Medicine on the Midway - Fall 2024 by University of Chicago Medicine

RADIC A L DISRUPT I ON

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION

University of Chicago physicians and scientists harness machine learning tools to augment breakthroughs and o er new avenues for patient care

Alexander Pearson, MD, PhD, inside a UChicago data center that fuels artiﬁcial intelligence tools to explore and diagnose disease

By formalizing

our principles and long-term goals, we can better support groundbreaking discoveries, train the best teams and deliver world-class patient care.

Paul and Allene Russell Professor Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine

Executive Vice President for Medical A airs

Dear Colleagues,

By now, many of us have heard at least a little bit about artiﬁcial intelligence and perhaps AI has made your life easier or more e cient today. This year, AI has dominated headlines as tools become more widely available, sparking excitement and curiosity, as well as concerns around ethics, bias and accuracy.

In science and medicine, AI presents both opportunities and challenges. Proudly, the University of Chicago has long been at the forefront of this ﬁeld.

Our cover story in this issue of Medicine on the Midway explores the groundbreaking work that medical physicist Maryellen Giger, PhD’85, and other UChicago faculty and alumni have done to advance AI in medicine. This collaborative journey spans more than three decades, from Giger’s ﬁrst papers on computer-aided mammography to her current work with datasets and deep learning algorithms. Their work emphasizes the importance of approaching scientiﬁc problems from multiple perspectives and confronting potential risks head-on.

Other stories in this issue showcase the robust collaboration that deﬁnes UChicago. You can read about Chuan He, PhD, whose biochemistry partnerships with fellow faculty helped secure more than $18 million in new funding in 2023. We also feature Pritzker School of Medicine students who have published research while balancing their medical studies; the impactful work that sta and alumni are doing in street medicine to reach unhoused patient populations; and the evolution of our myCHOICE program, which broadens career pathways for PhD students.

Our intellectual vibrancy in medicine and the biological sciences is reﬂected in our structure. Whereas many academic health systems have a loose a liation to their university, our health system corporation is wholly owned by the University of Chicago. This close relationship strengthens our research, education and clinical care missions, allowing them to reinforce each other.

To harness our collective strengths as one institution, we have created a new enterprise-wide strategy: Elevate 2035. This is the first comprehensive strategic plan that covers the Biological Sciences Division, the Pritzker School of Medicine and the UChicago Medicine health system. Launched this fall after months of collaboration and discussion across our organization, Elevate 2035 will guide us toward shared goals over the next decade. This plan is anchored by five pillars People, Community, Healthcare, Research and Education and reflects the roles and responsibilities of every person who is a part of our enterprise.

Elevate 2035 builds on the work we accomplished last year with our new Mission, Vision and Values framework. By formalizing our principles and long-term goals, we can better support groundbreaking discoveries, train the best teams and deliver world-class patient care.

When I joined UChicago two years ago, I was drawn to its unique culture of collaboration and intellectual curiosity. I’ve sought to build on that foundation and better harness the vast knowledge across all of our departments. I’m inspired by what we’ve accomplished together so far, and I look forward to what we do next.

Mark E. Anderson, MD, PhD

The University of Chicago

Fall 2024 Volume 77, No. 2

A publication of the University of Chicago Medicine and Biological Sciences Division.

Medicine on the Midway is published for friends, alumni and faculty of the University of Chicago Medicine, Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine.

Email us at momeditor@bsd.uchicago.edu

Write us at Medicine on the Midway

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The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and Biological Sciences Division

Executive Leadership

Mark E. Anderson, MD, PhD, Paul and Allene Russell Professor, Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine, and Executive Vice President for Medical A airs for the University of Chicago

T. Conrad Gilliam, PhD, Marjorie I. and Bernard A. Mitchell Distinguished Service Professor, Dean for Basic Science, Biological Sciences Division

Thomas E. Jackiewicz, President of the University of Chicago Health System

Vineet Arora, MD, AM’03, Herbert T. Abelson Professor, Dean for Medical Education, Pritzker School of Medicine

Editorial Committee

Chair Jennifer “Piper” Below, PhD’11

Gabrielle Edgerton, PhD’10

Dana Lindsay, MD’92

Carol Olson, PhD’82, MD’86

Loren Schechter, MD’94

Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, MD’59, SM’59 (Lifetime Member)

Carol Westbrook, AB’72, PhD’77, MD’78

Student Representatives

Peishu Li, SM’22 (BSD)

Tony Liu (Pritzker)

University of Chicago Medicine

Communications

Kevin Joy, Editor

Editorial Contributors

Emily Ayshford

Jamie Bartosch

Kat Carlton

Jane Kollmer

Louise Lerner

Devon McPhee

Jen A. Miller

Grace Niewijk

Photo Contributors

Mark Black

Shannon Hocker

Kaisa Holmstrom

Chris Jones

Jean Lachat

Maria Maslennikov

Jordan Porter-

Woodru

Sarah Richards

Sara Serritella

Anne Stein

Jack Wang

Angela WellsO’Connor

Matt Wood

Erin O. Smith

Jason Smith

Joe Sterbenc

Je rey Wang

Xiewen Wen

Nancy Wong

Cutting through the noise 8

For the past 30 years, University of Chicago physicians and scientists have been committed to leveraging artiﬁcial intelligence for good. The journey is only beginning.

inform diagnosis and treatment.

FEATURES

Alumni proﬁle 6

For Nadia Biassou, MD’00, PhD, language is the crux of humanity and her life’s work.

Taking it to the streets 17

Care professionals address evolving challenges in caring for marginalized and unhoused patients.

It takes a village 24

How UChicago’s collaborative culture supports innovation and funding to bring big ideas to life.

Icy Cade-Bell, MD

DEPARTMENTS

Midway News

UChicago Medicine’s Comprehensive Cancer Center celebrates 50 years of excellence. 2

Dinosaur lab makes roaring debut in Washington Park. 4

BSD News

myCHOICE program empowers PhDs in the workplace. 21

Researchers get the skinny on weight-loss drugs. 23

Pritzker News

Students publish in major journals, often as ﬁrst authors. 28

Chuan He, PhD

50 years of national leadership in cancer care

BY JANE KOLLMER

Decade after decade, physician-scientists at the University of Chicago Medicine have worked tirelessly to increase the number of cancer survivors in the United States and improve their quality of life.

Their seminal UChicago discoveries led to the development and introduction of many treatments widely used today including chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, gene therapy and bone marrow transplantation.

Many of those breakthroughs came to life thanks to the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center, which is marking 50 years of receiving its ﬁrst designation from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 1973.

“Celebrating this important milestone presents a wonderful opportunity to acknowledge how far

we’ve come over 50 years, and to build excitement as we chart a course for the future,” said M. Eileen Dolan, PhD, deputy director of the Center.

A history of excellence

The Center’s mission continues as UChicago Medicine works to build the state’s ﬁrst standalone structure dedicated to cancer care and research. A 575,000-square-foot, seven-story pavilion, expected to open in 2027, will provide the South Side with even greater access to breakthroughs and leadingedge therapies.

UChicago Medicine was among the ﬁrst organizations in the country to earn an NCI designation after the implementation of the 1971 National Cancer Act, which established the

Charles B. Huggins, MD

Demonstrated that prostate cancers are dependent on hormones

Leon O. Jacobson, MD’39 Laid the foundation for use of chemotherapy to treat cancer 1943

Janet Rowley, PhB’45, SB’46, MD’48

Established cancer as a genetic disease

Elwood Jensen, PhD

Discovered the estrogen receptor as a key diagnostic and therapeutic target for breast cancer

Everett Vokes, MD, and Ralph Weichselbaum, MD (not pictured) Pioneered the combined use of chemotherapy and radiation for treating head and neck cancer

U.S. News: Cancer program rated best in Illinois

The University of Chicago Medical Center has been recognized as having the top cancer program in Illinois, according to U.S. News & World Report’s 2024-25 Best Hospitals survey. The program, which ranked No. 12 nationally, was rated as “high-performing” for colon, gynecological, lung and prostate surgeries, as well as leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma.

National Cancer Centers Program as an anchor of the country’s cancer research e orts. The NCI status is awarded only to institutions that perform high-quality, population-based research designed to understand the determinants of cancer in area communities and to reduce the disease’s burden.

Ongoing duty to community

Of the 72 NCI-designated Cancer Centers in the United States, only 56 are deemed “Comprehensive” the highest honor an American Cancer Center can receive.

To maintain their status and related funding, designated Cancer Centers are reviewed by the NCI every ﬁve years. During a site visit in August 2023, the NCI team gave the UChicago

Mark Ratain, MD

Discovered genetic variants that predict which cancer patients are likely to experience severe side e ects to a drug

Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center a “high impact” rating.

NCI reviewers cited examples of the Center’s positive impact on the community and health policy, among other criteria, and they praised its research and training programs that place an emphasis on diversity and inclusion.

“This accomplishment is a true reﬂection of the dedication and hard work put in by our Cancer Center faculty and sta ,” said Kunle Odunsi, MD, PhD, the AbbVie Foundation Distinguished Service Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecologic Oncology and Dean of Oncology in the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Chicago Medicine. Odunsi has been director of the Cancer Center since he joined UChicago Medicine in 2021.

A rendering of the new cancer pavilion, expected to open in 2027.

Maryellen Giger, PhD’85

Pioneered computer-aided diagnosis imaging tools to accurately detect breast cancer

Olufunmilayo Olopade, MD

Discovered women of African ancestry are more likely to have aggressive breast cancers

Chuan He, PhD

Developed methods to investigate mRNA epitranscriptomic modiﬁcations

Ernst Lengyel, MD, PhD

Uncovered the importance of the ovarian cancer microenvironment in promoting tumor progression and metastasis

Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park, meet Washington Park

BY MATT WOOD

Newly relocated Fossil Lab will support study of rare specimens

Fossil Lab will showcase, of rare specimens

South Side residents no longer

outh Side residents no need to visit the Field Museum to see towering Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. Now, there’s one their own backyard.

Paul Sereno,

In May, paleontologist Paul Sereno, PhD, relocated his Fossil Lab from the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park to a building in the nearby Washington Park neighborhood.

“It’s a dream lab for paleontologists and archaeologists,” said Sereno, a Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at UChicago. He called the 6,000-square-foot space “one of the largest labs of its kind in the world … designed for high throughput of massive dinosaur skeletons.”

The Fossil Lab is also designed for the community. Civic groups, teachers and students can tour the facility and book rooms for meetings, ﬁeld trips and after-school programs. A colorful dinosaur mural welcomes guests, and vivid skeletons of modern-day creatures hang indoors.

Clinical-grade drug manufacturing facility opens at UChicago

The Duchossois Family Institute (DFI) at the University of Chicago has opened a new facility to manufacture clinical-grade microbiome therapeutics.

The ﬁrst of its kind at an academic institution, the facility will catalyze opportunities for research by allowing experts to grow, freeze-dry and encapsulate live bacteria into capsules that can be safely given to patients determined to have microbiome deﬁciencies associated with a wide range of illnesses.

“The capacity to manufacture live biotherapeutic products for Phase 1 clinical trials distinguishes the University of Chicago, and it will lead to microbiome augmentation therapies to improve human health,” said Eric Pamer, MD, director of the DFI and Donald F. Steiner Professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Microbiology.

The facility, which was completed in July, has the equipment, materials and procedures to comply with current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP), the FDA’s regulatory standard for production of pharmaceuticals and biologic therapeutics.

The one-story facility, a refurbished warehouse Wabash Ave., will ramp up what Sereno can achieve in research output. A wide freight entrance allows sta to easily move large specimens. (Sereno still has a backlog of fossils in another warehouse, a haul he estimates at more than 50 tons.)

The one-story at 5437 S. Wabash Ave., will ramp up Sereno can achieve in research output. A wide entrance allows sta to

Amenities include a prep lab which Sereno calls his “bone makerspace” with tools to clean, stabilize and protect fossils. Trained technicians will guide college students, volunteers and highschool interns to work on artifacts collected by Sereno’s team around the world.

Casual fans of the prehistoric beasts can engage during open house visits held on every second Thursday of the month from 3 to 5 p.m. “We’ll have a ‘Jurassic Park’ show, surrounded by gigantic bones, and talk dinosaur science,” Sereno said. “I’m thrilled to operate a science lab in a neighborhood.”

Cutting-edge technology and equipment are precisely calibrated and housed in two cleanroom suites. Teams of dedicated operators, engineers and scientists have been hired to manage the unit’s operations and manufacturing processes.

A cGMP designation ensures that “every therapeutic product is precisely characterized for composition, purity and stability before it is administered to a human patient,” said Matthew Odenwald, PhD’15, MD’17, Assistant Professor of Medicine and a hepatologist at the University of Chicago Medicine.

Research groups across the University and Medical Center, along with external collaborators, will be able to leverage the cGMP facility. They’ll also have access to existing DFI capabilities and the Symbiotic Bacterial Strain Bank, which contains almost 2,000 bacterial isolates from healthy human donors, in their quest to ﬁnd new treatments.

Je rey B. Matthews, MD, appointed Surgeon-in-Chief

Je rey B. Matthews, MD, Surgeon-inChief and Chair of the Department of Surgery, has been appointed Surgeonin-Chief for the University of Chicago Health System, e ective July 1.

“Our vibrant neurosurgery research program demanded real-time technology integration as the next logical step,” said Peter Warnke, MD, Director of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery at UChicago Medicine.

