitworth and his colleagues found evidence that resistance training (such as weight lifting) could have significant beneficial impacts on sleep quality and anxiety for people with PTSD. In subsequent studies, he’s found that improved cardiorespiratory fitness in post-9/11 veterans was associated with lower PTSD severity, and that as little as three weeks of high-intensity resistance exercise is a feasible intervention for symptoms in people with PTSD who aren’t otherwise seeking treatment for it.
“When we get people who have PTSD exercising, they feel better, there’s an impact and it reduces symptoms,” he says. “Is it a cure? A panacea? Absolutely not. But it is a coping strategy. It’s something that might be useful in augmenting other evidence-based practices, such as psychotherapy or medications.”
Whitworth and other physiologists and psychologists are still working to understand why exercise seems to be an effective therapeutic tool, but he says one potential factor could be the same one that makes people avoid exercise: it simulates a stress response—but in a safe and controlled environment. This kind of repeated exposure to those unpleasant sensations may work to normalize them, Whitworth reasons.
Another possible explanation is that exercise, and strength training in particular, builds senses of confidence, self-efficacy, and empowerment, Whitworth says. “Once you complete a challenging workout, or complete a heavy lift, you might think, ‘Well, I mastered this’ or ‘This one wasn’t so bad, maybe I can take on [a lift] that’s a little bigger.’ And that may augment your response to other similar or related stressors.”
Finally, Whitworth is interested in exploring the physiological adaptation that accompanies exercise. Perhaps a more efficient endocrine system—one of many side effects of going from “an untrained state to a trained state,” Whitworth says—helps people metabolize stress better.
Is There a Genetic Component to PTSD?
While Whitworth is interested in gym reps and sets, Logue deals in datasets: huge swaths of genetic data that might hold clues to the deep-rooted foundations of PTSD. He runs computational tests on millions of genetic variants across hundreds or thousands of genomes to find the variants that are statistically associated with a specific disease.
Once Logue identifies those statistically likely variants, other clinical researchers can use that information to identify better, more targeted strategies for the care and treatment of a particular disease.
It’s a technique that’s resulted in a number of important discoveries. Researchers have discovered genetic variations that contribute to the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disorders, obesity, Crohn’s disease, and prostate cancer.
Logue is part of a consortium of researchers pooling their datasets to search for clusters of genetic variants—small abnormalities in the DNA sequences that make up a gene—that are consistently present among people with PTSD.
Roughly a decade ago, Logue and his colleagues at the National Center for PTSD published the first ever genome-wide association study of PTSD; Logue was the lead author on its results, published in Molecular Psychiatry, an offshoot of Nature. They found a variant in a gene—the retinoid-related orphan receptor alpha, or RORa—that was associated with PTSD. Logue has copublished other papers since then, examining a possible connection between people with PTSD and the sizes of their hippocampus and amygdala, for example.
The genetic differences Logue and other researchers identified may not immediately lead to a cure, but they are an important starting point for clinicians—and could serve as markers on a genetic risk assessment for PTSD, Logue suggests.
Honorably Discharged, but Still Serving
For Logue and Whitworth, this work lives beyond the papers and the publications. It’s more like a calling, and one that could have a real impact for their fellow veterans and service members.
“It’s a personal connection,” Whitworth says. His work, which, like any, can be tedious at times, is made more profound because of that connection. “What gets me up in the morning for this sort of research, it’s not looking at the statistics and seeing significant p-values. It’s getting to talk to other veterans and knowing that the research that I’m doing is for them.”
That connection is true for many people who work at the VA, Whitworth says: “There’s this intrinsic desire to serve those who have served. And that’s powerful.”
It’s certainly true for Logue.
“Working at the VA spurs me on,” Logue says. “To get to my office [at the VA], I walk through the lobby with patients and ride with them in the elevator—these are veterans getting their care there. And then I go upstairs and analyze veteran data, and I’m hoping that the things we do actually help veterans and can lead to treatments; maybe not today, maybe not next week, but eventually.”
Dr. Gopal Yadavalli Receives Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Yadavalli on being a 2024 recipient of the Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award!
37th Annual Evans Days Symposium Highlights Extensive, Important Research
Tablet in hand, David Salant, MD, the Robert Dawson Evans Distinguished Professor of Medicine, paused briefly in his judging of the 160 poster presentations at the annual Department of Medicine Evans Days, to answer a question on what had changed over the 37-year history of the two-day symposium.
“The volume and quality of the science,” Salant explained succinctly.
