34 minute read
Faculty News
Appointments, Honors & Awards
Matthew Layne Named Assistant Dean for Research
Matthew Layne, PhD, associate professor of biochemistry, has been named assistant dean for research.
Dedicated to facilitating, monitoring, and evaluating research experiences for medical students to expand and enhance student research opportunities at BUSM, Layne will report to Associate Dean for Research Andrew Taylor and work collaboratively with the Medical Education, Enrichment, and Student Affairs offices. In this role, Layne will maintain and develop new resources, programs, and curriculum for medical student research.
Layne also studies the mechanisms of fibroproliferative diseases; current projects include identifying signaling pathways in the vasculature that lead to aortic aneurysm. Collaborative studies underway are defining the mechanisms of fat tissue expansion driven by changes in adipose tissue progenitors and identifying the mechanisms by which specific, disease-causing mutations lead to Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. n
Vasan Ramachandran Receives International Honors
Vasan Ramachandran, MD, FACC, the Jay and Louise Coffman Professor in Vascular Medicine, has been recognized with two outstanding honors in the fields of cardiovascular medicine and circulatory diseases.
Ramachandran was named the American Heart Association’s 2021 Distinguished Scientist in General Preventive Medicine and received the 2021 Louis and Artur Lucian Award, an honor bestowed annually to one researcher from around the world who has made exceptional contributions to the field of circulatory diseases. demiology Prevention in 2012; and the AHA’s prestigious Population Science Award in 2014.
Ramachandran received his medical degree from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India, where he also completed his residency in internal medicine and fellowship in cardiology. n
Sabrina Assoumou Named Louis W. Sullivan, MD, Professor of Medicine
On September 29, Sabrina Assoumou, MD, MPH, was installed as the inaugural Louis W. Sullivan, MD, Professor of Medicine as colleagues, friends, and family gathered in person and virtually to celebrate the occasion and her contributions to the field of medicine.
The installation was held in conjunction with the Race and Medicine symposium (please see story on page 3).
Assoumou, a BUSM assistant professor of medicine as well as an attending physician in the section of infectious diseases at Boston Medical Center (BMC), is a clinician-investigator who cares for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients at BMC’s Centers for Infectious Diseases. Assoumou’s research focuses on medical complications of substance use, including HIV and Hepatitis C virus (HCV).
This professorship honors Louis W. Sullivan, MD (MED’58), former secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and president of Morehouse School of Medicine. In 1966, he became the codirector of hematology at Boston University Medical Center and founded the Boston University Hematology Service at Boston City Hospital one year later. Sullivan remained at Boston University until 1975, holding positions as assistant, associate, and professor of medicine.
David Coleman, MD, FACP, Wade Professor and chair of Medicine, highlighted Assoumou’s achievements in medicine
Ramachandran was selected for these honors due to the impact his work has had on clinical practice in hypertension and for his significant contributions to the genetic and nongenetic epidemiology of high blood pressure and heart failure. He has implemented population-based vascular testing (endothelial function and arterial stiffness), echocardiography, and exercise testing at scale in communitybased programs. He has also raised awareness of the lifetime risk for high blood pressure, examining young adult and midlife blood pressures as significant determinants of an individual’s risk for heart disease and stroke.
Joining BUSM as an associate professor of medicine in 1998, Ramachandran was promoted to professor in 2006 and appointed professor of epidemiology at BU School of Public Health in 2013. Currently, he serves as chief of the section of preventive medicine and epidemiology in the department of medicine; principal investigator and director of the renowned Framingham Heart Study, with which he has been affiliated for the past 19 years; and principal investigator and founder of the Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal cohort study. He also is the founding editor of Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics and has received many RO1 awards and a midcareer clinical investigator award (K24) from the National Institutes of Health/National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute.
Ramachandran has made major contributions to the genetic and nongenetic epidemiology of congestive heart failure; population-based vascular testing, echocardiography and exercise testing; the genetic and nongenetic epidemiology of high blood pressure; and cardiovascular disease risk prediction models. His many awards and honors include BUSM’s department of medicine’s Evans Scholar and Outstanding Mentor awards in 2010; Outstanding Mentor, American Heart Association (AHA) Council on Epi-
and emphasized the significance of professorship installations.
“Today we celebrate the establishment of a new professorship. We do so as part of a number of efforts to concretely and specifically value the need to become a more diverse and just profession, institution, and department,” he said.