In this new role, Matthews will serve as the senior physician leader responsible for surgical and perioperative care across the health system, known in the marketplace as the University of Chicago Medicine.

rey B. Matthews, MD

Seth

Matthews will work with

leaders systemwide to develop surgical program strategies, drive performance improvement and expand surgical access and capacity. He will also continue his role as Chair of the Department of Surgery, a position he has held since 2006. Under his leadership, the department achieved several key milestones, including:

■ Doubling the volume of UChicago Medicine’s transplant programs over the past ﬁve years

■ Launching a Level 1 adult trauma program in 2018, which is now among the busiest in Chicago

■ Managing surgical services through the pandemic (a UChicago Medicine framework for the ethical triage of procedures was endorsed by the state of Illinois and the American College of Surgeons)

■ Nearly doubling the number of surgical faculty, residents and fellows

■ Growing the department’s research portfolio by 68% to a projected $12.3 million

Matthews, a gastrointestinal surgeon and an authority on pancreatic and bile duct diseases, holds current and past leadership positions in the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the American Board of Surgery, the Society of Surgical Chairs and the Society of University Surgeons, among others.

Matthews has more than 200 published works and has received long-term funding from the National Institutes of Health. In 2022, he received the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of University Surgeons.

His new role comes at a time when UChicago Medicine is experiencing substantial growth including a new multispecialty care facility in Northwest Indiana, a controlling interest in AdventHealth’s Great Lakes Region and a 575,000-square-foot cancer care and research facility scheduled to open in 2027 in Hyde Park.

named Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience

Seth Himelhoch, MD, MPH, was appointed as the new Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, e ective July 1.

Himelhoch comes to UChicago from the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, where he had served as the Lon and Ann Hays Professor and Chair of the UK Department of Psychiatry since 2018. A public health researcher focused on

evidence-based interventions including those for HIV, substance-use disorders and cancer Himelhoch has received continuous funding as a principal investigator for nearly 20 years from the National Institutes of Health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Department of Veterans A airs. Himelhoch received his medical degree at the University of Michigan School of Medicine and completed his residency in general psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. He completed a fellowship in health services research through the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he concurrently received a master’s degree in public health from the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

At UChicago, Himelhoch will focus on a strategic vision for the department’s research, clinical and educational missions. That vision will include collaboration with multidisciplinary scientists in the Neuroscience Institute and the Departments of Neurology, Radiology and Pediatrics as well as those at the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center.

A focus on recruitment and development of new faculty members to meet a growing need for research and psychiatric services is also a top priority.

Himelhoch succeeds Daniel Yohanna, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, who had served as interim chair of the department since 2016.

Himelhoch, MD, MPH,

Seth Himelhoch, MD, MPH

AI Cutting through the noise

AI diagnostic tools offering quick, accurate help to benefit patient populations in need.

For the past three decades, University of Chicago physicians and scientists have been committed to leveraging medical AI for good. The journey is only beginning.

Alexander Pearson, MD, PhD, envisions

BY EMILY AYSHFORD

Shortly after receiving her doctorate in medical physics, Maryellen Giger, PhD, watched the medical imaging field undergo a radical shift.

As part of a group in the Kurt Rossman Laboratories directed by Kunio Doi, PhD, now an emeritus professor in the Department of Radiology, Giger began to use digitized film then a new phenomenon to train computers to find the “signal” (a potential tumor or lesion) among the complexities of human tissue, aiding radiologists in their diagnoses.

The breakthrough concept was in its infancy. Datasets used for training were small, and the computers were slow with limited storage capacity.

Still, Giger and others were able to develop algorithms that harnessed the power of early neural networks artificial intelligence (AI) programs inspired by the human brain that can be trained to analyze data and find patterns that could accurately perform the same diagnostic task.

In 1994, she and her colleagues published the first papers on computer-aided mammography. Their work ultimately led to the first computer-aided system to detect breast cancer that received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration.

“University of Chicago has been at the forefront of using AI in medical imaging ever since,” said Giger, the A.N. Pritzker Distinguished Service Professor of Radiology.

Flash-forward 30 years: Technological leaps and massive datasets continue to elevate AI and machine learning techniques, and generative AI models have pushed the field forward.

The University of Chicago Medicine recently piloted the use of a generative AI-powered clinical documentation tool among 200 providers. The tool, used only with patient consent, has already led to significant reductions in physician burnout, as well as higher patient satisfaction.

At UChicago, physicians and scientists are committed to ensuring the medical applications of AI including disease detection, device development, workload management and designing new therapies are safe, bias-free and readily available to the populations that need it.

“If we don’t inform ourselves about how our algorithms are working, about the potential risks, about demanding accountability, then we risk that algorithm implementation happens to us rather than by us,” said Alexander Pearson, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine.

“We need to judiciously select the cases where we think using a computational tool is additive to augment science and patient care.”

‘Superhuman’ ability

It came as no surprise that Giger’s early diagnostic technology was embraced by radiologists and patients, eager for as much information as they could get.

But Giger soon found that the original intent to provide a second opinion about a radiologist’s own work was lost on some in the field. Some

radiologists, she said, used these early AI systems as a primary diagnostic tool, or they were analyzing the wrong kinds of images as part of their medical decision making.

“In the beginning, some AI developers who were not in medicine started making comments like, ‘In five years, we won’t need radiologists,’” Giger said. “We know that is not true. We need the knowledge of radiologists, the domain experts, to develop AI. In addition, you need to know your intended population, and you need to know the clinical question you hope to answer.”

Giger has continued to develop computer-aided analytics and software for mammograms, ultrasounds and MRIs. In 2010, she and her team developed QuantX, software that analyzes MRIs using AI and a large reference database collected over decades to help radiologists assess cancerous and noncancerous breast lesions. The software received FDA clearance in 2017 as the first computer-aided diagnosis system, and it was named a “Best Invention” by TIME magazine.

Maryellen Giger, PhD’85, a pioneer of artificial intelligence in medicine, developed the first computer-aided diagnosis system to gain FDA approval.

PHOTOS BY MARK BLACK

AI-generated microbiome marks ‘the future of medicine’

His goal is simple: to help people support a healthy gut.

“If you could do that and maintain a healthy immune system, you don’t just solve one disease,” said Arjun Raman, AB’08, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Pathology at the University of Chicago. “It would be like a statin it would address many problems.”

Doing so relies on combinations of trillions of microbes that create the

be difficult to kill with antibiotics. Armed with the Duchossois Family Institute’s bank of more than 2,000 gut bacterial strains, Raman and his colleagues developed custom microbiomes to see how well they could kill the pathogen.

Machine learning algorithms analyzed the results, and the bestperforming combinations ultimately were tested in mouse models.

The results were highly promising.

microbiome, and understanding the complex network that underlies it.

But Raman and his lab have created an AI model to help define specific combinations of microbes that can be used to treat and cure disease.

“There’s no way a human would ever be able to put together the right combination for a specific purpose,” Raman said. “It’s intractably difficult. Microbiomes have thousands of species, and they all interact in some weird way.”

Recently, the team tested its model with common pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae, which is implicated in several diseases and one that can

The AI model designed a 15-member synthetic microbiome (created from microbes that are found in the gut but would not be found together naturally) that could kill the pathogen.

“This approach is going to define the future of medicine,” Raman said. “AI and machine learning will develop therapies at a much faster rate.”

Moving forward, the team hopes to create microbiomes that can target drug-resistant pathogens and help placentas grow in a healthier manner, potentially solving serious pregnancy complications like pre-eclampsia.

Pearson, a statistician and physician, arrived at UChicago the same year as computer-aided cancer detection efforts received a boost from the increasing use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which include several layers of neural networks to learn from data and identify features in images. Some layers can find features like colors, while others find more complex elements, such as faces.

“One of the first questions we asked was, ‘Could AI pick up on patterns accurately enough to accomplish superhuman tasks?’” Pearson said.

Armed with massive amounts of data from the Cancer Genome Atlas, Pearson and his collaborators trained hundreds of models to create an algorithm that can detect molecular alterations from routine pathology images of tumors something the human eye is unable to do.

The result: Physicians could tailor treatment options for those specific genetic alterations without doing additional testing of the tumors.

“It was not a panacea; it did not replace nextgeneration sequencing [to diagnose disease],” Pearson said. “But it gave us the knowledge that AI could comprehensively provide more insights from existing data.”

Deep, impactful insights

Finding deep insights in existing images also drives the work of Madeleine Torcasso, PhD. A recipient of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, Torcasso is working to understand how immune cells and where they exist in relation to a tumor affect the outcome of cancer treatments.

Aided by advances in microscopy and chemistry, “You can get a much higher molecular content than ever before,” said Torcasso, who is based in Giger’s lab at UChicago. “As the technology gets better, there will be even more complexity in that image and that’s where AI comes in, to describe what’s happening.”

Torcasso uses CNNs to analyze images and map out where immune cells are in relation to a tumor. She and other researchers hope that these details will help them better understand the pathology of the cancer and how it might respond to immunotherapy.

Consider the characteristics of triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive disease that lacks the estrogen or progesterone receptors of other breast cancers. This lack of markers makes immunotherapy an attractive treatment option. Torcasso is examining

PHOTOS BY MARK BLACK

tissue images of these breast cancer patients to map the distributions of immune cells in the tumor area, comparing those who have received immunotherapy and those who haven’t.

“We want to find the commonalities that will predict the response to immunotherapy,” she said. “It will also help us understand the pathology as a whole.”

Isabelle Hu, PhD’21, is on a similar quest. At Tempus AI, a precision medicine company, Hu is applying what she learned at UChicago medical image analysis using machine learning algorithms to find molecular alterations within cancerous tumors.

For example, she has worked to analyze prostate cancer pathology images to predict microsatellite instability, a common biomarker that signals whether patients are more likely to respond to immunotherapy. Tempus AI has now launched an algorithm from this research.

“At the University of Chicago, I could see the tangible impact this kind of research can have on patients,” said Hu, who was advised by Giger during her graduate studies. “I was really motivated by that. And now these digital pathology algorithms are being deployed to make an impact on patients’ lives. It’s really exciting to see the advancements happening every day.”

Avoiding bias and misuse

Like any new technology, AI and machine learning faces hard questions about potential biases and ethics violations. Heather Whitney, PhD, an Assistant

Automation helps companies ‘do the right thing’

Alexander Sadovsky, PhD’14, didn’t envision a career in AI. He just wanted to understand how the brain works.

While studying computational neuroscience at UChicago, he focused on network and computational patterns within the cortex in an attempt to create a framework for how the brain processes sensory information.

“I was able to dedicate five years to an insanely complex question: How does the brain work?” he said. “I understood how data drives questions and how we can take the scientific method to solve problems.”

Those learnings laid a foundation for his career. Today, as chief AI officer at Enhesa which helps global companies stay compliant with environmental, health and safety regulations Sadovsky and his team leverage AI tools to review and summarize countries’ new laws and scan photos of workplaces for potential safety violations.

“We are helping large companies do the right thing around the world,” Sadovsky said.

And that’s how AI can best serve humans, he said by doing the monotonous, repetitive tasks that humans hate most.

“Our work helps enhance human work life and lets humans focus on creativity and problem-solving,” Sadovsky said. “There’s a fear that AI will steal jobs, but AI can make jobs more enjoyable and less focused on boring, routine tasks.”

Advances in machine learning are helping Madeleine Torcasso, PhD, better understand the pathology of cancer and it might respond to immunotherapy.

Robotic lab leads creation of wearable health tech

Jie Xu, PhD, is on a mission to create materials for wearable, skin-like electronics that can diagnose and monitor health conditions, or even be used as an artificial skin on prosthetics.

She has leveraged the power of AI to help expedite the process.

“We all have experience doing experimental validation in the lab, with our hands,” said Xu, a scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and the UChicago Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering. “It’s monotonous and time-consuming. I thought, how about we get a robotic platform to do it for us?”

The result was Polybot, a self-driving laboratory at Argonne created by Xu that combines AI with robotic automation to advance electronic polymer research. Instead of human scientists preparing polymers for electronics, the Polybot system can choose a promising recipe for a polymer solution and then prepare and print it.

Polybot then assembles layers together to form a device and measure its performance and it can even suggest what experiment to do next.

“We can use Polybot to enhance efficiency and discovery to really accelerate biomedical wearable electronics for health,” Xu said, noting that her team closely monitors the progress.

“But we keep humans in the loop. If I have a new idea, I can communicate with Polybot and ask it to screen my hypothesis.”

Professor of Radiology, spent a year as a MacLean Center Clinical Ethics Fellow thinking about those questions.

Consider cancer diagnoses. An AI model won’t simply call a lesion cancerous or not. It offers a prediction: This lesion has a 90% likelihood of being cancer. That’s information a patient might want. But what if the number is 50%, or 30%? What if the cancer is rare?

“Studying how a physician interacts with this information is really important,” said Whitney, adding that medical frameworks for ethical decision-making need to be updated for working with AI. “How much weight do they put on those numbers? How does that affect how they move forward with treatment? We need to consider how information from AI is used.”

Whitney, along with Giger, has also studied the offlabel use of AI in medicine. Similar to how physicians might prescribe drugs for conditions other than their intended use, they could feel compelled to use a medical imaging diagnostic tool in the same way.

“In my view, it’s really the same kind of principles that are used in medicine: beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, fairness,” said Whitney, who sat in on UChicago Medicine’s ethics consultation service meetings as part of her fellowship. “It’s so easy to ‘plug and chug’ with AI, but now is the time to see how this maps to those standards we really know about.”

Part of that discussion involves understanding what biases are brought into algorithms, to better understand how the technology makes associations.

Pearson discovered that divide firsthand when he studied a dataset of tumors in an attempt to discern if ancestry affected the way tumors grew.

The initial answer was yes. But Pearson and his team soon found that their AI model had identified which institution had submitted the images of the tumors via technical watermark. The algorithm discovered that some hospitals had high number of patients from a single race. It then used that watermark as a stand-in for patient characteristics, including ancestry. Needless to say, the model got the ancestry and the final predictions wrong.

