Student Updates

BUMC Faculty Appointments and Promotions: July-Sept. 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.

Ariel Hirsch, MD, Radiation Oncology, is the director of Radiation Oncology Education with clinical expertise in breast and genitourinary radiation oncology. A trailblazer in radiation oncology education and mentorship, she was an early implementer of radiation oncology education and medical student mentorship, and created the Oncology Education Initiative (OEI) and the Radiation Oncology Mentorship Initiative (ROMI). She has worked with institutions and organizations nationally and internationally to advise on mentorship and oncology education, including teams all over the United States as well as Belgium, Brazil and Australia. She serves on national and international committees and advisory boards on oncology education, mentorship and global health, including the medical student education task force and the education committee of the American College of Radiology (ACR) and the education committee for the American Society of Radiation Oncology (ASTRO). She is one of the creators of the Canadian Association of Radiation Oncology-Association for Residents in Radiation Oncology (CARO-ARRO) Collaborative Global Oncology Enrichment Program, a global certificate program created to educate the next generation about global oncology issues. Dr. Hirsch is the only radiation oncologist who serves on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) test material development committee for the National Board of Medical Examiners.

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.

 Jeffrey Siracuse, MD, Surgery and Radiology, is a leader in the treatment of patients with peripheral artery disease and dialysis access. Dr. Siracuse has been the principal investigator on a large number of research projects, with a strong record of external support from the NIH and surgical societies. He was the founding chair of the Society for Vascular Surgery Appropriateness Committee and deputy chair of the Appropriate Use Criteria for Claudication Writing Committee. He is the medical director of the Vascular Study Group of New England. Dr. Siracuse is an editor of Annals of Vascular Surgery and serves on the editorial boards of other journals, including Journal of Vascular Surgery. He also serves as the program director for the Vascular and Endovascular Surgery Fellowship and has been the clerkship director for the fourth-year vascular surgery sub-internship since 2016. He has guided more than two dozen medical students, residents and fellows (as well as junior faculty) to first-author publications in peer-reviewed journals and many podium and poster presentations.

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.

Nancy S. Miller, MD, Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, is chief and vice chair for Laboratory Medicine and serves as medical director for Clinical Microbiology and Molecular Diagnostics at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Miller is a pathologist and clinical microbiologist with two decades of experience in infectious disease diagnostics, patient care, outbreak response and preparedness. She advises and leads translational research including development of in-vitro infectious diseases diagnostics and comparative evaluation studies.

Associate Professor

Sarah Bagley, MD, MS, Medicine and Pediatrics, is a clinician-investigator specializing in adolescent and young adult addiction medicine. In addition to being a content expert, she has developed expertise as a qualitative and quantitative researcher with experience in community-engaged methods. Consistently funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Massachusetts Department of Health and the Jack Satter Foundation, she has developed an innovative clinical model of care for youth with substance use disorder that led to the receipt of the 2017 Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce 10 Outstanding Leaders Award and the 2018 Hilary EC Miller Award for Innovative Approaches to Adolescent Health Care from the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine.

Assen Marintchev, PhD, Physiology & Biophysics, is a scientist whose long-standing objective has been to provide a detailed structural and dynamic picture of the protein translation initiation in human cells, and its regulation. These interactions and the mechanisms they entail underlie pathological processes disrupting the integrated stress response, which, in turn, leads to a wide range of diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders in particular. His current research builds on his prior training to study the structure and dynamics of translation initiation complexes and involves his extensive training in NMR methodology and state-of-the-art understanding of biophysical chemistry.

Geoffrey Oxnard, MD, Medicine/Hematology/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.

Waleed Ezzat, MD, Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, is a clinician-educator with expertise in facial plastic and reconstructive surgery. His research focuses on the areas of rhinoplasty, revision rhinoplasty, and facial reconstructive surgery. He serves as the department’s director of the Division of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. He is known for his work in Advanced Techniques in Complex Rhinoplasty.