Two guest speakers shared remarks on Sullivan and Assoumou’s transformative work. Edgar Smith, PhD, professor of biochemistry, spoke first about Sullivan’s legacy.
“It is with a great sense of pride that I accept the honor and the challenge of introducing my friend and former colleague, Dr. Louis W. Sullivan,” Smith said. “The honor derives from a relationship spanning a period of more than 50 years. The challenge stems from an attempt to do justice to his enormous list of accomplishments.”
Smith detailed Sullivan’s career, from becoming a BUSM professor to establishing the Office of Research and Minority Health (now the National Institute of Minority Health and Disparities) at the NIH and organizing the Sullivan Alliance in 2005 to increase diversity and transform health professions education.
“Won’t you please join me in welcoming my friend, a true hero of American medicine, and an untiring warrior for health equity,” Smith concluded.
Sullivan spoke of his experience moving to Boston for medical school, his excitement at the learning opportunities before him, and his trepidation at living in a nonsegregated environment for the first time, saying that luckily, his classmates were welcoming, the faculty members were supportive, and he was able to immerse himself in the rich history of medicine in Boston.
Next, Benjamin Linas, MD, MPH, professor of medicine/infectious diseases, discussed Assoumou’s passion and positivity as a mentor and colleague.
“As you know, mentoring is a two-way street, and you inspire me in all you do,” he said.
Assoumou thanked her supporters and shared the many lessons she has learned along her career journey, including finding your passion, honing your craft, and appreciating what you have.
Her father, who tuned in over Zoom from Abidjan, West Africa, praised his daughter and all she has achieved.
“The whole extended family is proud of you. The village is proud of you. Keep up the excellent work,” he said. n
Tejumola Adegoke Named Inaugural MACE Fellow
Tejumola Adegoke, MD, assistant professor of obstetrics & gynecology, has been named an inaugural MACE Fellow by the Maternal Adverse Childhood Experiences (MACE) Foundation.
Adegoke, who also serves as an obstetrics & gynecology physician and director of equity and inclusion at Boston Medical Center (BMC), leads the RESTORE (Reproductive Sexual Gynecologic Health Community Partnership) project that seeks to amplify the criticality of including the voices of communities of color in patient and community research priorities on maternal health inequities by establishing a permanent patient advisory board for the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at BMC.
“This compendium of priorities will form the agenda for continued communitybased participatory research with the Boston community. This project will inform advocacy efforts to improve maternal health care provision at the local and state levels and will be disseminated to other institutions to guide future research and quality improvement to address maternal health inequities,” said Adegoke.
The foundation also named BU Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences Clinical Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy Leanne Yinusa-Nyahkoon a MACE Fellow.
“The MACE Foundation is confident the projects of these fellows will yield positive and transformative results in the development of strategies, solutions, and policies in prevention and intervention that mitigate the disproportionate maternal mortality rates for Black women,” said Sharon W. Cooper, MD, MACE Foundation founder. n
Joseph Mizgerd Named Jerome S. Brody Professor of Pulmonary Medicine
On September 14, Joseph P. Mizgerd, ScD, was named the inaugural Jerome S. Brody, MD, Professor of Pulmonary Medicine in a ceremony held in person and virtually as colleagues, friends, and family gathered to celebrate his contributions to the pulmonary field.
The professorship honors Jerome Brody, professor emeritus of pulmonary, allergy, sleep & critical care medicine and the longest-serving director of the Pulmonary Center, overseeing its growth and accomplishments for more than 20 years. He has made many seminal contributions relating to cigarette smoking-induced lung disease, including lung cancer and COPD.
Professor of medicine, microbiology, and biochemistry, and the center’s current director, Mizgerd focuses his work on immunology in the lung and its influence on acute lower respiratory tract infections.
Tejumola Adegoke, MD
Assistant professor of obstetrics & gynecology
BUMC Provost and BUSM Dean Karen Antman, MD, kicked off the event by noting that professorship installations offer some of the most joyful moments in academic medicine before opening the floor to David Coleman, MD, FACP, Wade Professor and chair of medicine.
“Professorships are a very important part of the way that we acknowledge people in our environment who have been really meaningful, important elements of the character of our department and our institution,” Coleman said.
“Dr. Brody has made indelible contributions to the many people who he inspired and the individuals that he mentored.”
Avrum Spira, MD, MSc, professor of medicine, pathology, and bioinformatics and the Alexander Graham Bell Professor in Health Care Entrepreneurship, spoke of Brody’s legacy in pulmonary medicine and their relationship as collaborators.