“We showed all kinds of relationships that could be misconstrued from this same kind of digital pathology effect,” Pearson said. “It does not have to be that way. You can build a model that is less intrinsically biased it needs to be vetted and validated to make sure it isn’t creating these relationships that we can’t anticipate.”

PHOTO BY XIEWEN WEN

A democratized tool

AI and deep learning have the potential for wider use outside of institutions with huge databases and resources. Pearson and his team recently showed that a low-cost, 3D-printed microscope, paired with a cloud-based AI platform, could provide the same pathology accuracy as a much costlier microscope.

“You can imagine a scenario where this allowed a clinician in a low-income region to take a patient slide and get an instant diagnosis without any delays,” Pearson said. “That would allow this technology to benefit a global population not just us in a first-world, high-income healthcare system.”

On the UChicago campus, Giger is leading an effort to level the playing field through the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC), which curates a massive data commons of more than 500,000 medical imaging studies. Originally funded by the National Institutes of Health to better understand COVID-19, the Center has expanded its image collection to include cancer, and it has developed AI tools and algorithms to help researchers develop trustworthy AI.

To date, the MIDRC has released images from more than 170,000 studies that can be used by physicians and researchers worldwide to develop AI. The work has the potential to improve disease detection and reduce the number of unneeded biopsies.

“This has been a dream for decades to give people the tools to help them with their training and test sets, and to teach them about bias awareness,” Giger said. “It will give all investigators data so everyone can develop AI models.”

Decades after Giger’s early discoveries, the potential of AI remains vast.

Deep learning algorithms, already scanning radiology and pathology images, are also pairing that information with patient demographics and disease characteristics. Soon, AI could help physicians adapt detailed treatment plans.

Pearson, who is working to expand data science and machine learning curriculum for students at the Pritzker School of Medicine, views the future of healthcare AI with optimism and caution.

“As algorithms become part of standard practice, it is imperative that physicians understand when algorithms are broken or when they are unreliable,” Pearson said. “We want to make sure Pritzker trainees have the full portfolio of skills to interact with them to best serve their patients.”

Q&A: Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD’04, MPH

As immediate past president of the American Medical Association, Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD’04, MPH, worked closely with the organization to study the growing use of AI in healthcare settings and to develop policy positions as the technology plays a greater role in patient care. He spoke more about recent AMA findings and recommendations.

What is the consensus about AI among doctors?

Physicians are enthusiastic about AI and its assistive role in healthcare that enhances human intelligence rather than replaces it. However, we are at a critical juncture with respect to physician confidence: A survey conducted by the AMA in 2023 found an equal number of physicians excited and concerned about the potential for AI.

How is AI most useful in healthcare settings?

The AMA survey illustrates that physicians’ greatest hope for AI rests in reducing the crushing administrative burdens that plague modern medicine, which drain healthcare resources and pull physicians away from patient care. AI tools considered to be most helpful by physicians are those for enhancing diagnostic ability, workflow efficiency and clinical outcomes.

In what ways can patient concerns be addressed?

Just as we demand proof that new medicines and biologics are safe and effective, we must also insist on clinical evidence of the safety and efficacy of AI-enabled healthcare applications. Key principles laid out by the AMA

call for comprehensive policies that mitigate risks to patients and physicians, ensuring the benefits of AI are maximized while potential harms are minimized.

As AI tools evolve, where do liability concerns fall?

The AMA believes accountability should rest with those best positioned to know the potential risks of the AI system and to mitigate potential harm, such as developers or those mandating physician use.

While the AMA strongly supports physician input in the design, development and deployment of AI tools, it continues to advocate that physician liability for the use of AI-enabled technologies should be limited and adhere to current legal approaches to medical liability.

Robotic lab leads creation of wearable health tech

Jie Xu, PhD, is on a mission to create materials for wearable, skin-like electronics that can diagnose and monitor health conditions, or even be used as an artiﬁcial skin on prosthetics.

She has leveraged the power of AI to help expedite the process.

Polybot then assembles layers together to form a device and measure its performance and it can even suggest what experiment to do next.

“We can use Polybot to enhance e ciency and discovery to really accelerate biomedical wearable electronics for health,” Xu said, noting that her team closely monitors the progress.

“But we keep humans in the loop. If I have a new idea, I can communicate with Polybot and ask it to screen my hypothesis.”

Consider cancer diagnoses. An AI model won’t simply call a lesion cancerous or not. It o ers a prediction: This lesion has a 90% likelihood of being cancer. That’s information a patient might want. But what if the number is 50%, or 30%? What if the cancer is rare?

“Studying how a physician interacts with this information is really important,” said Whitney, adding that medical frameworks for ethical decisionmaking need to be updated for working with AI. “How much weight do they put on those numbers? How does that a ect how they move forward with treatment? We need to consider how information from AI is used.”

Whitney, along with Giger, has also studied the olabel use of AI in medicine. Similar to how physicians might prescribe drugs for conditions other than their intended use, they could feel compelled to use a medical imaging diagnostic tool in the same way.

“In my view, it’s really the same kind of principles that are used in medicine: beneﬁcence, nonmaleﬁcence, justice, fairness,” said Whitney, who sat in on UChicago Medicine’s ethics consultation service meetings as part of her fellowship. “It’s so easy to ‘plug and chug’ with AI, but now is the time to see how this maps to those standards we really know about.”

Part of that discussion involves understanding what biases are brought into algorithms, to better understand how the technology makes associations.

Pearson discovered that divide ﬁrsthand when he studied a dataset of tumors in an attempt to discern if ancestry a ected the way tumors grew.

The initial answer was yes. But Pearson and his team soon found that their AI model had identiﬁed which institution had submitted the images of the tumors via technical watermark. The algorithm discovered that some hospitals had high number of patients from a single race. It then used that watermark as a stand-in for patient characteristics, including ancestry. Needless to say, the model got the ancestry and the ﬁnal predictions wrong.

“We showed all kinds of relationships that could be misconstrued from this same kind of digital pathology e ect,” Pearson said. “It does not have to be that way. You can build a model that is less intrinsically biased it needs to be vetted and validated to make sure it isn’t creating these relationships that we can’t anticipate.”

PHOTO BY XIEWEN WEN

A democratized tool

“You can imagine a scenario where this allowed a clinician in a low-income region to take a patient slide and get an instant diagnosis without any delays,” Pearson said. “That would allow this technology to beneﬁt a global population not just us in a ﬁrst-world, high-income healthcare system.”

On the UChicago campus, Giger is leading an e ort to level the playing ﬁeld through the Medical Imaging and Data Resource Center (MIDRC), which curates a massive data commons of more than 500,000 medical imaging studies. Originally funded by the National Institutes of Health to better understand COVID-19, the Center has expanded its image collection to include cancer, and it has developed AI tools and algorithms to help researchers develop trustworthy AI.

Decades after Giger’s early discoveries, the potential of AI remains vast.

Pearson, who is working to expand data science and machine learning curriculum for students at the Pritzker School of Medicine, views the future of healthcare AI with optimism and caution.

Q&A: Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD’04, MPH

What is the consensus about AI among doctors?

Physicians are enthusiastic about AI and its assistive role in healthcare that enhances human intelligence rather than replaces it. However, we are at a critical juncture with respect to physician conﬁdence: A survey conducted by the AMA in 2023 found an equal number of physicians excited and concerned about the potential for AI.

How is AI most useful in healthcare settings?

In what ways can patient concerns be addressed?

Just as we demand proof that new medicines and biologics are safe and e ective, we must also insist on clinical evidence of the safety and e cacy of AI-enabled healthcare applications. Key principles laid out by the AMA

call for comprehensive policies that mitigate risks to patients and physicians, ensuring the beneﬁts of AI are maximized while potential harms are minimized.

As AI tools evolve, where do liability concerns fall?

BY SARAH RICHARDS

Full-court press

Pritzker

student-athletes aim to identify, inspire youths considering medical careers

As a teenager, Jameel Alausa loved playing basketball for the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. But his teachers and family had a di erent mindset: You can’t play sports and do well in school, so pick one.

“I was always at odds with them on this,” said Alausa, 25, whose parents emigrated from Nigeria. “I thought I could do both.”

Alausa persevered and balanced both pursuits, ultimately playing for Yale University while earning a degree in economics. As his educational career blossomed, leading him to the Pritzker School of Medicine, he watched others struggle when their basketball dreams ended without a backup career plan.

“A lot of my teammates and friends saw basketball as their only outlet to success, and when they weren’t able to reach the NBA, they were severely impacted,” said Alausa, who is now a second-year student at Pritzker. “Some of them ended up engaging in activities that unfortunately led to them passing away or going to jail.”

Those scenarios set Alausa and a group of college and former professional athletes studying medicine o on a mission to provide underserved students with exposure to medical careers and mentoring. Their organization, Sneakers to Scrubs, aims to increase the number of Black men in the ﬁeld

by tapping into a deep well of potential: the youth football and basketball teams on the south and west sides of Chicago.

‘We’ve walked the same path’

Dressed in scrubs, the group’s volunteers visit schools and sports leagues to conduct training sessions on topics like concussion awareness and ﬁrst aid, and to discuss a wide range of careers in medicine a ﬁeld their audiences may not have considered for many reasons.

“Someday, the ball stops bouncing for everyone, so student-athletes have to ask themselves what’s next,” said 24-year-old Solomon Egbe, a second-year Pritzker student and former Harvard University football player.

With Alausa, he manages Sneakers to Scrubs alongside Marcus Allen, also a second-year Pritzker student, and Lord Hyeamang, who is in his second year at Rush Medical College.

“The magic really happens when we put medicine as a career option in front of students who had never considered it before or thought it was a ﬁeld not accessible to them,” Egbe said. “As former athletes and men of color, we can relate to their experiences and challenges they may be facing now or in the future we’ve walked that same path.”

The path might appear less traveled. Although Black people make up roughly 12% of the country’s population, only 5.7% of its doctors are Black, according to 2022 data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Sneakers to Scrubs e orts also highlight the potential of other roles, including nurses, therapists, technicians and support sta . Since launching last November, leaders have participated in about 60 events and reached 1,500 students via mentoring, career-focused summer camps, job shadowing and more.

The organization, which is applying for nonproﬁt status, focuses on three groups: middle school athletes interested in medicine; high school athletes seeking exposure to medical and health jobs; and college athletes in need of mentoring as they enter medical school.

PHOTOS BY NANCY WONG

For Iben King, who earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a master’s degree in health administration while playing football at McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois, the support from Sneakers to Scrubs is invaluable.

“They o er me help for my MCATs,” said King, 25, a South Side native who hopes to become an orthopaedic surgeon. “They check in on me and if I text them or call them, I hear back from them by the end of the day.” Staying true to the group’s mission, King has also volunteered at Sneakers to Scrubs events focused on CPR and wound care.

That work, he said, “is making me a better doctor already.”

Coaching and commitment

To widen its reach, Sneakers to Scrubs collaborates with a network of nonproﬁt partners.

They include Project Love Chicago, which provides academic and job support, and the youthfocused MedCEEP (Medical Careers Exposure and Emergency Preparedness) founded by Abdullah Pratt, MD’16, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Faculty Director for Community Engagement at Pritzker, and an

emergency medicine physician at the University of Chicago Medicine.

“We see ourselves as the bridge,” Alausa said. “We’ve been able to form an ecosystem.”

In July, the three organizations joined forces with UChicago Medicine’s Urban Health Initiative and the Southside Free Clinic to host a two-day violence prevention and health fair. Held at the Gerald Ratner Athletics Center at UChicago, the event featured basketball and football games, a basketball skills clinic, free school supplies and sports physicals.

Despite living nearby, many participating students had never set foot on campus, where UChicago Medicine’s Level 1 Adult Trauma Center is located.

The divide was brought home by the attendance of 14-year-old Shane Butler, a football player who once participated in a MedCEEP ﬁrst aid class and used the tourniquet skills he learned to save his own life when he accidentally shot himself in the leg after picking up a gun at a friend’s house.

Sneakers to Scrubs has been supporting the teen during his recovery, Alausa said, noting that the connection won’t end when the healing does. The group’s next step: providing Butler with mentorship and career exploration opportunities.

The Sneakers to Scrubs leadership team, from left to right: Marcus Allen, Jameel Alausa, Lord Hyeamang and Solomon Egbe

Six questions with Jennifer “Piper” E. Below, PhD’11

Jennifer “Piper” E. Below, PhD’11, is a geneticist and the new editorial committee chair for Medicine on the Midway magazine. She joined Vanderbilt University in 2017 and serves as a Professor of Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where her namesake lab uses computational methods to uncover the genetic and epigenetic basis of human disease, including Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

BY DEVON MCPHEE

What inspired your career path?

I had an opportunity in high school to hear pioneering geneticist Henry Ehrlich, PhD, give a lecture about this new technology called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The idea that you could assess the

PHOTO BY ERIN O. SMITH

As the new editorial committee chair for Medicine on the Midway, geneticist Jennifer “Piper” E. Below, PhD’11, is “thrilled” to share stories about alumni.

content of a human genome at scale was so inspiring. I applied for an internship in genetics at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, where I was part of some of the earliest disease gene mapping e orts. I continued working in genomics throughout high school and college, and I knew that I could make it my career.

How did you choose the University of Chicago for your doctorate?

After college, I ran into Henry Ehrlich, who remembered me from my internship. He asked if I was interested in continuing to work in genomics and he helped place me at Roche Molecular Diagnostics. I met Carrie Aldrich, PhD’01, there and she encouraged me to apply. My grandparents had met as undergraduates at UChicago, but somehow I still thought of the school as an unattainable dream

for someone like me. But Carrie reached out to one of her mentors, who agreed that I would be a good ﬁt. That was a life-changing moment.

How did the time there change you?

It wasn’t until I met Professor Nancy Cox, PhD, who’s now at Vanderbilt, that I realized I could combine my love of mathematics —I was a math major in undergrad with genetics in a ﬁeld called statistical and computational genetics. I couldn’t believe that I could combine my two favorite things in the world and make them my career. I was hooked!