Held Oct. 19-20 this year, Evans Days highlights research carried out by trainees and faculty in the Department of Medicine and their collaborators across the Medical and Charles River campuses and are supported by the Evans Endowment. The Endowment was established in 1912 by Marie Antoinette Evans with funding provided to what was then known as the Massachusetts Homeopathic Hospital, now Boston Medical Center (BMC). Intended to foster both research and teaching, the Evans Endowment supports both clinical and translational research and training and academic programs at the school and BMC.
In addition to more than 150 posters and oral presentations, Evans Days hosts and features presentations by two eminent visiting professors, as well as ongoing research undertaken in Affinity Research Collaboratives (ARC). The ARCs are the building blocks of the Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research (ECIBR), founded in 2009 with Evans Endowment support to facilitate interdisciplinary approaches across the University. “Each ARC consists of investigators representing different disciplines bound by a common interest and focused on translational research,” said Katya Ravid, DSc, the Barbara E. Corkey Professor of Medicine and ECIBR founding director. To this end, during the 2023 Evans Days, participants heard from Jay Mizgerd, ScD, the Jerome S. Brody Professor of Medicine; Matthew Kulke, MD, the Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine; and Vijaya B. Kolachalama, PhD, associate professor of medicine, who presented reports focused on new discovery in their respective ARCs.
Newly featured this year was the David L. Coleman, MD, Junior Faculty Prize for outstanding research, citizenship and mentorship by an assistant professor. Assistant Professor of Medicine Anica Law, MD, MS, was named the inaugural recipient. Her presentation, attended by former Chair of Medicine Coleman, followed the ARC presentations and focused on the outcomes of critically ill patients who require long-term life support.
The 2023 Evans Days visiting professors, Barbara Kahn, MD, George R. Minot Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Gbenga Ogedegbe, MD, MPH, the Dr. Adolph & Margaret Berger Professor of Population Health at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, addressed students, faculty and staff as the Wilkins Visiting Professor and the Ingelfinger Visiting Professor, respectively.
“I’m really impressed with the research you have going on here,” said Kahn in remarks prefacing her lecture in Keefer Auditorium Thursday, Oct. 19. “The posters were great; the short presentations were terrific; the collaboration, the energy, the enthusiasm, the cutting-edge nature of things — congratulations! It’s really been exciting to see.”
Kahn is regarded as one of the leaders in the field of glucose transport and is internationally known for her work on obesity and type 2 diabetes, uncovering the molecular mechanisms underlying fat storage cells, insulin and inter-tissue communication. She said she hoped to leverage the findings outlined in her lecture on signaling lipids that have an anti-inflammatory and anti-diabetic effects to protect against or prevent type 1 and type 2 diabetes.
Before her lecture, Kahn sat down with Anthony Hollenberg, MD, the John Wade Professor and chair of medicine, for an informal question-and-answer session exploring her career. Asked what gives her the greatest joy in her work, Kahn, who has trained more than 100 principal investigators and whom Hollenberg called “a builder of scientists,” said her greatest joy was in training the next generation of scientists, especially physician-scientists.
“It’s a major concern, I think, that physician-scientists are a dying breed,” Kahn said. “It gives me great gratification to take someone who has limited experience and help them not just with research skills but how do you choose a good question, how do you choose something that is going to be worth working on.” She also highlighted the immense importance of collaborative, interdisciplinary science.
Ingelfinger Visiting Professor Ogedegbe is a renowned expert on health disparities, with research focused on evidence-based interventions to reduce cardiovascular risk in minority populations. During his lecture on Friday, Oct. 20, in Keefer Auditorium, he shared how to use research to address health inequities in hypertension.
“Researchers and policy makers don’t talk to each other,” he said. “We focus on our grants. We focus on our papers. We focus on advancing our careers. The policy makers do what they do best – create policy that lacks evidence. Until we bridge that, we won’t be able to narrow the gap that we are seeing today.”
Ogedegbe proposed that programs to achieve health equity need to mitigate the adverse effects of social determinants of health like economic stability, access to quality education and health care, the communities where they live and work, and family and community interactions. He said researchers need to partner with Black communities to support strategies that support adoption of lifestyle changes. Providers need to work with payors to create community clinics, and researchers need to produce policy and data to drive action by stakeholders and policy makers.
It is also worth noting that the 2022 Wilkins Visiting Professor was the 2023 Nobel Prize winner Drew Weissman, MD, PhD (CAMED’87, GRS’87, Hon.’23).
For a list of the 2023 awards and poster winners click here. See more on Facebook.
Congratulations to This Year’s Evans Days Awardees!