Claudio Morera, MD, Pediatrics, is a pediatric gastroenterologist with expertise in motility disorders. Director of the Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology for 18 years, the division has evolved from a single clinic session per month to a now state-of-the-art division, which serves close to 3,000 visits per year, performs a variety of procedures, and participates actively in the teaching of residents and medical students. He has expertise and leadership on the importance of cultural competence and humility in health care, and recruiting multilingual providers to provide culturally concordant care more effectively to our diverse population of patients. He developed a LatinX Medicine elective, during which medical students participate in learning and applying strategies to engage more effectively with patients of the LatinX culture.

Christine Pace, MD, MSc, Medicine/GIM, is a primary care physician at Boston Medical Center 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.

Lorraine Smith, MBBCh, Radiology, is a breast imaging and interventional radiologist who is the QA lead for the Breast Imaging section at Boston Medical Center. Her teaching responsibilities include residents and fellows as well as imaging technologists, with interventional procedure teaching as well as screening and diagnostic breast imaging and physics of mammography.

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.

Kathleen Swenson, MS, MPH, CGC, Medical Sciences & Education, is program director of the MS in Genetic Counseling Program, which has a strong track record of success. An accomplished genetic counselor and educator, she has broad clinical background in the fields of maternal fetal medicine, pediatric neurology and rare disease through her clinical, advocacy and industry-related experiences. She serves as president of the New England Regional Genetics Group, holds positions across national and accrediting organizations, and is in the process of completing a doctoral degree in higher education leadership.

52 BUMC Faculty Attend Emerging Leaders Program

Resuming after one-year delay due to COVID, the BUMC Emerging Leaders Program returned with a robust class of 52 representing Medical Campus schools and, for the first time, faculty affiliated with St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center (SEMC). Initiated in 2007, the program has been offered seven times and served 237 participants.

This year the two-day intensive workshop was held on the Charles River Campus where the cohort of late assistant professors and early associate professors learned about the characteristics and key leadership skills of effective leaders and participated in discussions and panels where they practiced and discussed those skills with a network of peers.

“I thought this was the right meeting for my current position in my academic career. I loved having an opportunity to focus on leadership qualities, examining communication and negotiation skills that are so applicable in interactions with colleagues, trainees and patients, thinking about financial considerations that academic institutions face and networking with other BU faculty,” said Alena Goldman, MD, assistant professor of medicine, and associate program director of Cardiovascular Fellowship Training Program, Division of Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology, SEMC.

“The Emerging Leaders Program was a great experience. It was a unique opportunity to meet Medical Campus colleagues and receive training in soft skills such as team communication, negotiation and conflict resolution. I especially appreciated learning about formal leadership and administration at the university level as well as how I can improve my interpersonal communication and organization on a daily basis,” said Prasad Patil, PhD, assistant professor of biostatistics.

“The Emerging Leaders Program was a two-day opportunity to learn many high-yield pearls of leadership wisdom from fantastic speakers from across Boston University as well as a chance to get to know tomorrow’s future leaders on the Medical Campus,” said Kevin J. Chang, MD, associate professor of radiology and section chief of Abdominal Imaging & director of MRI, Boston Medical Center.

Showing their commitment to developing emerging leaders, Medical Campus Provost Karen Antman, MD, and Deans Sandro Galea, MD, and Cataldo Leone, DMD, attended and made themselves available for informal networking. Presenters shared their expertise in dental medicine, public health, medicine, healthcare, research, finance, academic legal issues and communication.

Participants were nominated by their department chairs, division chiefs, associate deans and center directors who showed promise as leaders evidenced by their effectiveness, innovation, reliability and capacity to energize and motivate others.

“Faculty are key to our teaching, research and community outreach mission on the Medical Campus. This program is one way we help develop early-career faculty into future leaders on the Medical Campus,” said Hee-Young Park, associate dean for faculty affairs, Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and professor and chair of Medical Sciences & Education. Graduates of the program now serve as department chair, section chief, associate dean, assistant dean and program director.