Why serve as editorial committee chair for Medicine on the Midway?

It never ceases to amaze me to learn about our alumni. They’re at the highest tiers of leadership in some of the most important medical societies in the world. They are thought leaders who are shaping scientiﬁc discoveries, medical access and medical care. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to help share their stories and highlight the ways they are changing the world.

What is most promising about your current research?

Enormous resources have been devoted toward generating genomic data about Alzheimer’s disease. My grant supports a reanalysis of this data to better aggregate and leverage it to maximize discoveries. We’re thinking creatively about how to integrate the data and turn it into risk proﬁles to better understand the molecular etiology of the disease. We’ve already done some important work in functionally characterizing genes that have been implicated in studies of Alzheimer’s disease.

As a professor, what’s your approach to teaching?

I learned at UChicago that a rising tide lifts all boats. When one person is successful, everyone beneﬁts. I have tried to instill that same mentality in my graduate students and to reward hard work, disciplined thinking, creativity and innovation, even if that means risk taking and failure sometimes.

From mobile clinics to encampments,

clinicians bring their practice directly to those who need it most

Taking it to the streets

BY DEVON MCPHEE

Before asking his patients about their medical needs, Thomas D. Huggett, MD’85, MPH, likes to begin his appointments with another topic: their goals.

Huggett, a family medicine physician who has spent three decades working with marginalized and unhoused people on Chicago’s West Side, knows that those goals might di er from the typical concerns a doctor might hear about weight loss or managing cholesterol.

“Some people want to ﬁnd steady employment or stable housing, while others are looking to not use street drugs or reconnect with their family,” Huggett said.

As medical director of mobile health at Lawndale Christian Health Center, Huggett and his team o er primary care services at 20 shelters, including 12 traditional sites and eight dedicated to migrants. He sees conditions as varied as diabetes, hypertension, wounds and skin infections, mental and behavioral issues, and substance use disorder and he knows the housing insecurity issues that may exacerbate

them can happen for many reasons, sometimes without warning.

For Huggett and other clinicians working in shelters and among an estimated 150 “street medicine” programs nationwide, the workloads are rising.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development saw the number of people experiencing homelessness (PEH) rise 12% from 2022 to 2023. Last year, it recorded the highest point-in-time count of PEH more than 650,000 on a single night in January since reporting began in 2007.

Similarly, Chicago o cials cited a PEH count of 18,836 on January 25 for the city’s annual point-intime recording, a threefold increase from one year earlier. That total includes migrant arrivals bussed or ﬂown in from the U.S.-Mexico border.

Huggett’s mission, motivated by his faith, remains steady amid challenges and change.

“Our intent is to provide a very low barrier to care, to build rapport and relationships so that over time we may have the opportunity to deliver care to our patients, and perhaps connect them with housing and traditional outpatient services,” he said.

Expanded care and approach

Chicago’s inﬂux of migrant families has prompted Icy Cade-Bell, MD, Medical Director of the Comer Children’s Hospital Mobile Medical Unit and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Chicago, to expand her team’s capabilities and the age range that they serve.

The Comer Mobile Unit has been treating children ages 3 to 19 in medically-underserved parts of the city’s West and South Sides since 2002, and it typically partners with area schools to provide sports physicals, health screenings, vaccinations, lab tests and more.

But about a year ago, the clinic on wheels began pulling up to area police stations, where new arrivals

Thomas D. Huggett, MD’85, MPH, has spent three decades providing care on Chicago’s West Side.

People experiencing homelessness (PEH) and health disparities

NUMBERS TO KNOW

1 in 5

Onethird

are families with at least one adult and one child report having a serious mental illness

50 years

Average life expectancy — 20+ years shorter than the general population

9x higher

Opioid overdose death rate compared to stably housed people

79.5%

The number of PEH in Chicago who are Black

150+ Street medicine programs operating nationwide

were housed on a short-term basis, and later at shelters. The unit also started seeing patients as young as infants and as old as 24.

Cade-Bell and her team also adjusted their approach to care. With no medical records to review, they spent more time uncovering the health needs of their patients. They worked through a Spanish-speaking interpreter, either in person or

over the phone, and focused on providing traumainformed care and connecting individuals with additional services.

“Working with new arrivals has been a learning experience for us, because they have these layers of concerns that go above what we typically encounter

with our public-school students,” Cade-Bell said. “It requires a set of cultural competencies that takes into account the harrowing experiences these individuals may have faced.”

Cade-Bell’s experience underscores the complexities of working with marginalized populations, where medical care may require more than writing a prescription or devising a treatment plan.

These patients often have competing needs and priorities, such as court dates and Social Security appointments, and they can face transportation obstacles to attending appointments or obtaining medication.

Beyond logistical challenges, some individuals may harbor a distrust of the medical profession due to prior traumatic or discriminatory experiences, further delaying or complicating vital care.

“Many people who are living in the streets have been burned by the system,” said Jonathan Sherin, PhD’97, MD’98, who served as director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health from 2016 to 2022. “By that, I mean taken to the hospital, often against their will, and medicated, often against their will. This puts clinicians in league with a system that has been very traumatizing.”

Leading with heart

In his former role with the country’s largest public mental health department which serves an area of 10 million people, about the same population as Georgia Sherin focused on relentless engagement and treating patients with what he calls a “heartforward” approach.

Icy Cade-Bell, MD, has helped expand the Comer Children’s Hospital Mobile Medical Unit to serve an inﬂux of children arriving in Chicago.

Sources: Chicago Department of Public Health, KFF Health News, National Alliance to End Homelessness, National Coalition for the Homeless, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Sherin remains proud of developing the Homeless Outreach and Mobile Engagement (HOME) program that focuses on the most severely ill individuals, those with a chronic psychiatric disorder, schizophrenia, and likely comorbid health problems and addictions.

The model, deployed throughout Los Angeles, uses outreach teams to approach individuals in need of medical care by bringing them comfort items like food, toothbrushes and socks. Over time, as trust develops, teams begin to talk about medication and other treatments. The team involves the patient as much as their illness allows as a partner in the decision making about their care.

“It’s about reaching individuals in the most humanitarian way and restricting their civil liberties as little as possible,” Sherin said.

Peer engagement using former PEH who have overcome addiction or mental illness can also help create a bridge between underserved communities and healthcare providers, said Je rey Eisen, MD’09, acting deputy president and chief medical o cer for the behavioral health division of MultiCare Health System, the largest provider of behavioral health programs and services in Washington state.

Eisen’s division runs a program called Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) that employs a team of peers and case managers to help PEH transition into shelters or other housing. The team connects with individuals in homeless camps, meal sites and other locations to support their search for steady housing and to enable their access to medical care and social services.

The program’s success comes from bringing people who lived the experience into the equation, said Eisen, who, as a student at the Pritzker School of Medicine, volunteered at the University of Chicago Maria Shelter Health Clinic, a shelter in Englewood providing healthcare to women and children.

“Peers understand the mental health concerns these individuals have and how di cult it can be to maintain housing or employment when you are not feeling well,” Eisen said. “They also have learned ways of navigating health systems that they can teach to others to help them more successfully connect with care.”

Reﬂection of community

A deep focus on health inequities and disparities is critical to tackling the diverse and complex needs of PEH and other marginalized groups, said Pilar

Ortega, MD’06, vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and a Clinical Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Racially and ethnically minoritized populations are disproportionately a ected by housing insecurity, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Black people make up 13% of the U.S. population but comprise 37% of PEH. Asian Americans experienced the greatest percentage increase among PEH, increasing 40% from 2022 to

2023. Individuals who identify as Hispanic or Latino had the largest numerical increase, rising 38% during that period.

Medical education has the potential to impact PEH and street medicine e orts by encouraging students from underrepresented communities to enter the profession.

The reason? “They are often the ones who are most motivated to take care of underserved patients, and they have valuable trust-building, communication, cultural and language skills to be able to reach these populations e ectively,” said Ortega, who also helped found Medical Organization for Latino Advancement (MOLA), a nonproﬁt devoted to supporting Latino physicians and students interested in medicine.

“It’s important that we facilitate the resources for medical schools, residency programs and faculty to create inclusive learning environments so that learners can thrive and become clinicians who

Pilar Ortega, MD’06, advocates for diversity in medical education to better serve the health needs of underrepresented communities.

provide excellent care to the populations that they want to serve.”

Ortega’s experience at Pritzker mirrored that approach. With the support of the school, she developed a medical Spanish course for students.

“From Day One, I was treated as a colleague by even the most senior physicians and faculty,” said Ortega, whose current research focuses on language proﬁciency assessment and how physicians can deliver language-appropriate care. “That type of environment is very nourishing, and it made medical education leadership feel natural to me.”

Last fall, Pritzker launched a newly revised framework known as the Pritzker Curriculum that prioritizes health equity education as a longitudinal

thread throughout a student’s ﬁrst three years. The curriculum includes a dedicated ﬁrst-year equity course plus foundational courses and clerkships that incorporate patient advocacy and healthcare disparities discussions.

Applying these concepts on a wider scale would have an undeniably positive impact on the future of street medicine and the health of marginalized populations, Eisen said.

“This is very interesting, complex and meaningful work,” Eisen said. “To the extent that we can develop a workforce that’s dedicated to the needs of populations that are socioeconomically struggling or have other social determinant challenges, that really allows us to create more opportunity for care and recovery.”

‘Unwavering’ health equity pioneer to retire

After 12 years at the University of Chicago Medicine, Brenda Battle, RN, BSN, MBA, will retire as Senior Vice President for Community Health Transformation, Chief Equity O cer, and head of the Urban Health Initiative (UHI), which administers the Health System’s population health and community beneﬁt programs and work.

“Brenda’s unwavering belief in the power of community and collaboration has sparked transformative change, as she built strong alliances

with community leaders to reduce health disparities and expand access to care,” said Tom Jackiewicz, President of the University of Chicago Health System.

Since 2005, the UHI has focused on improving health equity in UChicago Medicine’s service areas, which cover more than 880,000 people in the South Side and Southland facing disproportionate rates of chronic and serious diseases, as well as intentional violence.

A cornerstone e ort came in 2016 when Battle’s team partnered with 20 volunteer leaders to create UChicago Medicine’s ﬁrst Community Advisory Council to provide guidance on targeting chronic disease, maternal and child health, trauma care and violence prevention.

Under Battle’s leadership, UChicago Medicine’s annual community beneﬁt investment has more than doubled since 2013, totaling more than $5 billion.

Battle’s contributions have been pivotal in launching programs and alliances that include UChicago Medicine’s nationally recognized adult trauma care center and Violence Recovery Program, and Southland RISE, a violence prevention collaboration between UChicago Medicine and Advocate Christ Medical Center.

More recently, Battle helped lay the groundwork for regulatory approval for a standalone cancer care and research pavilion by working with the community to ensure the facility meets the needs of South Side residents. It is scheduled to open in 2027.

“Her contributions leave a lasting legacy at our organization and within the community, and we remain committed to building on her work,” said Mark Anderson, MD, PhD, Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and Pritzker School of Medicine, Executive Vice President for Medical A airs, and Paul and Allene Russell Professor in the Department of Medicine.

Brenda Battle, RN, BSN, MBA

PHOTO BY NANCY WONG

Putting PhDs to work

Celebrating

10 years, the myCHOICE program helps grads broaden their career

Earning a doctorate in the biological sciences can mean stepping into an unknown world. PhD-trained scientists may be equipped to succeed in a variety of careers ranging from pharmaceutical research to roles in consulting, communications and public policy but the paths to these and other careers may be unfamiliar or unclear to graduates.

programs at universities across the country designed to help trainees transition into careers that ﬁt their skills and interests.

Today, myCHOICE is one of the few programs created by that NIH funding still in operation, and its events and programs regularly attract more than 1,000 attendees annually.

BY JEN A. MILLER

For the last decade, doctoral students and postdoctoral scientists in the Biological Sciences Division (BSD) at the University of Chicago have had a specialized resource: the myCHOICE program, a comprehensive e ort to expose scientists-in-training to a pipeline of potential jobs beyond academia and to help them leverage their unique skills in the market.

“As the economy and workforce matures and changes, PhD-trained scientists can contribute attention to detail, outside-the-box thinking and ingrained determination to produce a high-quality result, all of which is recognized by employers,” said Abby Stayart, AB’97, PhD’12, senior program director for myCHOICE.

The program’s broad focus, she adds, “has carved out permission for trainees to consider their skills and their relevance to careers that were not previously represented in academic training.”

Launched in 2014 via a grant from the National Institutes of Health at a time when data showed that more than half of recent PhD graduates were pursuing careers outside of academia myCHOICE was one of 17 NIH-funded

‘Hyper-valuable’ asset

The ambiguities that students face when searching for jobs aren’t lost on educators, said David Kovar, PhD, Associate Dean for Graduate Education in the BSD.

“All of us faculty are very well positioned to provide students advice on how to pursue a career in academia,” said Kovar, noting that the “vast majority” of faculty aren’t nearly as well equipped or experienced to o er advice about other options.

That was clear to Karyl Kopaskie, AB’07, PhD’14, an early alumni volunteer for myCHOICE, who struggled to both identify alumni that had left academia through word of mouth and “talk to people who had pursued other careers” in nontraditional paths.

“There wasn’t a lot of support or resources for students looking to make the jump,” said Kopaskie, who earned her doctorate in microbiology.

Today, students in the myCHOICE program can learn more from 10 di erent ﬁelds: academic research; industry research; government and nonproﬁt research; science and education outreach; science communications; business and commercialization; healthcare and medicine; academic research and administration; data science and law; and policy and regulatory a airs. Each o ers specialized, career-focused panel discussions and mini-courses for participants to expand their professional skill sets, pursue externships and connect with alumni and mentors.