Evans Days Poster & Presentation Winners
Clinical Poster Winners:
1st Place: Samantha Malatesta, PhD Candidate
2nd Place: Adriana Flores, MD
3rd Place: Alex Werekuu, MPH
Basic Science Poster Winners:
1st Place: Gwen Beacham, PhD
2nd Place: Burcu Erdogan, PhD
3rd Place: Lorraine Soares De Oliveira, PhD
Clinical Oral Presentation Winners:
1st Place: Lauren Kearney, MD
2nd Place: Victoria Overbeck, MPH
3rd Place: Breanne Biondi, MPH
Basic Oral Science Presentation Winners:
1st Place: Lucien Garo, PhD Candidate
2nd Place: Olivia Perry
3rd Place: Roxana Pfefferkorn, PhD
Faculty Award Winners
Outstanding Citizenship Award
Sarah Kimball, MD – General Internal Medicine
Clinical Quality Improvement Award
David Yuh, MD – General Internal Medicine
Clinical Innovation Award
Deepa Gopal, MD, MS – Cardiovascular Medicine
Nir Ayalon, MD – Cardiovascular Medicine
Junior Faculty Mentoring Award
Jessica Taylor, MD – General Internal Medicine
Research Mentoring Award
Alexander Walley, MD – General Internal Medicine
Special Recognition Teaching Award
Mark Sloan, MD – Hematology & Oncology
Clinical Excellence Award
Praveen Govender, MB BCh – Pulmonary, Allergy, Sleep & Critical Care Medicine
Faculty Diversity Award
Kaku So-Armah, PhD – General Internal Medicine
Evans Clinician
Lauren Stern, MD – General Internal Medicine
David Coleman, MD Junior Faculty Prize
Anica Law, MD, MS – Pulmonary, Allergy, Sleepy & Critical Care Medicine
Staff Awards Winners
Maria Antoinette Evans Award
Erin Kane – Computational Biomedicine
Daneiris Heredia-Perez, MSPM – General Internal Medicine
David “Aaron” Freed Award
Dennis Chow – Central Finance
Evans Center/IBRO
Evans Center/IBRO Outstanding Research Collaborator Award
Elise Morgan, PhD – Engineering Design & Innovation
CReM Celebrates 10th Anniversary as Pioneering Center for Stem Cell Research
Professor of Medicine Gustavo Mostoslavsky, MD, PhD, recalled fellow Argentinian scientist and Nobel Prize winner Cesar Milstein telling him that as young scientist you are presented with a ball full of knots and that you keep untying them, one knot at a time, and, maybe, 20 years later you might have a major discovery.
In the decade since the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) of Boston University and Boston Medical Center (BMC) was established by co-founders Mostoslavsky, Professor of Medicine Darrell Kotton, MD, and Associate Professor of Medicine George Murphy, PhD, there has been a lot of untying of knots on some of the world’s most intractable diseases.
“We have a slogan that reflects our mission – ‘Advancing Science to Heal the World,’” said Kotton. “And we’ve tried to pursue that in the most selfless way possible.”
Regenerative medicine uses stem cells and the body’s natural healing process to replace or rebuild damaged tissues and organs. Until Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, discovered a way to make induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from mouse fibroblasts in 2006 and then from human fibroblasts in 2007, research had been restricted by political and ethical debates over using pluripotent stem cells from human embryos. iPSCs are cells engineered from adults that are nearly identical to embryonic stem cells (ESCs). Once engineered in the laboratory in the undifferentiated state, like ESCs, iPSCs are pluripotent – meaning they have many potentials. Once differentiated iPSCs can be used to build specific tissues and organs, mimicking the embryonic tissue-building process.
“The stem cell field really took off with the discovery of reprogramming, of how to generate these pluripotent stem cells from anyone, especially patients,” said Kotton.
CReM first launched in 2008 as a virtual center with a seminar series and a website. Within a few years, Kotton, Mostoslavsky and Murphy were able to gain the support of Kate Walsh, then President and CEO of Boston Medical Center (BMC), former BU President Robert Brown, medical school Dean Karen Antman, MD, and David Coleman, MD, then chief and chair of the department of medicine, now professor emeritus of medicine. The virtual center was also supported by Katya Ravid, PhD, when the group received the inaugural Affinity Research Collaborative (ARC) award given out by Ravid’s then new Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research.
The CReM became a physical center when it opened its doors in 2013 with support from BU and BMC and its lab space has since grown from around 7,000 to 16,000 square feet, from one culture room to five, and from 25 researchers in six labs to 66 working in nine labs. The group’s high impact publications have resulted in yearly accolades from a variety of campus and national organizations and an impressive 300% growth in grant dollars.