“You always were there to help me take the leap, take the risk, to believe in myself,” Spira told Brody. “From the bottom of my heart, thank you, not just on my behalf, but from the ocean of people who you’ve influenced in such a profound way. You’re a unique, visionary leader.”
On behalf of herself and her sisters, Karen Brody thanked the Pulmonary Center and BUSM for honoring their father.
“It makes us so proud that our father’s lifetime of research and teaching are being recognized through this professorship,” she said.
Brody’s brother, stepdaughter, and stepson also spoke of their admiration and pride before Brody stepped up to the podium to thank the speakers.
Matthew Jones, PhD, associate professor of pulmonary, allergy, sleep & critical
Joseph Mizgerd, ScD
care medicine, a faculty member in the Pulmonary Center, and a former trainee of Mizgerd’s as a postdoctoral fellow in 2003, when Mizgerd was an assistant professor at Harvard School of Public Health, introduced Mizgerd to the group via Zoom.
“He fosters a culture of curiosity, scientific rigor, insightfulness, and hard work, and it’s balanced with reflection, life accommodation, and fun,” Jones said.
Upon taking the podium, Mizgerd said, “This professorship is the most important, most meaningful, and most personally significant honor I’ve ever received.” n
George Murphy Receives the 2021 Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award
George Murphy, PhD, associate professor of medicine and codirector of the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM), has received a 2021 Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award for his project “Deciphering Mechanisms of Disease Resistance and Longevity in Centenarians.”
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) founded the competition and coordinates among a network of global collaborators, each of whom administers a competition in their respective country or region. The NAM also administers a US-based Catalyst Award competition to which approximately 500 innovators submitted applications in 2021. Murphy is one of 25 awardees and will receive $50,000 as seed funding to advance his project. n
Michael Wallace Receives Peter Paul Career Development Professorship
Assistant Professor of Anatomy & Neurobiology Michael Wallace, PhD, has been selected to receive this year’s Peter Paul Career Development Professorship, made possible through the generous support of BU Trustee Peter Paul and presented to promising junior faculty who have been at BU for less than two years and who have held no prior professorships.
Wallace’s research uses new technologies and imaging techniques to better understand the synapses, cells, and circuits—particularly in the basal ganglia— that guide motivated behaviors, with the goal of developing new therapeutics to treat disorders, including depression, Parkinson’s disease, and drug addiction.
Wallace received his PhD in neurobiology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his bachelor’s degree in cell biology and neuroscience from Rutgers University. He completed his postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School. n
Ravin Davidoff Takes on New Roles
Ravin Davidoff, MBBCh, professor of medicine, has stepped down as BUSM associate dean for clinical affairs and BMC chief medical officer and senior vice president of medical affairs, effective January 2, 2022. He will continue with BMC and BUSM in a new capacity.
Davidoff joined Boston City Hospital in 1980 as an internal medicine resident—and never left. As a champion and advocate for every person’s right to high-quality, compassionate care, he has earned the trust and respect of patients, faculty, staff, and countless community partners and peers. In addition to his clinical and research achievements, Davidoff served as associate dean of clinical affairs at BUSM and received numerous teaching awards, including the Excellence in Teaching Award in Medicine at University Hospital/Boston Medical Center in 1992, 1996, 2003, and 2006, and the BUSM Stanley L. Robbins Excellence in Teaching Award in 1994.
In his new role, Davidoff will serve as a part-time executive medical director, in which capacity he will manage nonclinical relationships with BUSM and continue his clinical practice, oversight of Boston HealthNet, and leadership of BMC’s ongoing clinical partnership with Steward Health Care. He will also continue to serve as a mentor for health system leaders and help the new chief scientific officer assimilate into that position.
To honor Davidoff’s commitment to exceptional care without exception throughout his career, the BMC Board of Trustees has established and endowed the Ravin Davidoff Health Equity Fellowship
to train the next generation of physician leaders in health equity during the early career stages.