Ittai Eres, SM’17, PhD’20, attended two myCHOICE-sponsored programs called “treks” to New York and San Francisco to learn more about ﬁnance and biotech careers. The trips were “helpful in seeing the di erent types of jobs available and what it would be like for people who had a PhD,” said Eres, whose PhD is in human genetics.

Now working as a senior scientist at Amgen providing computational support to enable drug

discoveries, Eres praised myCHOICE for o ering “a ton of exposure” and helping him realize that having a PhD didn’t pigeonhole him, but instead made him a “hyper-valuable asset” to employers.

The intensive exposure and networking o ered by myCHOICE treks is invaluable: Of trainees who participated in treks during the past 10 years, more than 80% are now working in that industry, and many attribute their ﬁrst career to connections made via their trek.

Career-focused collaboration

Kopaskie, who is now a principal at healthcare intelligence ﬁrm SG2, as well as Alumni Council President for the University of Chicago Medical & Biological Sciences Alumni Association, has spent 10 years volunteering with myCHOICE by serving on event panels and o ering one-on-one meetings with students and postdocs.

The ongoing work, Kopaskie said, has helped her feel more included as a BSD alumna and strengthened her connection to UChicago.

Rene Mora, PhD’88, MD’89, a myCHOICE mentor who studied biochemistry at UChicago, now works as a portfolio manager at a hedge fund management ﬁrm in Boston. He has seen how the program breaks down walls between academic disciplines and puts a wide array of career options

for PhD-trained scientists on an even ﬁeld.

“The program has really caused a cultural shift within biological sciences,” Mora said. “It encourages interaction and collaboration among individuals as opposed to people being siloed in their own labs.”

Fitting to its mission, myCHOICE is entering a new phase of institutionalization by transitioning from its original home in the BSD into central University through a merger with UChicagoGRAD, a dedicated resource that serves all graduate students and postdocs at UChicago.

It will continue to serve BSD students and beneﬁt from UChicagoGRAD’s larger sta and job-focused resources including workplace scenario trainings, resume-writing workshops and job interview preparation.

“myCHOICE and UChicagoGRAD have collaborated closely over the past 10 years to complement each other’s programming, as opposed to competing or repeating or duplicating it,” Stayart said.

“While the goal of myCHOICE was to dive deeply into conversations about careers that are appropriate for PhD-trained scientists, the career development professionals at UChicagoGRAD o er a broader array of opportunities and provide invaluable one-on-one career advising merging the two o ces is the NIH mission accomplished.”

Retiring ITM founder leaves legacy of collaboration, discovery

Physician-researcher Julian Solway, MD, retired in September after a nearly 40-year career at the University of Chicago, where he secured more than $165 million in funding and launched the Institute for Translational Medicine (ITM) that has fueled the scientiﬁc innovations of hundreds of faculty and helped families receive cutting-edge care.

“UChicago provides the perfect environment to have a most fulﬁlling career,” said Solway, the Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Clinical Science Research/Translational Medicine.

Under Solway’s leadership, the ITM received more than $100 million from the National Institutes of Health since its 2007 founding.

A partnership between UChicago and Rush, the ITM operates in collaboration with Advocate Aurora Health, the Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola University Chicago and Endeavor Health to connect researchers and community organizations with education and resources to prevent and treat disease in real-world settings.

Solway’s vision led to several major initiatives, including The New Normal campaign to increase awareness of and participation in health research. Solway emphasized the importance of the “sociome” to measure how everyday factors such as exposure to green space, light, noise and violence a ect human

health, and he mobilized teams to create a big data platform to help physicians give patients more customized care.

He is also one of the founders of myCHOICE, a program created to provide exposure, education and experiences that expand career opportunities for PhD students, postdocs and medical scientists at UChicago.

Colleagues and students recalled Solway’s trademark “Julian-ism” phrases that sparked laughter and encouraged discussion, as well as his commitment to educating others.

“There is no better mentor in the universe,” said Lainie Ross, MD, PhD, who co-directed the ITM with Solway for 15 years before becoming the Inaugural Chair of the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester.

Studies examine heavy questions behind weight-loss drugs

BY GRACE NIEWIJK

A class of drugs known as glucagonlike peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs) originally approved by the FDA for treating adults with Type 2 diabetes has skyrocketed in use for achieving fast and signiﬁcant weight loss.

Better known by their brand names like Mounjaro, Ozempic, Wegovy and Zepbound, the drugs contain semaglutide, which mimics a hormone (GLP-1) that helps control insulin and blood glucose levels and promotes feelings of fullness.

About three-quarters of Americans are familiar with them, according to a 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center. The survey also found that two in three people say willpower isn’t enough to lose weight, underscoring the surge in popularity of GLP-1RAs.

Still, the widespread adoption fueled by celebrities and social media inﬂuencers “should raise a red ﬂag,” said Chun-Su Yuan, MD, PhD, the Cyrus Tang Professor of Anesthesia and Critical Care at the University of Chicago.

Prescribing physicians face complex considerations over dosage, cost, side e ects and e cacy, said Yuan, who in January published a paper in The BMJ comparing 15 di erent GLP-1RAs.

The strengths of each drug varied, researchers found, but each one successfully lowered users’ blood glucose and weight. Secondary beneﬁts, such as lower cholesterol, were also identiﬁed.

Personalized prescription

The drugs aren’t a one-size-ﬁts-all solution: Patients with comorbid conditions like hyperlipidemia may be better suited to one GLP-1RA drug than another, Yuan said.

And even patients with similar clinical proﬁles might prioritize di erent aspects of

their health or quality of life when choosing a medication with their doctor.

Eric Polley, PhD, an Associate Professor of Public Health Sciences, recently led a study using statistical modeling to emulate a clinical trial comparing four di erent classes of diabetes medication including GLP-1RAs in patients with moderate cardiovascular risk.

GLP-1RA drugs, Polley found, came out on top, and they also were most e ective in reducing the risk of major heart-related events and the risk of death overall. The results were published in April in Nature Cardiovascular Research.

“If cardiovascular health is what you think is important for deciding between these drug classes, I think our most recent study provides some strong evidence,” Polley said. “But if there are other outcomes that your patient is concerned about, then you have to consider the e ect size for those other outcomes.”

Yuan’s study revealed some patients taking GLP-1RAs experienced gastrointestinal issues. It also found that higher doses

can have stronger e cacy but also induce more severe reactions.

Furthermore, the long-term e ects of GLP-1RAs are not yet well-studied.

“If large swathes of the general public start taking them o -label for weight loss and then we ﬁnd out years later that there are bad side e ects, it could be a real issue,” Yuan said.

Barriers to access

Despite their beneﬁts, GLP-1RAs are expensive. The drugs’ massive popularity has created supply shortages and increased hesitancy among insurance providers to cover them.

“Costs present a key barrier to equitable access,” said David Kim, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences at UChicago. “Large populations are potentially eligible to take these drugs, and we can’t pay for a lifetime supply for everyone.”

Recently, Kim and other researchers analyzed the potential impact of alternative approaches to weight loss including one in which GLP-1RAs could be prescribed for an initial period before transitioning to lower-cost medications, behavioral programs and support from nutritionists.

The team’s simulation modeling study published in Health A airs Scholar suggests that the alternative approach may only be slightly less e ective than long-term, full-dose use of GLP-1RAs. But it could also substantially decrease lifetime healthcare spending on the medications.

“We argue that this alternative framework is a viable solution that provides greater ﬂexibility for managing a limited drug supply and giving healthcare payers ﬁnancial headroom to support more patients,” Kim said.

It takes a village

BY MATT WOOD

When Chuan He, PhD, joined the University of Chicago in 2002, he worked mostly as an inorganic chemist, occasionally partnering with structural biologists and microbiologists to study bacteria and pathogens.

As his research pivoted towards human biology, He realized that collaborating with physicians, physician-scientists and basic science researchers in the Biological Sciences Division would help him apply his unique skill set for the greatest impact.

“You have to be open-minded, planning to reinvent yourself every ﬁve to seven years and be willing to get out of your comfort zone,” He said.

That mindset has become a way of life at UChicago, where researchers apply their discoveries to myriad biological processes and systems to build a network that connects once unrelated ﬁelds. Consider the gynecologists and neuroscientists teaming up to develop bionic technology to restore sensation for breast cancer survivors. Or the marine biologists lending their expertise on microbes to help gastroenterologists treat digestive diseases.

Meanwhile, the University’s longtime stewardship of national and a liated laboratories including Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab and the Marine Biological Laboratory continues to enable the development of new programs to accelerate research priorities.

He, who holds dual appointments as the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor of Chemistry in the Physical Sciences Division and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the BSD, has seen the power of these partnerships ﬁrsthand.

“We constantly learn from our collaborators, and when you partner with physician-scientists who also treat

Collaborative culture drives Chuan He, PhD, and other biological and biomedical science experts to join forces in innovative — and sometimes unexpected — ways.

PHOTO BY NANCY WONG

patients, there are opportunities where you will not only learn biology, but also hopefully develop clinically useful therapies or diagnostic tools,” He said.

Partnerships boost progress

He is a pioneer in the field of epigenetics, which focuses on dynamic and reversible modifications of DNA and histones that regulate how genes are expressed. Starting in 2011, He’s team worked in a new area of biology involving RNA modifications and developed new methods for mapping DNA and RNA markers that can silence or reactivate genes across an entire genome a landmark discovery.

Bolstered by close yet diverse research networks, the momentum has paid dividends: Last year, collaborators working on RNA/DNA modiﬁcations with the He research group garnered more than $18 million in new federal and philanthropic funding (see graphic on following page).

“Chuan is just one example of how collaboration can expand your horizons as a scientist,” said Mark Anderson, MD, PhD, Dean of the Biological Sciences

Division and Pritzker School of Medicine, Executive Vice President for Medical A airs, and Paul and Allene Russell Professor in the Department of Medicine.

He’s recent partners include:

Marc Bissonnette, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine worked with He to develop liquid biopsies that analyze epigenetic proﬁles in blood samples to detect colorectal cancer as a less invasive alternative to conventional colonoscopies.

Jing Chen, PhD, Janet Davison Rowley Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine used a DNA sequencing technique invented by He’s team to discover a nutrient in meat and dairy products that improves the ability of immune cells to ﬁght tumors.

Brian Chih-Hung Chiu, PhD, Professor of Public Health Sciences and Family Medicine worked with He to study multiple myeloma, including using liquid biopsies to evaluate response to treatment and epigenetic modiﬁcations to understand risk disparities.

Susan L. Cohn, MD, Professor of Pediatrics used He’s DNA methylation

assays to analyze patterns of epigenetic marks from neuroblastoma tumors as a biomarker for survival rates in children.

Yu-Ying He, PhD, Professor of Medicine worked with Chuan He on several projects to investigate how environmental exposures to toxins can render cells more vulnerable to cancer.

Ralph R. Weichselbaum, MD, Chair of Radiation and Cellular Oncology and the Daniel K. Ludwig Distinguished Service Professor of Radiation and Cellular Oncology partnered with Chuan He to study epigenetic impacts on cancer immunotherapy and radiation treatments.

“Collaborating with Chuan has dramatically sped up our progression,” Yu-Ying He said, praising her colleague for extending the capabilities of her research group. “In addition to performing a number of challenging RNA modiﬁcation sequencing analyses and quantiﬁcations in his lab, he generously shared his conceptual insights with us.”

Chuan He’s collaborations across the BSD1 garnered more than $18 million in new federal and philanthropic funding in 2023.

n Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; and Chemistry

n Human Genetics

n Medicine

n OB/GYN

n Public Health

n Radiation Oncology

Ralph R. Weichselbaum, MD

NIH NIEHS

Weichselbaum also cited Chuan He’s kindness and openness as catalysts to translating discoveries. And Cohn, who used a technology developed by He as a diagnostic tool to determine which neuroblastoma patients will respond to standard therapy, said their partnership sprung from a casual conversation after one of his lectures.

Making connections is easy at UChicago, He said. “Whenever you encounter a biological problem and wonder if someone on campus has expertise, you can actually reach out to them,” He said. “Once you have the mindset that you are willing to share your expertise and be sincere about working as a team, then those projects will move forward.”

Branching out in new directions

He’s work in DNA and RNA modiﬁcations intersects with a wide range of diseases, biological systems and technologies. It makes sense, then, that this branching

NIH NCI

Elucidating the roles of RNA m6A readers Y1 and Y2 in radiation-induced immunity and immunotherapy 2

Epitranscriptomic mechanism of environmental stress response and tumorigenesis

network led to another big discovery: boosting the world’s food supply.

In 2021, He’s team published a groundbreaking study in Nature Biotechnology showing that by inserting a gene that a ects RNA modiﬁcation into rice, the plants grew three times more rice in the lab and 50% more rice in the ﬁeld. The rice plants also grew longer roots, were better able to withstand stress from drought and photosynthesized more e ciently.

He is now director of the Pritzker Plant Biology Center, a new space funded by a $10 million gift from the Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation. The Center will expand his RNA modiﬁcation work and the research of other scientists searching for ways to promote plant growth and resilience and increase crop yield.

Although plant biology represents a new direction, He said, with a laugh, “Even if just 10% of it leads to groundbreaking new discoveries, that’s totally worth it.”

