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.