David McAneny, MD, professor of surgery, succeeds Davidoff as BUSM associate dean for clinical affairs and BMC chief medical officer and senior vice president of medical affairs. A valued and esteemed member of BUSM and BMC, McAneny has served as chief of the division of general surgery, vice chair of the department of surgery, and BMC chief surgical officer. He joined University Hospital and Boston City Hospital as a surgery intern in 1983, followed by a fellowship in GI, pancreas, and hepatobiliary surgery at the Lahey Clinic before being recruited back to the department of surgery in 1989. n
Angelique Harris Coauthors Award-Winning LGBTQI+ Report
The recent National Academies report Understanding the Well-Being of LGBTQI+ Populations received the 2021 Achievement Award from GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQI+ Equality (previously known as the Gay & Lesbian Medical Association) at their 39th Annual Conference on LGBTQI+ Health. The GLMA Achievement Award honors exemplary individuals and/or organizations for their significant contributions to improving the health and well-being of LGBTQI+
individuals or people living with HIV/AIDS; improving the climate for the LGBTQI+ health workforce; or contributing to gains made by the LGBTQI+ civil rights movement.
The report was recognized as “a groundbreaking effort to compile and synthesize a decade’s worth of research, policy change, and public opinion about the social and legal status and well-being of LGBTQI+ people.”
Angelique Harris, PhD, associate professor of medicine and director of faculty development & diversity for the department of medicine and director of faculty development for the Medical Campus, contributed to the report as coauthor in her role as a member of the Committee on Understanding the Status and Well-Being of Sexual and Gender Diverse Populations.
Released in 2020, the report explores the well-being of LGBTQI+ and other sexual and gender diverse populations across demography; law and legal systems; public policies and structural stigma; community and civic engagement; families and social relationships; educational environments; economics; physical and mental health; and healthcare access, providing recommendations on strengthening research and evidence-based interventions for this growing and understudied population. n
David Coleman to Step Down as Chair of Medicine
David Coleman, MD, has announced his plans to step down as Chair of the Department of Medicine at BUSM and Physician-in-Chief at Boston Medical Center. He will remain in these roles while a national search for his successor is conducted.
Coleman came to BUSM as chair and chief in 2006 after serving as chief of medical service at VA Connecticut for 10 years and interim chair of the department of medicine at Yale School of Medicine for nearly four years. He also served as interim president/CEO of the Faculty Practice Plan at BMC.
The department of medicine has grown substantially under Coleman’s leadership over the last 15 years. Continuing its already remarkably inspiring history, the department’s clinical programs have doubled in size and experienced major improvements in inpatient mortality, ambulatory specialty and primary care access, and patient satisfaction. New inpatient specialty teams have been established in nephrology, infectious diseases, and hematology-oncology.
The department’s research programs also developed in size and scope during this period, and research funding increased substantially, to more than $285M of new grants in academic year (AY) 2019. During the period between 2008 and 2018, 70 percent of the department’s more than 10,300 publications appeared in the top quartile of most-cited journals, with five percent of the publications appearing in the top one percent of the most-cited journals.
Several new research instrumentation and education evaluation cores were developed, and five innovative and highly successful centers for research and training were established: the Center for Regenerative Medicine, the Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research, the Center for Integrative Transdisciplinary Epidemiology, the Center for Implementation and Improvement Sciences, and the Program in Health Equity in General Internal Medicine.
Nine endowed professorships were established to support and honor outstanding department faculty. The first section of Computational Biomedicine in a Department of Medicine in the US was formed in 2009, and Biomedical Genetics was established as a separate section.
The department’s educational programs have become increasingly selective and the collective performance of residents on in-training and certification exams has risen to top-tier nationally. The faculty development and diversity programs have become national models and important resources for the entire campus community. The percentage of women faculty at the rank of professor has nearly tripled, with several women appointed to section chief and vice chair positions. The percentage of department faculty from underrepresented groups increased threefold from AY 2012 to 2020.
In the early phase of his career, Coleman studied fundamental aspects of macrophage proliferation and activation
and characterized immuno-regulatory signals produced by cells of mesenchymal and endodermal origin. More recently, his scholarly work has focused on medical professionalism and program development in research and education. He has received multiple awards, including from the Yale School of Medicine, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the American College of Physicians, and the Humanitarian Award from Catholic Charities of Connecticut. He has served as president of the Association of Professors of Medicine and on the boards of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine, the American Board of Internal Medicine, and the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation. Based on the accomplishments of the department of medicine and his national service, Coleman received the 2020 Robert Williams Distinguished Chair of Medicine Award from the Association of Professors of Medicine.
Karen Antman, MD, BUMC provost and BUSM dean, and Kate Walsh, BMC president and CEO, congratulated Coleman.