NIH NCI

Integrating liquid biopsy-based epigenetic and imaging modalities to evaluate disease response in myeloma

NIH NHGRI

Develop new bioinformatic infrastructures and computational tools for epitranscriptomics data

Zhang,

NIH NCI

Elucidating novel epigenetic modiﬁcations impacted in multiple myeloma risk disparities

NIH NIAID

Genetic variation of m6A RNA modiﬁcation in immune cells and its contribution to human diseases

Tina Brozman Foundation

Multimodal, plasma-based biomarkers for ovarian cancer detection

Chuan He, PhD

1 We Zhang trained at UChicago but is now at Northwestern. 2 This grant was initially awarded in

Brian Chih-Hung Chiu, PhD

Wei Zhang, PhD1

Yu-Ying He, PhD

Luis Barreiro, PhD Xin He, PhD

Brian Chih-Hung Chiu, PhD

Benjamin Derman, MD

Wei

PhD1

Mengjie Chen, PhD

Ernst Lengyel, MD, PhD

Melanie Weigert, PhD

New lab to study how cells adapt to surroundings

$7.4 million grant supports an eight-member team from UChicago and Northwestern

BY MATT WOOD

A team led by scientists at the University of Chicago has received a $7.4 million, ﬁve-year grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a division of the National Institutes of Health, to study how cells adapt to environmental stressors such as hotter temperatures and what happens when those adaptations go awry.

The grant will support development of the Cellular Adaptation Lab, to be led by experts from the Biological Sciences Division (BSD), the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) and the Department of Physics at UChicago, along with partners from Northwestern University.

The lab will focus on cellular adaptation in aging, cancer, neurodegeneration and stress responses driven by climate change.

“If we better understand how adaptation works in healthy cells, we can also learn about the di erent ways it can break down,” said David Pincus, PhD, Assistant Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology and principal investigator (PI) on the new grant. “And to understand how climate change a ects the global ecosystem, we must ﬁrst understand how organisms are coping with changes in temperature, nutrient availability or pH in their environment.”

Pincus will work with four other PIs in the Cellular Adaptation Lab:

Anindita “Oni” Basu, PhD: Associate Professor of Medicine specializing in single-cell sequencing techniques and who studies mechanical forces that shape the structure and surfaces of microbial environments

Madhav Mani, PhD: Associate Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied

Mathematics (Northwestern) who will build machine learning models to interpret the enormous amounts of data generated in the Lab

Scott Oakes, MD: Professor of Pathology focused on how mammalian cells adapt or self-destruct in response to damage and how the process a ects cancer and neurodegenerative diseases

Allison Squires, PhD: The Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Molecular Engineering and a leading expert in single molecular analysis of condensates that form under cellular stress

The primary PIs are joined by three auxiliary researchers and a three-member senior advisory board.

Applying for a grant with such a large and complex cast is a Herculean feat. The

team received signiﬁcant support from the BSD’s Research Development Team (RDT), which since 2023 has provided support for faculty submitting largescale, interdisciplinary and collaborative research proposals by easing the administrative burden for researchers.

The Cellular Adaptation Lab grant is the ﬁrst successfully funded proposal supported by the RDT.

“This kind of support is critical if you want to encourage more faculty to write these big, team-science applications,” said Oakes, who is also the Vice Dean of Clinical Science Research for the BSD. “It tells you the institution is invested in helping us do this, and it speaks volumes for how important team science is at UChicago.”

Scott Oakes, MD; Anindita “Oni” Basu, PhD; David Pincus, PhD; and Allison Squires, PhD, are the UChicago principal investigators developing the lab.

PHOTO BY JORDAN PORTER-WOODRUFF

Lab-grown cells o er new insights on lung disease

BY LOUISE LERNER

Neat rows of lab benches and humming freezers line the walls of the laboratory of Joyce Chen, MS, PharmD, PhD, an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the Ben May Department for Cancer Research in the Biological Sciences Division.

The lab is where Chen and her team of scientists are ﬁnding innovative ways to grow lung cells and structures. The goal: to understand the many tiny changes that take place in the lungs when disease strikes and to discover new methods of treatment and prevention.

Chen, who was recently featured in UChicago’s new “Inside the Lab” interview series, spoke more about her research and her workspace.

Why is it important to study lung disease?

The lungs are one of the few organs that are directly connected to the outside environment, so they are uniquely vulnerable. They are exposed to the air, to the atmosphere, and they have very suitable conditions for microbes: warm temperatures and ample blood supply. There are many threats pathogens like viruses, bacteria or fungi, as well as pollution and smoking.

What makes studying this disease so hard?

Lung structures are so beautiful, but yet so complex. Because of these complexities, diseases can happen in di erent locations of the lung system, and we have to apply di erent strategies to study each of them. It also means that recreating tissue or cell systems to study lung cancer in the lab is relatively challenging compared to other organs.

What is a key function of your lab?

One of the main directions in my lab is to be able to grow miniature human lung tissue and systems. We want to create multicellular structures that mimic di erent parts of the lungs to study how these complex systems including the immune system, the pathogens and disease cells interact, and to also test new therapies in a structure that behaves like a real lung.

How do you recreate a lung structure?

We work with a type of stem cell called a pluripotent stem cell, which can convert themselves into other kinds of cells as needed. In 2012, a group led by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University received a Nobel Prize for ﬁnding a way to make pluripotent stem cells from adult cells, so you don’t need embryonic stem cells. We use this technology, known as iPSC, in our lab.

How does that technology work?

We can generate any of the major cell types found in the lining of the human airway, called the epithelium. We can make these mini-tissues in unlimited amounts in culture dishes. We can even grow them into small 3D structures that we call “organoids,” which is more similar to how they would grow in a person. Then we can study the interaction between these host cells and other types of cells, or with pathogens or toxins.

What are your greatest hurdles now?

Small cell lung cancer is one of the most aggressive types of cancer; there hasn’t been as much progress in the past few decades, in part because it’s so problematic to study. But we have had a few breakthroughs such as being able to watch how the disease proceeds over time in a way that is impossible to observe in a human patient that make us hopeful for real progress.

PHOTO BY JASON SMITH

Young authors, big ideas

Pritzker

students publish research in prestigious journals, often as ﬁrst authors

BY GRACE NIEWIJK

Medical school is a notoriously challenging experience ﬁlled with textbooks, exams and clinical rotations. So it might come as a surprise that most students at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine have another big pursuit on their to-do lists: publishing their own research.

And the work is appearing in worldrenowned journals like JAMA, Nature and Science

“Not a week goes by that I don’t hear about a Pritzker student doing amazing research,” said Vineet Arora, MD, AM’03, Dean of Medical Education. “Sometimes, mentors reach out to me with exciting milestones, but other times I just stumble across our students’ names on plenary speaker lists or in top journals.”

The wave is fueled by the Scholarship & Discovery component of the Pritzker curriculum, in which every student participates in a four-year mentored research program. As a result, 90% of students publish in a peer-reviewed journal by graduation, while 96% author an abstract or poster.

It’s achievement that distinguishes Pritzker graduates from their peers, said

PUBLISHED OP-EDS GIVE M1S A VOICE

Pritzker School of Medicine

students are excelling in a new area: writing op-eds.

In the past three years, 24 students have had their essays featured in local and national publications, including the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Ms. magazine and Newsweek

Jeanne Farnan, AB’98, MD’02, MHPE, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Medical Education, who noted that fewer than 80% of medical students nationally conduct mentored research.

Although medical students facing ever-steeper competition for residencies and fellowships might feel driven to pursue research just for their resumes, Arora says Pritzker students care deeply about producing strong, valuable work and ﬁnding answers to the questions that interest them.

Laying

the groundwork

During their ﬁrst year, Pritzker students can enroll in the school’s Summer Research Program (SRP). As part of the e ort, which includes a spring prep class and proposal submission, students receive guidance from a faculty mentor to conduct research and present their results at an end-of-summer forum. Grants from the National Institutes of Health and Pritzker funds provide stipends for students.

Through the SRP, Wendy Luo began researching pandemic-era trends in intentional adolescent acetaminophen

Opinion writing is part of a ﬁrst-year course called Foundations of Health Policy and the US Health Care System.

The class, which was renamed last year, is taught by V. Ram Krishnamoorthi, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Medicine, and Gregory W. Ruhnke, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine.

Since 2021, students in the class have been allowed to choose their

overdoses, which culminated in her publishing a ﬁrst-author paper in Hospital Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, during her third year.

“It’s really been a highlight of my career so far,” said Luo, who is now in her fourth year at Pritzker. “The mentorship and ﬁnancial support I received helped me see it through from start to ﬁnish.”

The SRP isn’t the only opportunity. After taking the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE) Step 1 in their second year, all Pritzker students have a dedicated block of time for research.

“Not everything works out the first time, so the second block gives people the chance to find a new mentor and start on a new project that will finish by their fourth year,” said Rachel Wolfson, MD’00, Assistant Dean of Medical School Research. “For other people, that extra time is what they need to finish up an SRP project or get it to publication.”

Like many of his Pritzker classmates, Liam Spurr, MD’24, accepted the challenge. In November 2022, he published two ﬁrst-author papers about associations between tumor aneuploidy and cancer

own ﬁnal assignment topic as well as the format to deliver it, which includes op-eds.

Op-eds can serve as a powerful advocacy tool for physicians, Krishnamoorthi wrote in a Journal of General Internal Medicine article published in February about the value of teaching opinion writing as part of med school curriculums.

“Students may have realized from this experience that entering

physician training grants them inﬂuence on healthcare issues with the public,” Krishnamoorthi wrote in the article, which also highlights the many topics Pritzker students have covered in their published op-eds.

Among them: the now-ended FDA ban on blood donation by gay and bisexual men, racial disparities in breast cancer survival and increasing inclusion of women in clinical trials.

The number of patients increased

increased efforts to study mental health in older

adults

overall mortality rate was 0.2%

Interestingly, among low TMB, but tumors treated with single-agent patients with highly combination therapy elevated aneuploidy

impaired sensory function focuses on a limited range mental health outcomes

majority of patients were aged between 12 diagnosed with depression acetaminophen ingestion compared with

treatment response in the Nature family of journals on the very same day.

“I chose to devote time to research because that’s where my passions lie,” Spurr said.

Pritzker also sponsors the Scholarly Concentrations Collaborative, which is led by Wolfson and composed of faculty leaders of medical student research programs across the country. The group supports new program creation, and it produces original research on how residency program directors consider student research in the residency selection process.

Career-deﬁning guidance

Some schools scramble to ﬁnd enough help to nurture young researchers, Wolfson said. “But at UChicago, I walk across the quad and get stopped by faculty who ask, ‘How can I ﬁnd a student to mentor?’” she said.

Students may reach out directly to faculty, while others opt to match with a mentor via an online form that students and sta a ectionately call the “eHarmony letter.” The ensuing professional relationships can last years, often long past a student’s graduation.

Pritzker student Alex Wang recently ﬁrst-authored a paper published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society revealing a connection between sensory disabilities and mental health in older adults.

His research mentor, Jayant Pinto, MD, a Professor of Surgery and Medicine, called Wang “passionate” and the catalyst who developed and led the approach. Wang, now in his third year, acknowledged the di culty of balancing research and academics, but said it was well worth the e ort.

Sid Ramesh, MD’24, MS’24, who is now a resident in internal medicine and medical oncology at UChicago Medicine, credits mentorship from Alexander Pearson, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine, with changing his career trajectory.

Ramesh, who has ﬁrst-authored research published in Nature Cancer and presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, is continuing to work on research projects in oncology, machine learning and quantum computing pursuits that began during his time at Pritzker.

Those milestones also paved the way for Ramesh to enroll in the Physician Scientist Development Program, a postgraduate training program at UChicago.

“I’m on a physician-scientist track, which is relatively atypical for someone without an MD/PhD degree,” Ramesh said. “None of this would have been possible without my mentors and everyone at UChicago who moved heaven and earth to get me where I am.”

PRITZKER STUDENT’S DISCOVERY: BAD MEDICAL ADVICE ABOUNDS ON TIKTOK

University of Chicago researchers recently analyzed sinus-related health information on TikTok. Their ﬁndings? Forty-four percent of videos reviewed over a 24-hour period contained nonfactual information with a large portion coming from nonmedical inﬂuencers (creators with over 10,000 followers who do not self-identify as medical professionals). TikToks created by medical professionals overwhelmingly received higher scores.

“As a clinician, you can’t deny that anyone who comes into your o ce has probably looked something up,” said Rose Dimitroyannis, AB’20, a fourth-year Pritzker School of Medicine student and lead author of the study, published in March in Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery. “Patients and physicians alike should understand the power of this tool, recognizing the downsides while acknowledging that there can be good quality information available as well.”

White Coat Ceremony welcomes Pritzker’s incoming class

“ When you are proximate to the patient or the community, you will see more, you will understand more, and you will do more.”

Iris Romero, MD, MS’07

Vice Dean, Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine

Romero, MD, MS’07

As excited families and friends looked on from the pews of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on the University of Chicago campus, 91 new ﬁrst-year Pritzker School of Medicine students received their white coats to mark the start of their journey to becoming physicians.

The White Coat Ceremony is a tradition founded at Pritzker in 1989, and it is now held widely at

medical schools across the country. The latest ceremony, held in August, recognized the entering Class of 2024.

Keynote speaker Iris Romero, MD, MS’07, challenged students to consider three key questions as their education continues: “Why are you here?” “What will sustain you?” and “How did you get here?”

Romero, a Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Executive Vice Dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine, touched on her own path, recounting personal trials and the sacriﬁces that her mother and grandmother made for her.

She also told students to ﬁnd the tools and personal connections to help weather the challenges they’ll face in their careers and to see individuals as much more than their medical diagnoses or disparities.

“When you are proximate to the patient or the community, you will see more, you will understand more, and you will do more,” Romero said,

Iris

PHOTOS BY JOE STERBENC

adding that wearing a white coat comes with great responsibility. “This is what it means to be a Pritzker School of Medicine doctor.”

After receiving their ﬁrst white coat from their new faculty career advisors, the new Pritzker students recited the Physician’s Oath, a modiﬁed

and modernized Hippocratic Oath in which doctors-to-be pledge to “do no harm,” but also to be unbiased, socially-minded collaborators who never view their patients as “anything but a fellow human in pain.”