Kotton separates the center’s progress over the past decade into three phases. In the early years, CReM made significant progress in reprogramming cells from patients, making iPSCs that duplicate cells or tissues needed for damage repair. In the middle years, there were remarkable advances in using those stem cells to discover how tissues are encoded and differentiate to become specific organs and other parts of the body. More recently, CReM research advanced the science of engraftment, the transplanting of these engineered cells and organoids into damaged organs in animal models, successfully regenerating a variety of injured tissues.
“The transplanted cells rescue organ function, and they survive in some cases, for the lifetime of the recipient,” said Kotton.
The next phase is to move testing into larger animals and then into human clinical trials, with the goal of creating gene therapies using stem cells.
“I think anybody around the world would recognize that the CReM has made contributions in those three areas: reprogramming technology to make stem cells; directed differentiation to make really advanced organoids and cell types; and our progress towards cell and gene-based therapies,” said Kotton.
One of the CReM’s first discoveries as a still virtual center was publication of a new reprogramming approach, led by Mostoslavsky, ultimately earning him the award for “BU Innovator of the Year” in 2017. iPSC generation was a time-consuming and expensive process until Mostoslavsky developed a tool called STEMCCA that made it simpler and more efficient. BU patented the tool, and it was freely shared and used in over 1,000 labs worldwide.
“In the last 10 years, we have become much, much better at making cells that are closer to what they are supposed to look like,” said Mostoslavsky. He’s hoping that the future brings advancements in cell and tissue manufacturing that will enable them to build whole, functioning organs.
But as current researchers, students and alumni of the program gather at Mostoslavsky’s home this weekend to mark CReM’s 10th anniversary, it is not just the untying of scientific knots they will be celebrating.
“Many famous centers have big discoveries, but I think, in addition to the scientific discoveries, what is unique about the CReM is the track record of selfless sharing,” said Kotton, who was named the inaugural recipient of the AAMC’s National Research Resource Sharing Award (2017) in recognition of the CReM’s record of sharing their stem cells.
Kotton, Mostoslavsky and Murphy came to BU because of its culture of collaborative research. They decided from the outset that the center would follow the open-source sharing model that had emerged in the computer code-writing culture. They created biobanks that housed stem cells and organoids and made them freely available upon request. They are one of the largest repositories of iPSC samples for various diseases in the world.
“It’s 100% that people know us and recognize us as the guys that collaborate and share,” said Mostoslavsky. This sharing and collaborative principle was something that the world came to realize as an important principle in the desperate race to develop tests and find vaccines to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There was a lot of cultural dogma at the time (CReM was founded) that you have to protect your research until you publish because you are in competition with others and are going to get scooped,” said Kotton. “The collaborative approach is more efficient and faster, with shared research across the globe. For us it’s been an even more positive and productive experience than we planned at the beginning.”
Today, the CReM includes nine principal investigators covering different aspects of developmental biology, stem cell biology and regenerative medicine. Associate Professor of Medicine Andrew Wilson, MD, who was recently named scientific director of the Alpha-1 Foundation, runs both a research program in the CReM and an internationally recognized clinical center at BMC focused on caring for patients affected by alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, the most common genetic cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Assistant Professor of Medicine Finn Hawkins, MBBCh, uses iPSCs to develop new therapies for genetic airway diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.
CReM co-founder Murphy, who originally established studies in the field of sickle cell anemia, is now part of a team studying supercentenarians and understanding aging and extreme longevity. Valerie Gouon-Evans, PhD, MS, PharmD, directs the BU Liver Biology Program, focused on developing approaches for liver regeneration. Angie Serrano, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, joined CReM in 2022, studying iPSCs and how various mutations impact cell fates in a variety of diseases.
The two newest additions, Kim Vanuytsel, PhD, MS, and Kostas Alysandratos, MD, PhD, research treatments for sickle cell disease and interstitial lung diseases, respectively. Together with Mostoslavsky, who works on understanding neurodegeneration, intestinal organoids and T cells, and Kotton who studies lung injury and repair, these faculty lead the nine research programs of this multi-disciplinary center, advancing the field of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine.
Call for DEIA Week Volunteers – Apply Here!
The Department of Medicine will hold its first annual Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Week the week of March 18, 2024. We are looking for members of our faculty, staff, and trainees to take part in the planning and implementation of this event.