“Please join us in thanking Dr. Coleman for his leadership and his many contributions to our health system, faculty practice, medical school, and professional community over his 15 years at BUSM/BMC,” Dr. Antman said. n
Deborah StearnsKurosawa Steps Down as GMS Associate Provost/ Dean ad interim
Deborah StearnsKurosawa, PhD, has stepped down from her role as associate provost/dean ad interim for Graduate Medical Sciences (GMS). She will remain on the faculty as an associate professor of pathology & laboratory medicine through June 30, 2022, at which point she will retire from Boston University to spend time gardening and with her family.
Stearns-Kurosawa earned a BS in biochemistry from Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in chemistry from Cleveland State University, doing graduate research at the Cleveland Clinic. She completed postdoctoral training focused on mechanisms of blood coagulation in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) laboratory at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. She joined BU in 2008.
Her research focuses on host contributions to distinct coagulation abnormalities from bacterial and E. coli toxin-induced severe sepsis. Continuously funded as principal or co-investigator on numerous NIH and organizational grants for two decades, Dr. Stearns-Kurosawa holds multiple patents. She also has served on the editorial board of Shock for seven years and has consulted for five pharmaceutical companies.
She was a core faculty member of the BU Faculty Innovation Network—which supported development of the Innovate@ BU initiative for student entrepreneurs—and designed the GMS PA 810 Seminars in the Business of Science course to lead students through the business realities of modern biomedical sciences. She directed and teaches medical immunology for medical and graduate students and codirects the Goldman School of Dental Medicine’s general pathology course. She also has mentored more than a dozen master’s, PhD, and postdoctoral fellows through their research training and into successful careers.
Stearns-Kurosawa has served on numerous BUSM and GMS committees and chaired the Institutional Biosafety Committee. She guided the GMS graduate programs through transitions necessitated by the pandemic and managed the successful return to campus. She also restructured GMS to include a new business office, expanded the registrar’s office, and realigned admissions, marketing, and student services personnel to better serve the GMS community. n
C. James McKnight Appointed GMS Associate Provost/Dean
C. James McKnight, PhD, associate professor of physiology & biophysics, accepted the position of associate provost and dean for Graduate Medical Sciences (GMS) effective January 1, 2022. McKnight replaced Deborah StearnsKurosawa, PhD, who stepped down from the role at the end of 2021.
He will be a member of the senior leadership teams of the School of Medicine and Medical Campus, overseeing curricula and execution of all graduate programs including recruitment, admissions, ongoing program activities, new program development, and student outcomes. He also will continue to foster the collaboration of the basic science and clinical departments in education and graduate research.
McKnight received his BS in chemistry from Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland; master’s in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Delaware; and PhD in biochemistry from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT before joining BU in 1995 as an assistant professor of biophysics.
A structural biologist who directs the BUSM Core Facility for Structural NMR Spectroscopy, McKnight also serves as cocourse director of Foundations in Biomedical Sciences in the PhD curriculum, and codirects the renal section of the PrISM course for medical students. He is an experienced and valued mentor, teaching multiple medical, dental, PA, and GMS classes on campus.
He chairs both the GMS Committee on Academic Standards and the Program in Biomedical Sciences (PiBS) Admissions Committee, recruiting committee members from the 10 participating doctoral programs and working with them to fairly and thoroughly evaluate hundreds of PiBS applications, with the goal of matriculating a diverse class of outstanding scientists. n
David H. Farb to Step Down as Chair of Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
After 31 years at BUSM as chair of the department of pharmacology & experimental therapeutics, David H. Farb, PhD, has announced he is stepping down from that role when a successor is appointed. Thereafter, he will focus more on his own research in neural systems basis for memory disorders and on his leadership of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences-supported T32 Biomolecular Pharmacology training program, consistently funded for the past 24 years, which he founded and continues to direct.
Farb received his BA in chemistry from Long Island University, where he was
president of the American Chemical Society chapter and received honors including the American Institute of Chemists Award. He received his PhD in biochemistry (enzyme mechanisms/ bioorganic chemistry) with William P. Jencks, MD, at Brandeis University. His current research focuses on identifying novel targets in the hippocampal trisynaptic circuit that underlie prodromal memory dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease using cutting- edge in vivo electrophysiology and computational analysis.
Before joining BU, Farb was a Fogarty Senior International Fellow with Sydney Brenner, PhD, in the Molecular Genetics Unit at the Medical Research Council, Cambridge University, UK. Dean Aram V. Chobanian recruited Farb to BUSM to develop a research-intensive department of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics and to enhance medical and dental education in therapeutics.