‘Full-circle moment’ for Pritzker M1 and her childhood doctor

As Kyra McGee walked onstage to receive her white coat, the ﬁrst-year Pritzker School of Medicine student was shocked to see the person holding it: her childhood pediatrician, Arlene Roman, MD, AB’91.

It was the ﬁrst time the two had seen each other since McGee was a teenager. After Roman helped McGee put on her white coat to symbolize the student’s path to becoming a doctor the women shared a long, joyful hug.

McGee, a native of Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, fondly recalled her visits with Roman at the University of Chicago Medicine. She called the August ceremony “a very full-circle moment.”

Roman also was touched. “One of the wonderful things about being a pediatrician is seeing the kids from birth to young adulthood,” she said.

McGee remembered Roman —a UChicago Medicine sta member for more than 20 years as a caring and attentive pediatrician who ﬁrst inspired her to pursue a career in medicine.

As part of the festivities, ﬁrst-year Pritzker School of Medicine students read a modernized version of the Hippocratic Oath in which doctors-to-be pledge to “do no harm” to their patients. Pritzker’s

After McGee was accepted to Pritzker and assigned to the Huggins Society (one of the four Pritzker Societies that mentor all students during their four years), where Roman is a career advisor, the pair reconnected.

McGee, who has interests in neonatology and maternalfetal medicine, chose Pritzker for its people, diversity and location. “I also thought about maybe getting the opportunity to work with Dr. Roman one day,” she said.

MD students

MD/PhD students

28 states represented, plus Puerto Rico

50 undergraduate institutions represented

43% from backgrounds underrepresented in medicine

13%

ﬁrst-generation college students

6,400+ size of applicant pool (630 interviewed)

First-year Pritzker student Kyra McGee was delighted to see her childhood pediatrician in attendance at the medical school’s White Coat Ceremony.

A weekend of memories

See more photos at tinyurl.com/MBSAA-Alumni-Weekend-2024

Members of the Class of 1974 celebrate their induction into the Alumni Emeriti Society.

Alumni enjoy engaging presentations on AI in Science and Medicine at the Lightning Talks.

Classmates pose for a photo at the Welcome Breakfast.

Alumni pose for a picture with Vineet Arora, MD, AM’03, Dean for Medical Education and Herbert T. Abelson Professor of Medicine (middle).

Alumni pose for pictures at Social Rounds with a View.

PHOTO BY JASON SMITH

PHOTO BY JOE STERBENC

Hugs abound as classmates greet each other at their Class Reunion Dinners.

and Joan

receive the Alumni Service award at the UChicago MBSAA Alumni Awards Luncheon.

Biological Sciences Division alumni gather for a dinner with David Kovar, PhD, BSD Associate Dean for Basic Science Research, Graduate Education (back left).

Russ Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’63,

Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’66,

Alumni stroll through campus during the Medical Campus Trivia Walk.

The weekend concludes with food, drinks and views of Lake Michigan and the Chicago skyline.

Alumni pose for pictures at Social Rounds with a View.

PHOTOS BY JOE STERBENC

Milestone classes reunite, reminisce

PHOTO BY JASON SMITH

PHOTO BY

JOE STERBENC

PHOTOS

2024 UChicago MBSAA Awards

Vincent Nelson, MD’98,

The Distinguished Alumni Award honors the contributions alumni make in medicine and science. The Alumni Service Award recognizes contributions by alumni through philanthropy and volunteer service to UChicago. Learn more about the UChicago MBSAA Awards program at mbsaa.uchicago.edu/ alumni-awards.

MD’81; Miriam Goodman, PhD’95; Kenneth Fox, Jr., AB’85, MD’89; and Courtney Burrows, PhD’15, MBA’17.

DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARDS

Richard G. Fessler, PhD’80, MD’83

Professor of Neurosurgery, Rush University Medical Center

Fessler is internationally known for his contributions to endoscopic and microendoscopic surgery, and his research into human embryonic spinal cord transplantation for treating spinal cord injury. He was co-principal investigator on the ﬁrst human transplant study to evaluate the safety and e cacy of human embryonic spinal cord transplantation for the treatment of syringomyelia, and he is the only physician in the country to have performed these procedures.

Kenneth Fox, Jr., AB’85, MD’89

Former Chief Health O cer, Chicago Public Schools

Fox has worked to eliminate healthrelated barriers to learning and to drive better health and educational outcomes for Chicago’s students. He has written and lectured widely on cultural and social justice issues in healthcare, and his work and fellowships have taken him to Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and South Africa. In 2023, Fox

returned to Erie Family Health Center as a pediatrician working primarily with Latinx and immigrant patient populations.

Miriam B. Goodman, PhD’95

Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Stanford University

Goodman is an educator and activist in support of diversity, equity and inclusion in the sciences and addressing the social factors that a ect the career paths of people in this ﬁeld. As the ﬁrst woman to serve as chair for her department, Goodman conducts research deciphering molecular events responsible for touch and temperature sensation, including how sensory neurons are protected from damage caused by mechanical stress or chemical toxins.

Thomas E. Wellems, PhD’80, MD’81

Chief, Malaria Genetics Section, NIAID Division of Intramural Research, National Institutes of Health

Wellems’ contributions to tropical medicine and parasitology helped understand the genetics of chloroquine resistance, which had developed into a malaria control catastrophe in Africa. Working with scientists in Africa, Wellems showed how children fail chloroquine therapy when their infections carry the drug resistance gene. Diagnostic tests

based on his discoveries are now used worldwide. He is a past president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, and has served on numerous advisory committees.

ALUMNI SERVICE AWARD

Joan Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’66

Retired Colonel, U.S. Army Medical Corps; Professor Emeritus, Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, Rush University Medical Center

Rostik “Russ” Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’63

Retired Commanding General, U.S. Army Medical Research and Logistics Command; Professor Emeritus of Cardiovascular Surgery, Rush University Medical Center

The Zajtchuks have contributed philanthropically toward multiple areas of the University, including generous support of the Pritzker School of Medicine and the Section of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery in the Department of Surgery at UChicago Medicine. Both were longstanding chairs for their medical school classes via the UChicago Medical & Biological Sciences Alumni Association, and Dr. Russ Zajtchuk served as president of the UChicago MBSAA Alumni Council from 2007-2009.

The 2024 UChicago MBSAA Award recipients with alumni leaders, from left: Karyl Kopaskie, AB’07, PhD’14;

MBA, MPH; Richard Fessler, PhD’80, MD’83; Russ Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’63, Joan Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’66; Thomas Wellems, PhD’80,

PHOTO BY JOE STERBENC

YOUR NEWS

1960s

David Silverstein, MD’67, wrote Heartbeat: An American Cardiologist in Kenya It is a fast-paced memoir about enjoying life to the fullest and having the courage to put your story down on paper with profound honesty. Silverstein arrived in Kenya in 1974 to take up what was intended as a brief posting, teaching at the University of Nairobi’s School of Medicine. Fifty years and many adventures later he is still in private practice as one of East Africa’s foremost cardiologists. In 1983 he was appointed as the former President Daniel arap Moi’s personal physician. In the course of traveling with him all over the world, the two men became close friends. His privileged position gave him a unique ﬂy-on-the-wall perspective on many of the seminal events in recent Kenyan history. His memoir recounts stories of patients such as Nelson Mandela and Diana Delamere, interspersed with tales of treating Marburg (green monkey) disease, plague and other diseases. Silverstein handled all he encountered with aplomb, be it Libya’s Muammar Gaddaﬁ deep in the Sahara or the victims of terrorist attacks in the wake of bombings in Nairobi and Mombasa.

Allen M. Young, PhD’68, was honored in May 2024 by the Tirimbina Rainforest Center in Costa Rica for his pivotal role in its establishment. Young is the curator emeritus of zoology of the Milwaukee Public Museum and the author of over 300 scholarly papers. In the late 1960s, Young’s research on insects and cocoa led Tirimbina to contact him. Young’s vision helped shape Tirimbina’s mission to protect its 852-acre area of tropical rainforest as a resource of exceptional biodiversity through environmental education and research that promotes conservation. Today, Tirimbina also boasts a vibrant ecotourism arm with a lodge and tours. Young was the instigator of the

Tirimbina project, founded in 1995 as a partnership between the Milwaukee Public Museum and Riveredge Nature Center, and now owned by a Costa Rican association. He was instrumental in raising funds to purchase the property along with the Milwaukeebased board of directors. According to Young, “Tirimbina has become something much bigger than we ever anticipated.” Visit tirimbina.org to learn more.

Dr. Young with his life partner, Roberta Gordon, at the dedication celebration in May 2024.

1970s

Jim Stankiewicz, AB’70, MD’74, is the recipient of the 2024 Andy McKenna Leo Lions Legacy Award. Stankiewicz completed his medical education at the University of Chicago, followed by his internship and residency at UChicago Medicine. He was on the faculty at the University of California, San Francisco, while serving with the Navy in California. He then joined Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine faculty in 1980 where he remains a tenured professor. One of the leading ear, nose and throat specialists in the country, Stankiewicz is the former chairman of the Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Division at Loyola Medicine. He has contributed to more than 300 publications dealing with the subject and made more than 500 presentations nationally and internationally. He has performed more than 15,000 nasal and sinus procedures.

Share news about your life and accomplishments: mbsaa.uchicago.edu/update-contact-info

1980s

Doriane C. Miller, MD’83, was appointed as the vice dean for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) for the Biological Sciences Division (BSD), where she plays a key role in implementing the division’s strategic plan while creating opportunities to integrate DEI initiatives across the BSD and with UChicago Medicine partners. Miller works closely with DEI leaders in the academic units to develop and maintain practices to support DEI for all division members, including postdocs, trainees, faculty and sta . Carol Olson, PhD’82, MD’86, retired in 2024 from her role as senior vice president and head of the Medical Science and Strategy department at Pharmaceutical Product Development (PDD) —a group within Thermo Fisher Scientiﬁc. Olson was also a member of the PPD Pandemic Response Committee and a founding member of the Human Subjects Committee. She now serves as PPD’s senior medical advisor to the Human Subjects Committee.

2000s

Amy J. Derick, MD’02, was re-elected as trustee-at-large of the Illinois State Medical Society (ISMS) during its recent annual meeting. She is board certiﬁed in dermatology and founder, owner and chief executive o cer of Derick Dermatology. She is also a clinical instructor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and an academic associate member at the University of Chicago Section of Dermatology, Biological Sciences Division, Pritzker School of Medicine. Derick has been involved in ISMS since 2012 and was the recipient of the ISMS Physician Leader of the Year Award in 2023.

Candace D. McGregor, MD’05, was elected trustee-at-large of the Illinois State Medical Society (ISMS) at its recent annual meeting. The chief medical o cer at Christie Clinic in Champaign-Urbana, she is also an associate medical director at Carle. McGregor has been a member of ISMS since 2010 and is currently serving on the ISMS Governmental A airs Council. Her term as ISMS trustee-atlarge will run through April 2026.

Julie Oyler, MD’01, has been named as the inaugural chair of the newly established Biological Sciences Division Women’s Committee at the University of Chicago. She will convene and develop a charter for the committee and lead division-wide initiatives focused on the engagement and well-being of female faculty. Oyler is a professor of medicine and associate program director of the Internal Medicine Residency Program. She recently completed Drexel University’s prestigious Executive

Leadership in Academic Medicine/ Executive Leadership in Healthcare (ELAM/ELH) program and will translate the leadership lessons from this national program to her work leading the Women’s Committee.

2010s

Marcia Faustin, MD’13, joined the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team in Paris this summer for the Olympics as co-head team physician. Faustin also works at University of California-Davis in family and sports medicine. Since joining the U.S. Women’s Gymnastics team, she has emphasized rebuilding trust between the athletes and their care teams. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Olympian Suni Lee said of Faustin, “She’s like my saving angel.”

We want to hear from you!

LETTERS

Is there a story in this issue that inspires you to comment? Do you have a memory or reﬂection to share? Medicine on the Midway is open for feedback. Letters must be signed and may be edited for AP style, space, clarity and civility. To provide a range of views and voices, we encourage letter writers to limit themselves to 300 words or fewer. Please send letters via email: momeditor@bsd.uchicago.edu.

IN MEMORIAM

1950s

Nicholas Christo , MD’53, died on July 30, 2024. A graduate of Purdue University, he served in the Merchant Marines and in Korea as a battalion sergeant major in the U.S. Army before attending the University of Chicago. He was a neurologist and teacher at several hospitals, including 22 years at Mount Sinai in New York. He was also a member of the emeritus sta of Scott & White Clinic in Temple, Texas, where he trained future physicians as professor of neurology at Texas A&M. Christo volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and the Peak Vista Health Center in Colorado Springs.

Edwin H. Eigenbrodt, MD’59, died on June 12, 2024. After graduating from North Central College in Naperville, Edwin attended medical school at the University of Chicago and began his surgical residency there. He followed this with a pathology residency at Stanford University. Dr. Eigenbrodt joined the faculty at University of Texas Southwestern (UTSW) Department of Pathology, where he spent much of his career studying liver and kidney disease. In 2023, he was recognized as one of the favorite professors by a UTSW Medical School class he taught. In his free time, he was an avid ﬁsherman, musician, tennis player, artist and chef.

Gerald S. Gotterer, MD’58, PhD, died on June 20, 2024. Gotterer was a longtime Vanderbilt University faculty member and played a key role in the implementation of the clinicianeducator track and the modernization of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM) curriculum. Before serving as the associate dean for academic a airs at VUSM, he served on faculty at Johns Hopkins University and as associate dean at Rush University. Gotterer enjoyed his time at his summer home in West Virginia, baking bread and traveling to Scotland and Italy.