June 2022 Faculty Appointments, Promotions Announced

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

Niloo Edwards, MD, BUSM, Surgery, is a cardiothoracic surgeon with emphasis on cardiothoracic surgery and heart transplantation, performing more than 5,000 operations. As chief of cardiac surgery at Boston Medical Center (BMC), he treats patients with a range of common cardiac conditions and has a special interest in aortic surgery, mitral valve repair and surgery for bacterial endocarditis. Before becoming chief of cardiac and vascular surgery in 2011 at St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany, NY, Dr. Edwards was professor of surgery and chair of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, having previously been on the faculty at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. As PI of multiple clinical trials, Dr. Edwards was instrumental in establishing the safety and efficacy of left ventricular assist devices as a bridge to transplant. Shortly after joining BMC in January 2020, he was called up to active duty as a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve Medical Corps and was deployed to Afghanistan. Since returning to BMC in late 2020, he has taken a multidisciplinary approach to enhancing quality, efficiency and service in cardiovascular surgery that has yielded significant improvements.

Erika Wolf, PhD, BUSM, Psychiatry, examines the neurobiological consequences of traumatic stress and the genetic and environmental factors that increase risk for adverse outcomes among those with trauma exposure and associated psychopathology. She had led the international arena in demonstrating that PTSD is associated with accelerated epigenetic aging and that this association is related to immune, inflammatory, and metabolic dysregulation, as well as with initial signs of neurodegeneration and early onset of age-related health conditions. She has received four federal grants for this line of research, including an R03, R21 and R01 from the National Institute on Aging as well as a VA Merit Award. Dr. Wolf’s research using latent variable modeling techniques to refine the PTSD diagnosis contributed to the addition of the dissociative subtype of PTSD in DSM-5; she has also shown that this subtype is associated with a unique response to psychotherapy and unique genetic risk factors (relative to PTSD without dissociation), helping to further validate the subtype.

Associate Professor

Joshua Campbell, PhD, BUSM, Medicine/Computational Biomedicine, has established his lab as one of the leading computational genomics groups developing novel algorithms and software to address unmet needs across a variety of cancers. His group has developed novel statistical methods to identify transcriptional modules in single-cell RNA-seq data and mutational signatures in cancer genomic data, which has led to R21, R01 and U01 funding in collaboration with several other groups across the University. Dr. Campbell serves as the co-director of the department of medicine’s Single Cell Core, which provides data analysis services for investigators with single-cell data. Within the NCI’s Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN), he is contributing to the Lung Pre-Cancer Atlas and identifying molecular alterations that are responsible for initiation and progression of lung premalignant lesions. He leads a cross-center HTAN working group to develop data standards for single-cell RNA-seq that can be used by the research community. His translational research also includes characterization of prostate cancer where he is identifying mutational events and cell states that may contribute to disparities in outcomes in African American populations.

Ronald Iverson, MD, MPH, BUSM, Obstetrics & Gynecology, is a clinician improvement scientist whose leadership and scholarship have had a consistent theme of quality and safety. He has promoted advancement in obstetric safety through implementation of cross-discipline, inter-professional initiatives that have led to significant and sustained improvement in clinical outcomes. Involved in clinical teaching for 24 years, Dr. Iverson has educated hundreds of third- and fourth-year medical students about OB/GYN inpatient and office-based care. His work has always included training OB/GYN, family medicine and emergency department residents, inpatient obstetrics, as well as gynecologic surgery. With others, he has developed a multidisciplinary teams training program for the Boston Medical Center's (BMC) labor floor and has implemented this in the postpartum and NICU services, training hundreds of providers. Dr. Iverson has served on the BMC Credentialing and Privileging Committee since 2008, and helped develop the BU Improvement Learning Academy, where he mentors hospital leaders on quality improvement.

Naomi Y. Ko, MD, MPH, AM, BUSM, Medicine/Hematology & Oncology, specializes in breast cancer clinical care and research, with a particular focus on cancer disparities, and is the co-Director of the breast cancer program at Boston Medical Center (BMC). Dr. Ko’s research includes health services, translational, and epidemiological studies, all focused on health equity. Most notably, Dr. Ko recently received an R01 grant as co-PI to study disparities in triple negative breast cancer. Over the years she has received funding both as principal investigator and co-investigator, playing a key role as BMC’s site lead investigator on numerous grants, as well as several cancer clinical trials. She is known nationally for her dedication to equity and frequently invited to speak on the complexity of breast cancer disparities. Dr. Ko is also the recipient of several clinical excellence awards, including the national Arnold P. Gold Humanism in Medicine award.