His early efforts at BU were instrumental in developing a system of faculty governance for the MD/ PhD program with Associate Dean Carl Franzblau. Farb chaired the MD/ PhD executive committee for 18 years, implementing many enhancements to benefit students. He also founded the Program in Biomedical Neuroscience at BUSM, which subsequently merged with the CRC Program in Neuroscience to become the University-wide Graduate Program for Neuroscience.
Farb was a member of the founding Scientific Advisory Boards of CoCensys, DOV Pharmaceuticals, and SAGE Therapeutics. He holds nine US patents, and one each in Australia and Japan. Farb pioneered technology development for high-throughput electrophysiology and was the scientific founder of Scion Pharmaceuticals, which commercialized his patents on high-throughput electrophysiology and small molecule modulators of amino acid receptors. High-throughput electrophysiology is currently in use throughout the pharmaceutical industry for ion channel and receptor-directed drug discovery. n
In Memoriam: John Noble, MD
Emeritus Professor of Medicine John Noble, MD, died on October 3, 2021, at home. He was 84.
Born in Boston, John Noble received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Noble’s career began with his service as an officer in the United States Public Health Service, National Communicable Disease Center, specializing in viral infections. From 1967 to 1969, he was director of the World Health Organization Regional Reference Laboratory for Smallpox and a consultant to the WHO Smallpox Eradication Program.
In the early 1970s, Noble held the position of superintendent and medical chief of staff at the Middlesex County Hospital in Waltham and Lexington, Massachusetts. He spent five years as director of primary care at North Carolina Memorial Hospital before joining the BUSM faculty in 1978 as a professor of medicine and embarking on what would be a 20-year tenure as chief of general internal medicine and director of the Primary Care Center at Boston City Hospital (now Boston Medical Center). He was named emeritus professor of medicine in general internal medicine in 2013.
Over the course of his career, Noble received countless honors and accolades for his accomplishments and creative program development. He initiated and oversaw programs to improve health outcomes for persons with smallpox, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, homelessness, and frail elders, and helped establish clinics providing specialized services for members of the Haitian and Hispanic communities, for young Black men, for the diagnosis and assessment of HIV infection, and for homebound seniors in need of care, among many other initiatives. Noble was a lifelong champion of general internal medicine as an academic discipline and for primary care as a career for physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants.
Noble was a seminal force in academic medicine at the local, national, and international levels. He was among a small group of colleagues who created the organization now known as the Society of General Internal Medicine, for which he served as president from 1989 to 1990. He also served as commissioner and, ultimately, chair of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations. He authored more than 50 publications and two leading textbooks on primary care and the practice of medicine.
His guidance and passionate support for his students, trainees, and junior faculty helped mold countless careers in public health, clinical medicine, healthcare research, medical education, administration, and advocacy. In each domain of service, he insisted on excellence and purpose, always demanding attention to the health and hope of the neediest among us. Given his achievements and stature in the field, an endowed professorship was created in his honor in 2016, the John Noble Professor of General Internal Medicine.
Noble’s many interests beyond medicine included a vast knowledge and passion for the visual arts, classical music, rare books, and travel. He and his beloved wife Ewa Kuligowska, MD, professor of radiology at BUSM and BMC, traveled often and spent as much time as possible in her native Poland. For half a century, Noble was an active member and leader of the Dorchester Medical Club, an organization of physicians from in and around Boston that has met monthly for fellowship and ongoing education since the Civil War.
He will be remembered often and fondly by his family, friends, and colleagues for his warmth and good humor, his humility and dignity, his unfailing curiosity, and—always—for his sense of style. n
When the School of Medicine training program called
Biology of the Lung: A Multidisciplinary
Program began, on July 1, 1975, Gerald Ford was president, all four Beatles were alive, and gas cost about 50 cents a gallon.
Iwas in elementary school when this started, so I wasn’t spending a lot of time thinking about lung biology or pulmonary disease or anything else,” Joseph Mizgerd, now program coprincipal investigator, says with a smile.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has funded Biology of the Lung from the beginning and has just renewed it for five more years, taking it through years 46 to 50 of training predoctoral and postdoctoral scientists, both PhDs and MDs, in lung biology and pulmonary disease. The $4.1 million renewal will fund stipends and other expenses for a dozen trainees a year until 2026.