J. Thomas Grayston, SB’47, MD’48, SM’52, died on February 15, 2024. Grayston served as one of the ﬁrst members of the Centers for Disease Control Epidemic Intelligence Service, led studies of infectious diseases in East Asia for the U.S. Navy and was the chair of the Department of Preventative Medicine at the University of Washington (UW) for ten years. At UW, he was also the inaugural dean of the School of Public Health and Community Medicine. His interest in epidemiology began at the University

of Chicago, where he investigated histoplasmosis, a disease with little research available at the time.

Alan M. Weintraub, MD’56, died on July 20, 2024. Dr. Weintraub was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended Syracuse University, where he met his future wife, Betty Ann Cohn. After medical school, he joined the Navy Medical Corps and was stationed at the U.S. Capitol, where he provided care to Senators, including Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. After the Navy, Weintraub continued with residency at Georgetown University Hospital. He later established a cardiology practice at Georgetown and Sibley Hospitals. He was instrumental in the cardiac care of patients undergoing the ﬁrst heart valve operations.

1960s

Robert Porter, MD’60, died on September 10, 2024. Porter pursued his medical degree from the University of Chicago following his undergraduate education at Beloit College an institution for which he served as a two-term trustee. After an internship at the University of Iowa, he served as a U.S. Air Force ﬂight surgeon for two years and then returned to Iowa to complete his surgical and orthopedic residencies. After working for many years at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital, he became an associate professor at Dartmouth College. Deeply dedicated to medicine, Porter served on many boards and committees, and he dedicated much of his career to mentoring others.

George Rhyneer, MD’64, died on June 29, 2024. Rhyneer attended the University of Washington, followed by medical school at the University of Chicago. He then joined the U.S. Public Health Service, where he was assigned to Alaska as their primary tuberculosis control o cer. Rhyneer partnered in the development of what would become the Alaska Heart Institute, which assured Alaskans could receive cardiac care in-state. In his retirement, Rhyneer continued to support others through his work with the Anchorage Faith & Action Congregations Together, where he helped ease the needs of those experiencing homelessness.

Thomas W. Wilson, MD’61, died on July 17, 2024 in Fort Worth, Texas. Following graduation from the University of Chicago, he studied pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Hospital and Columbia Presbyterian

Hospital, and finished his residency at Texas Children’s Hospital. He entered the U.S. Army Medical Corps in 1964 and taught pediatrics at William Beaumont Army Hospital. While stationed there, he developed the military’s first program for handicapped children. In 1966, he went to Fort Worth, Texas, as the first medical director of the Child Study Center, entered private practice in 1969 and retired from active practice in 2002.

1970s

Paul A. Coulis, SM’75, PhD’78, died on May 19, 2024. Coulis studied biological sciences at Indiana University followed by pursuing his master’s of science and doctorate in microbiology and immunology. He began his career as a researcher at the Infectious Diseases Program at the National Naval Medical Center, followed by his role at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). At NIDA, he managed many large and diverse portfolios of research grants pertaining to health services research, telemedicine and more. He also served as a member of a team that developed two FDA-approved medications for the treatment of opioid addiction.

Ray R. Hinchman, PhD’71, died on June 4, 2024. Hinchman earned a bachelor’s in biology from the University of Illinois, a master’s in marine botany from the University of Washington and a PhD in botany from the University of Chicago. For 30 years, he worked at Argonne National Laboratory in the Botany Department.

1980s

Charis Eng, AB’82, PhD’86, MD’88, died on August 13, 2024. She was a pioneer in genetic and genomic medicine as the inaugural chair of the Cleveland Clinic Genomic Medicine Institute, the director of its Center for Personalized Genetic Healthcare and the director of the PTEN Multidisciplinary Clinical Center of Excellence. She was recently named the Cleveland Clinic Global Director of Genomic Research Strategies. Prior to joining Cleveland Clinic, she was the inaugural founder of the Ohio State University James Cancer Hospital’s Clinical Cancer Genetics Program. Eng dedicated her life to medicine and biomedical sciences for the beneﬁt of humankind.

Mark your calendar for Pritzker Alumni Weekend May 2–3, 2025

All medical alumni are invited to Pritzker Alumni Weekend, including campus festivities, engaging talks and Social Rounds. On Friday, May 2, Pritzker classes ending in 0 and 5 will celebrate their Reunion Class Dinners. Learn more at mbsaa.uchicago.edu/alumniweekend/pritzker or follow @UChicagoMBSAA on Facebook, LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter).

2024-2025 ALUMNI COUNCIL

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Karyl Kopaskie, AB’07, PhD’14

President

Doriane Miller, MD’83

Immediate Past President

Sapana Vora, PhD’14 Vice President

Courtney Burrows, PhD’15, MBA’17

Alumni Awards Committee Chair

Rajiv Jauhar, MD’91

Chicago Partners Program Chair

Jennifer “Piper” Below, PhD’11

Editorial Committee Chair

Sydney Yoon, MD’86 Regional Programs Chair

ALUMNI COUNCIL

Lampis Anagnostopoulos, SB’57, MD’61 ✱

Shahriar Alikhani, MD’91

Allison August, MD’93

Margaret “Peggy” Barron, MD’78

Anita Blanchard, MD’90

Jillian Bowman, AB’20 ✤

Kenneth Bridbord, MD’69, MPH

Ava Ferguson Bryan, AM’10, MD’18 ✤ Arnold Calica, SM’61, MD’75 ✱

Ruth Carlos, AB’89, MD’93

Gabrielle Edgerton, PhD’10

Arash Emami, MD’94

Katherine Given, AB’08, PhD’13, MBA’16, MD’16

Je rey Goodenbour, PhD’09

Stanton Greenstone ✤

Andrew Hack, AB’95, PhD’00, MD’02

Theresa He, MD’03

Suejin Kim, MD’04

Cli ord Ko, AB’87, SM’89, MD’91

Peter McCauley, MD’86

Jennifer McPartland, PhD’08

Vincent Nelson, MD’98, MBA, MPH

Carol Olson, PhD’82, MD’86

Aneesha Sahu, PhD’19

Loren Schechter, MD’94

Coleman Seskind, AB’55, SB’56, MD’59, SM’59 ✱

Puneet Singh, MD’11

Margaret Steiner ✤

Anne Taylor, MD’76

Cynthia Thaik, MD’90

Vishruth “Vish” Venkataraman ✤

Russ Zajtchuk, SB’60, MD’63 ✱

✱ LIFE MEMBER

✤ STUDENT OR RESIDENT REPRESENTATIVE

Faculty Harry Trosman, MD

Harry Trosman, MD, a Professor of Psychiatry who spent 70 years working for the University of Chicago, died August 27. He was 99.

“Many people in our department repeated that Harry Trosman was kind, generous of spirit, intellectual and always helpful,” said Daniel Yohanna, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience and the department’s former interim chair. “We will miss him dearly.”

During his ﬁrst years at UChicago, Trosman participated in studies on the psychophysiology of dreams just as Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, Professor Emeritus in Physiology, and then-graduate student Eugene Aserinsky were developing their landmark research on REM sleep and dreams.

Working with Edward Wolpert, PhD, formerly a Clinical Associate Professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine, Trosman wrote some of the ﬁrst papers on the implications of that new research for the psychoanalytic theory of dreams. Trosman taught a UChicago course to fourth-year Psychiatry residents on the concept of psychodynamic psychotherapy which focuses on the psychological roots of emotional su ering that frequently won him accolades from students.

Sara Szuchet, DPhil

Sara Szuchet, DPhil, Professor Emerita of Neurology at the University of Chicago, died on July 31 at the age of 91. She was a pioneering multiple sclerosis researcher and trailblazer for women in academia, and she served on the UChicago faculty for 45 years.

She worked tirelessly until age 90, retiring in 2023.

Her research focused on the origins and development of MS, a neurodegenerative disease in which the immune system attacks the protective sheath (myelin) that covers nerve ﬁbers and causes communications problems between the brain and the rest of the body.

Trosman also had an interest in applying psychoanalysis to humanities and the arts. He authored two books “Freud and the Imaginative World” and “Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Masterworks of Art and Film” and he was passionate about travel, literature and family during his o hours.

Trosman was born in Toronto and attended medical school at the University of Toronto before holding residencies in psychiatry at the University of Iowa and the University of Cincinnati. In Cincinnati, he met and would later marry Marjorie (Mardi) Goldman. The couple settled in Chicago, where Trosman started working at UChicago in 1952. During this period, the couple started a family, and Trosman also served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve for two years in Oceanside, California.

Trosman returned to UChicago to direct the psychiatry department’s outpatient clinic from 1956 to 1968, later serving as the acting chair for the department from 1986 to 1988. Trosman was also an active member of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute and the American Psychoanalytic Association. Trosman was preceded in death by Mardi, his wife of 67 years, and is survived by his three children, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Szuchet believed that in order to understand the breakdown of myelin, researchers ﬁrst needed to understand how it is formed. Her lab developed in vitro models of the cells that form the myelin sheath to study their biology and function.

Szuchet grew up in a small village in Argentina. After graduating from college in Buenos Aires, she pursued graduate studies at Cambridge University in England. From there, she attended Princeton University as a postdoctoral fellow in physical biochemistry. In 1966, Szuchet took her ﬁrst faculty position at the State University of New York at Bu alo to study

myosin, a muscle protein. But when her older sister was diagnosed with MS, Szuchet resolved to learn more about the disease at a time when little was known about it.

Her research caught the attention of Barry Arnason, MD, founding Chair of what was then the new Department of Neurology at UChicago. Arnason recruited Szuchet in 1978 to lead a team focused on neuroimmunology research, and she became one of a small, select group of tenured female professors of her generation.

In a message to the Department of Neurology, current Chair Shyam Prabhakaran, MD, celebrated Szuchet’s energy and willpower to better understand MS.

“Sara was driven by a desire to find answers to questions and rigorously solve them through scientific inquiry,” Prabhakaran wrote. “Fueled both by innate curiosity and a strong desire to advance, she chose to devote her life to scientific research because it was what gave her the most joy and satisfaction out of life.”

Szuchet is survived by her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren.

“ Many people in our department repeated that Harry Trosman was kind, generous of spirit, intellectual and always helpful. We will miss him dearly.”

Daniel Yohanna, MD

Associate

Professor of Psychiatry

“ Fueled both by innate curiosity and a strong desire to advance, she chose to devote her life to scientiﬁc research because it was what gave her the most joy and satisfaction out of life.”

Shyam Prabhakaran, MD Chair, Department of Neurology

Faculty George Bakris, MD

George Bakris, MD, a Professor of Medicine in the Section of Endocrinology at the University of Chicago and Director of the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Hypertension Center, died on June 15. He was 72.

“His impact was enormous as it related to improving the lives of those individuals with di cult-to-control blood pressure and secondary hypertension,” said Arlene Chapman, MD, Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Section of Nephrology at UChicago.

Bakris published more than 500 peer-reviewed manuscripts and guidelines including a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine showing that treatment with a semaglutide (a medication known by brand names such as Ozempic or Wegovy) reduces the risk of clinically important kidney outcomes in patients with Type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease.

“George Bakris was the most proliﬁc researcher, teacher and clinician in the history of hypertension,” said Michael Davidson, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine and Director of the UChicago Medicine Lipid Clinic. “He will live on through his great work.”

An obituary published by the International Society of Hypertension cited Bakris’ “remarkable legacy in research and patient care” as well as his roles in policy development and leadership that “inspired many scientists around the world.”

In a letter to faculty and sta , Everett Vokes, MD, John E. Ultmann Distinguished Service Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine, praised Bakris as a “an exceptional leader, mentor and friend,” and as someone who “worked tirelessly to advance and provide the best care to patients.” Bakris previously served as President of the American

College of Clinical Pharmacology (2000-02) and the American Society of Hypertension (2010-12). He also held various roles with the American Diabetes Association.

Bakris’ living legacy includes the many fellows he trained to become hypertension specialists, said Chapman, who remembered her colleague as gru but with a soft edge.

“George was an out-of-the-box individual who was not restricted by institutional expectations and really forged paths forward for many individuals a ected by di cult-tocontrol hypertension and chronic kidney disease,” Chapman said.

Bakris’ accolades include a lifetime achievement award from the National Kidney Foundation of Illinois and an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens. In April, he was awarded the Donald F. Steiner Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Treatment of Diabetic Nephropathy at the University of Chicago Diabetes Day.

Born in Greece and just six weeks old when he moved to the U.S., Bakris received his medical degree from the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. He completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, where he also pursued a research fellowship in Physiology and Biophysics.

In addition, Bakris completed fellowships in Nephrology and Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Chicago.

After faculty appointments at Tulane University and the University of Texas at San Antonio, he served as Vice Chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine for more than a decade at Rush University Medical Center before returning to UChicago in 2006.

Bakris is survived by his wife and best friend of more than 40 years, Demetria, their two children, Athena and Louis, and grandchildren.

“ George Bakris was the most proliﬁc researcher, teacher and clinician in the history of hypertension. He will live on through his great work.”

Michael Davidson, MD Clinical Professor of Medicine Director, Lipid Clinic

“ His impact was enormous ... During his tenure of training fellows in hypertension, he was able to provide the United States with the next generation of hypertension specialists.”

Arlene Chapman, MD Professor of Medicine Chief, Section of Nephrology

JOIN FELLOW ALUMNI AND PARTY LIKE IT’S 2025!

Those from Pritzker class years ending in 0 and 5 will enjoy special Reunion dinners. MAY 2-3

2025

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Delicate dance

This image, taken by University of Chicago Laboratory Schools student Je rey Wang, shows millions of ﬁne ice crystals moving gracefully between cold and hot plates. The motion of the

ice particles is called thermophoresis, which describes complex atmospheric phenomena in nature. Wang submitted the image to the UChicago’s annual Science as Art contest.

PHOTO BY JEFFREY WANG