In the DoM, we are dedicated to fostering a workplace that values and celebrates diversity, promotes equity, ensures inclusion, and prioritizes accessibility. We firmly believe that our collective differences make us stronger, and we are committed to creating an environment where all individuals, regardless of their background, feel valued, respected, and empowered.
The charge of this committee is to help us determine the best way to celebrate and educate our community about the wide range of characteristics and attributes that make individuals unique, including but not limited to: race, ethnicity, sex, gender, gender identity & expression, sexual orientation, age, religion, disability, neurodiversity, socioeconomic status, nationality, immigration status, language, cultural background, education, work experience, etc.
The committee will be meeting regularly from November – March.
Access the Application HERE – Deadline for application is 10/23
For questions, please contact Jen (Visconti) Murphy, Jennifer.visconti@bmc.org
Dr. Frederick Ruberg Named Next Section Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine
The Department of Medicine is very pleased to announce that Dr. Frederick L. Ruberg will become the next Section Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine, effective December 1, 2023. Dr. Ruberg will also be appointed as the Thomas J. Ryan Professor of Medicine. As you all know, he has served Boston Medical Center and Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine for many years, having been initially appointed as a faculty member in 2005.
Dr. Ruberg attended the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He then completed internal medicine training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a cardiovascular disease fellowship at Boston Medical Center/Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, and a fellowship in cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He has served as Associate Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at BU/BMC since 2017. Dr. Ruberg has an active clinical practice as the senior cardiologist in the renowned BU/BMC Amyloidosis Center. An internationally-recognized expert in amyloid heart disease, he has co-directed or contributed to numerous collaborative clinical guidelines initiatives on cardiac amyloidosis, including the 2021 American Heart Association scientific statement and the 2023 American College of Cardiology Expert Consensus Decision Pathway document. In addition to his appointment as Professor of Medicine, he holds a secondary appointment as Professor of Radiology and directs the cardiac MRI program at BMC. A recognized scientific mentor who is committed to the development of clinician scientists, he serves as Workforce Development Program lead of the Boston University Clinical and Translational Science Institute and has been recognized with mentorship (2017) and citizenship (2022) awards from the Department of Medicine. Dr. Ruberg is Senior Associate Editor of Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, a Fellow of both the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology, and a member of the Association of University Cardiologists.
Dr. Ruberg is presently the co-principal investigator of the NIH-funded Screening for Cardiac Amyloidosis with Nuclear Imaging in Minority Populations (SCAN-MP) study, one of the largest NIH-funded studies exploring heart failure causes and outcomes in older, self-identifying Black and Hispanic patients. Dr. Ruberg is deeply committed to developing an equitable and supportive clinical and research environment at BU/BMC that champions our shared mission and values. To achieve this goal, he serves on multiple BUMG-sponsored committees organized to facilitate gender and racial equity at BU/BMC.
Dr. Ruberg’s appointment comes after an extensive national search. We would like to thank Dr. David Salant and the search committee for their work in this process. The Department would also like to thank Dr. Wilson Colucci for all of his efforts in building and leading the Section to its current position of excellence and prominence. We look forward to celebrating Dr. Colucci’s tenure of 26 years as Section Chief in the near future.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Ruberg on his new role.
DoM Seeking Applicants for the Evans Junior Faculty Research Merit Award
Since the 2008-9 academic year, the Department of Medicine has made annual awards to recognize and assist outstanding junior faculty investigators through the Evans Junior Faculty Research Merit Award.
We are pleased to announce that we are now seeking applications for AY 24-25.
The award provides two years of support at up to $50,000 per year for a total amount of $100,000. The funds can be used for research-related activities such as salary, equipment, and supplies.
The selection criteria for the Evans Junior Faculty Merit Award are as follows:
- Outstanding record of scholarship and research;
- Rank of Assistant Professor or Research Assistant Professor;
- Likelihood of superior productivity and accomplishment in the future;
- Receipt of at least one successful peer-reviewed grant since joining the faculty.
Individuals who have not previously received a start-up package (i.e., funds for research supplies, equipment, or personnel) will be given preference by the review committee. We anticipate that 2-4 recipients of the award will be selected by a committee comprised of senior faculty, the Vice Chair for Research, and the Department Chair.
Eligible faculty in the Department of Medicine should provide the following materials to Ms. Vanessa Nguyen vanessa.nguyen@bmc.org by Monday, October 30, 2023:
- A one-page summary of past research accomplishments and future research goals;
- A description of institutional resources provided to the faculty member since joining the faculty;
- An updated C.V. that includes past, current, and pending grant support, honors, mentoring activities, and a brief description of any clinical or educational responsibilities.