While Biology of the Lung appears to be the longest-running grant-funded training program at the University, the scientists who run it would much rather talk about the innovative idea at its core.
“There are certain well-worn, traditional paths in training a doctor or a researcher, and this program is not one of those. It’s very different,” says Darrell Kotton, who joined Mizgerd as a coprincipal investigator on the grant this summer.
Mizgerd, the Jerome S. Brody, MD, Professor of Pulmonary Medicine, is a professor of medicine, microbiology, and biochemistry and BU Pulmonary Center director. Kotton, the David C. Seldin Professor of Medicine, is a professor of medicine and pathology and founding director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM).
“The well-worn paths are: if you decide to become a doctor, you go through medical residency and a fellowship and get a job as a clinician,” Kotton says. “If you decide to be a researcher, you get a PhD in grad school and go through a postdoc and get a job in a company or a university as a researcher. This program is neither of those. It’s the synergy of the two, the interface of the two.”
Clinical and research trainees are thrown together in the same laboratories and seminar rooms, start talking, and ultimately train each other. Each is also assigned a faculty mentor. The result is greater than the sum of its parts.
The PhD scientists learn about the clinical questions that are most vexing for physicians, what sorts of clinical materials might be available to help empower their biological research, and how scientific discoveries can powerfully impact the prevention, diagnosis, or cure of pulmonary diseases.
“You have these unique researchers who get an impressive breadth of understanding of what are the clinical issues that a patient suffers from and what is the true biology that’s going on in the lung when things go wrong in patients, and come up with some really interesting ideas in the lab about how to make them go right,” Kotton says.
On the other side, Mizgerd says, by working with the basic scientists, the MDs learn the application of scientific rigor and how best to ask research questions like: “What do genes do when they get turned on or off in the lungs, and how that affects pulmonary diseases, such as which immune
Joseph Mizgerd (l) and Darrell Kotton are the current coprincipal investigators on BU’s longest-running federal research grants for the pulmonology program for students learning to be lung researchers and has been going strong for 45 years and has been renewed.
cells get summoned in response to infections or allergens or pollutants, why some lung cells get too twitchy in asthma, or which cells are responsible for the stiffening of fibrotic lungs.”
“I was 100 percent a clinician at the time I arrived on campus in 1998,” says Kotton, who graduated from this same program he now coleads more than two decades later. “They gave me a lab opportunity that unexpectedly attracted me to basic science research. I changed my career as a result of this program, to a physician-scientist track, and so it has really affected my life and experience in delivering care and research to the community.”
Like a Kid in a Candy Shop
Of course, pulmonary specialists have been much in demand—and in the news—since COVID-19 arrived on the scene, but the two PIs say that the SARS-CoV-2 virus wasn’t really a factor in the grant’s renewal. There was already a tremendous need for more lung disease researchers, a high priority for the NIH.
Many prominent pulmonary scientists at BU and elsewhere first passed through the Biology of the Lung program as trainees.
“The training grant had a huge impact on my career trajectory,” says Avrum Spira (ENG’02), BU’s Alexander Graham Bell Professor in Health Care Entrepreneurship, professor of medicine, pathology, and bioinformatics, and the global head of the Lung Cancer Initiative at Johnson & Johnson. “It allowed me to go back to school and get training in the emerging field of bioinformatics, which in turn catalyzed the launch of my career as a physician-scientist in the field of computational genomics.”
Others include Sharon Rounds, a Brown Medical School professor of medicine and of pathology and laboratory medicine and a past president of the American Thoracic Society; Rebecca Kusko (MED’15), Immuneering Corporation vice president, business development and corporate affairs; and Alicia Wooten (MED’19), a Gallaudet University assistant professor of science, technology, accessibility, mathematics, and public health biology.
“When I came out of residency, I already knew I was looking for a research-oriented fellowship, but I wanted one that would give me excellent clinical training too,” says Burton Dickey, Clifton Howe Distinguished Professor of Pulmonary Medicine and for 20 years the chief of pulmonary medicine at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who was a trainee in the program in the 1980s before briefly joining BU’s faculty.
“I was like a kid in a candy shop, taking a course in biophysics one semester and learning the structure of lipid bilayers, and another semester taking a course on drug receptor interactions,” Dickey says. “There were so many outstanding basic scientists and so many opportunities to learn from them. I was so busy going from one to the next.”