Karsten Lunze, MD, MPH, DrPH, BUSM, Medicine/General Internal Medicine, is a global health expert who has pioneered evidence-based, behavioral interventions to help people with HIV, addictions and other socially disadvantaged conditions cope with stigma as a barrier to quality care. He co-directs the Boston-Providence CFAR Substance Use Research Core and is a teacher and mentor to many graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and early-career faculty. Dr. Lunze applies rigorous quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods in clinical sciences and population health. His research has used a broad methodological spectrum to optimize clinical processes and thus population health, including pharmacological and behavioral intervention studies of various designs, clinical health services research, implementation science, policy and human rights analyses, program evaluations, ethical analyses and more. In partnerships with communities of people with lived experiences and civil society organizations in Eastern Europe, Central and Southeast Asia, he has geographically and methodologically extended BU’s existing expertise and global networks to better serve vulnerable populations worldwide.

Brian Smith, PhD, BUSM, Psychiatry, is recognized for his work in the traumatic stress field. His research focuses on the effects of trauma exposure on downstream health, functioning and quality of life in veteran populations. Findings from his work have elucidated the highly impactful roles of PTSD, depression and other mental health sequelae of traumatic stress for veterans and other high-risk populations from a lifespan perspective. His studies also have frequently directed particular attention to gender differences and gender-specific effects. His research program has received funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which includes a current VA merit grant to examine gender differences in later-life health outcomes for older veterans, with a focus on risk for cardiovascular disease and other chronic disease morbidity. He also provides mentorship to research fellows and other early career professionals in the Women’s Health Sciences Division of the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System, and he currently serves on the Board of Directors for the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Clinical Associate Professor

Frederic Gerges, MD, BUSM, Anesthesiology, specializes in pain medicine. Since 2011 he has served as medical director of the Pain Management Center at the BU teaching affiliate, St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center (SEMC) in Brighton. In addition, since 2016 he has been vice president of Pain Management Service for the Steward Medical Group. He will be participating in the education of third-year BUSM medical students while on their clinical rotations at SEMC.

Eileen Keneck, MD, BUSM, Pediatrics, is a clinician-educator who recently joined the division of ambulatory pediatrics after 29 years in the division of pediatric emergency medicine. She previously served as clinical director of the Pediatric Emergency Department (PED) at Boston Medical Center (BMC). In the PED, she led quality improvement efforts to reduce the length of stay for patients and dramatically improved the time for pain management of children with Sickle Cell pain episodes, and she established a nurse protocol for asthma patients to receive their medications immediately upon arrival in the PED. She also developed a Pediatric Urgent Care Center within the PED to more swiftly manage the needs of children with less acute needs. Dr. Keneck oversaw the clinical supervision and education of ~50 residents/year from multiple disciplines during their PED rotation. She is the recipient of several teaching awards, including from the Boston Combined Residency in Pediatrics, the department of Family Medicine, and the third-year medical student clerkship.

Alan Malabanan, MD, BUSM, Medicine/Endocrinology, is a clinician educator who specializes in metabolic bone diseases and osteoporosis. He was recruited back to BMC/BUSM in 2021 to serve as director of the Bone Health Clinic, including oversight of the Bone Density Program. In these roles, he will restructure the clinical and educational programs in bone disorders, including developing service lines with orthopedics, geriatrics and rheumatology. He also will serve as section quality director,  as well as the quality projects of second-year fellows.

Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, PhD, BUSM, Psychiatry, is a child clinical psychologist with emphasis on multicultural psychology, and a particular focus on raising emotionally healthy children and racial identity development in children and adolescents. She has served as faculty of the Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology (CMTP) since 2004, where she has been responsible for training, supervising, and mentoring interns within the realm of multicultural psychology as well as ethics and preparation for postdoctoral training experiences. She has mentored more than 70 BUSM and BMC trainees, many of whom are now working in clinical practice in community, hospital and private settings, as well as in teaching and research positions in university and academic medicine settings.