DoM Faculty Promotions – May – July 2023
Congratulations to the following Department of Medicine Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine faculty on their recent appointment or promotion.
Professor
Frederick Ruberg, MD, Medicine/Cardiovascular Medicine and Radiology, is associate chief for cardiovascular medicine at Boston Medical Center (BMC) and a clinical scientist with expertise in cardiac amyloidosis with continuous funding since 2005. He senior authored a number of important consensus guidelines statements relative to cardiac imaging, cardiac amyloidosis management and cardiac amyloidosis imaging/diagnosis. He currently is multi-PI of the $7.2M NHLBI-R01 funded Screening for Cardiac Amyloidosis with Nuclear Imaging in Minority Populations (SCAN-MP) study. An expert in cardiac imaging, Dr. Ruberg is senior associate editor of Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging and a Fellow of the American Heart Association. In 2017 he was recognized as the outstanding research mentor by the BMC Medicine house staff, and in 2022 recognized with the Outstanding Citizen award from the department of medicine. A member of the BU Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) leadership team since 2016, he presently directs research workforce development activities for the Medical Campus. In 2022 he was elected to membership in the Association of University Cardiologists.
Associate Professor
Sabrina Assoumou, MD, MPH, Medicine/Infectious Diseases, is a physician-scientist and the inaugural Louis W. Sullivan, MD, Professor of Medicine. She is a thought leader in research focused on infectious diseases complications of substance use including hepatitis C and HIV. Her research uses health economics including cost-effectiveness analysis to inform guidance panels on the best approach to improve the uptake and implementation of evidence-based interventions. She also works on developing evidence-based interventions to improve outcomes. Her findings have been included in recommendations by national guidance panels such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. She has received research honors that include the school’s Evans Junior Faculty Research Merit and Evans Investment awards and the Massachusetts Infectious Disease Society’s Finland Award for Research Excellence as well as teaching awards, including Boston Medical Center’s Excellence in Teaching Hospital-Based Faculty Award and the school’s Distinguished Faculty of the Month, April 2020.
Matthew Nayor, MD, MPH, Medicine/Cardiology, is a physician-scientist and cardiologist with subspecialty training in advanced heart failure and transplantation. He is a previous recipient of the school’s Aram V. Chobanian Distinguished Assistant Professorship. Dr. Nayor’s research uses physiologic studies and cardiovascular epidemiology to focus on the intersection of metabolic health and cardiovascular disease, especially heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). His NIH-funded laboratory is engaged in examining individual responses to discrete physiological perturbations, such as dietary stress or exercise, as precision phenotypes of impaired reserve capacity. By combining these assessments with high-throughput molecular screens (metabolomics, proteomics), Dr. Nayor’s laboratory has the ultimate goals of furthering understanding the underlying pathobiology, improving risk stratification, and potentially identifying novel therapeutic targets.
Andreea Bujor, MD, PhD, Medicine/Rheumatology, is a rheumatologist-scientist who focuses her research on the role of myeloid cells in scleroderma pathogenesis and cardiac fibrosis. She has made a major contribution in her field by identifying Fli-1 as a key player in cardiac fibrosis with an h-index of 14. She is currently a PI on an R01 and a grant from the National Scleroderma Foundation, in addition to being site PI for the Scleroderma Clinical Trials Consortium study. Dr. Bujor also serves as associate director for the rheumatology fellowship and has established and organized an institutional scleroderma biorepository of patient and control skin biopsies and blood samples linked to a clinical database.
Shuaiying Cui, PhD, Medicine/Hematology & Medical Oncology, specializes in sickle cell disease. His work has elucidated new mechanisms for the induction of fetal hemoglobin and has tremendous therapeutic potential. He is PI on an R01 and PI on five other grants from foundations and industry. Dr. Cui has served on several editorial boards and is currently associate editor of Frontiers in Hematology.
Clinical Associate Professor
James Hudspeth, MD, Medicine, is a clinician educator with expertise for learners at every stage of training. He has taught Introduction to Clinical Medicine for nine years and Return to the Clinic for eight years for MD/PhD students. Since 2018 he has supervised and taught third- and fourth-year medical students during their inpatient rotations and served as a field specific advisor for students applying into internal medicine since 2018. In his roles as medical director of General Medicine Inpatient Teams and associate director of the Hospital Medicine Unit, Dr. Hudspeth has led a range of initiatives to improve patient care and the educational experience in the inpatient context. During the COVID-19 pandemic he organized the ward teams, coordinating the efforts of his residents, medicine faculty and more than 100 residents and faculty outside of the department of medicine to expand the medicine teams’ coverage to match the surge of need.
Ryan Chippendale, MD, Medicine/Geriatrics, is a clinician-educator who serves as the geriatric medicine fellowship program director, geriatric oncology fellowship co-director and core faculty and the geriatrics subspecialty education coordinator for the internal medicine residency program at Boston Medical Center. She co-founded and co-directs a national virtual education platform, GERIAtrics Fellows Learning Online and Together (Geri-a-FLOAT). This curriculum delivers critical, but underrepresented, topics in geriatric medicine, including social determinants of health and health inequities to an international audience of learners. Clinically, she cares for complex, frail older adults in home care, geriatric assessment clinic and inpatient.
Rachel Stark, MD (CAMED’02), MPH, Medicine/GIM, joined BU in 2022 and is based at VA Boston Healthcare System where she cares for the frail and aging veteran population in its Home-Based Primary Care Program. Dr. Stark has served in various roles in primary care and medical education leadership, most recently as the director for the Internal Medicine Residency Program at Cambridge Health Alliance and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. During her 11 years at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, she won multiple awards for her excellence in teaching, mentoring and leadership. Most notably, she won the Young Mentor Award at Harvard Medical School in 2019. She also was honored as the Medical Educator of the Year by the New England Region of the Society of General Internal Medicine in 2014.