Training Doctors and Researchers
Some fellows have found themselves on the front lines in the pandemic.
“My dissertation research actually focuses on filoviruses—that’s Ebola and Marburg,” says Ellen Suder (MED’26), a PhD candidate in microbiology and a program trainee who has been doing a lot of COVID-related work at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) highcontainment labs. “Over the past year and a half, I’ve picked up a lot of research on SARS-CoV-2. It’s been a really amazing experience to be involved with all that.”
The NEIDL lab where she works offered virology help to scientists around the Boston area last year as soon as the seriousness and duration of the outbreak became clear. “We ended up accruing 20-plus collaborators at a bunch of labs in the Boston area—a lot of BU labs, a lot of other universities, some companies,” Suder says. “It was very much an allhands-on-deck situation. I just started volunteering to take on samples that needed to be generated and things like that.
“The biggest project that our lab did last year was this collaboration with Darryl Kotton’s lab at the CReM. We came up with all of these potential drug targets and curated a list of drugs that were either approved for something else entirely or were in clinical trials and tested if they would be viable in preventing this infection. What we found out that was really cool was in the cell-type model we normally use they weren’t terribly effective at preventing infection, but in the actual stem cell–derived lung cells, they worked a lot better.
“Now I’m really interested to see what I can do with these lung cell models,” she says, “studying the viruses we normally study.”
Among the training program’s benefits is its openness to a wide variety of research interests within the pulmonary field, says Nathan Mesfin, MD, clinical instructor and a Pulmonary Center fellow, who was recently accepted into the School of Public Health Master of Public Health program. He is studying how to optimize goals-of-care conversations between
patients and providers, both in the ICU and outpatient settings, including end-of-life conversations.
The Biology of the Lung program has allowed him to better learn the methodology of epidemiology, take SPH courses, and build foundational knowledge in biostatistics. “It leads you on the road to becoming an independent researcher,” Mesfin says.
Mesfin’s mentor is Renda Wiener, professor of medicine. Like Kotton, she was a program trainee before becoming a mentor.
“For me, a lot of it is being a role model and them seeing what the job of an academic scientist looks like—doing the work, having a team of people that are pitching in to move the science forward,” says Wiener, who is also associate director of the VA Boston Healthcare System Center for Healthcare Organization & Implementation Research. “I really like helping people find and develop what they feel passionate about, what they want to do for the rest of their lives, and help them get there.”
Being part of a half-century-old program “is a very humbling experience,” Mesfin says. “To know that there are so many people who have gone through this process and have become very successful, like Dr. Wiener, who were sort of raised through this program. Nearly 50 years running—it is amazing.”
In the Beginning
Jermone Brody, professor emeritus of medicine, founded the Biology of the Lung program with several other faculty members and was its first principal investigator. He ran the program for 25 years, passing the baton in 2001 to David Center (MED’72, CAS’72), Gordon and Ruth Snider Professor of Pulmonary Medicine and professor of medicine and biochemistry, who ran it until 2011, when Mizgerd joined him as co-PI.
When Brody was told of the grant extension this week via Zoom, his response was, “Wow…that’s fantastic,” but he’s quick to share credit with the other faculty from the 1970s and those who have come along after him. “A lot of people contributed,” he said. “It’s a good group, very smart, very dedicated, and usually right on target.”
“The goal was to train the PhD scientists side by side with the MD scientists,” says Center, “so the PhDs would learn the clinical relevance of the research with respect to human health, and the MD scientists would learn the techniques and rigors of PhD science. We still use that as the opening line of the grant, which has been pretty good to us over the years.”
In the early days of the program, new tools included molecular biology. Transgenics came along later, followed by big data, RNA sequencing, and clinical outcomes analysis. The latest techniques include gene editing, stem cells, and regenerative medicine.
“I imagine five years from now it’ll be a completely different conversation again,” Kotton says, “but what won’t be different is the innovative nature of this crossdisciplinary training program that really breaks conventional boundaries and silos.”
“The whole idea here is that this is an investment in the future of science,” Center says, “and NIH believes that this is one of the major ways that young scientists can be trained in environments that will give them the rigor to succeed subsequently. We’ve trained a lot of people who’ve gone on to make major contributions to our understanding of lung diseases and lung health.
“That’s why they keep investing in us,” he says. “We’re flattered, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard work.” n
Pulmonary fellow Ellen Suder preps her suit before working in the high containment lab, BSL-4, at the NEIDL.
