Eleven faculty members from Harvard Medical School have been newly elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).
Election to the NAM is among the highest honors in health and medicine, recognizing individuals for their exceptional professional accomplishments and dedication to service.
Lauding the new members as “outstanding health and medicine leaders,” NAM President Monica Bertagnolli said, “Their extraordinary talent and commitment to advancing evidence-based guidance and solutions for our country’s greatest health care challenges will strengthen our efforts to improve health for all.”
A total of 100 new members, chosen by current members, were announced during the NAM annual meeting on Oct. 19. Total NAM membership is now over 2,600, including more than 300 international members.
The newly elected members from HMS are:
- Fabrisia Ambrosio, HMS professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, for her international leadership and work in regenerative rehabilitation research that couples the use of cellular bioengineering technologies with physical modalities and exercise to improve health, functioning, and longevity.
- Kathleen Burns, HMS professor of pathology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, for work on transposable elements in human disease. Her discoveries have highlighted long interspersed nuclear element-1 (LINE-1) activity as a source of heritable genetic variation and a hallmark of cancers.
- Marcela del Carmen, HMS professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Massachusetts General Hospital, for her work in transforming the treatment of ovarian cancer and establishing new approaches to reduce cancer-related morbidity and mortality in gynecologic cancers.
- Anna Greka, HMS professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, for elucidating the molecular basis of kidney and genetic diseases, particularly those that disrupt fundamental mechanisms of protein trafficking and renal barrier function, and for translating these discoveries into targeted therapies.
- David Jones, the A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and chair of the Department of the History of Science at the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, for scholarship in the history of medicine, the social determinants of disease, health disparities in diverse populations, and the utilization of health technologies, including work reevaluating the use of race correction in clinical algorithms.
- Nancy Keating, professor of health care policy in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, for seminal contributions to promoting high-quality, high-value cancer care through the evaluation of alternative payment models, comparative effectiveness studies of cancer treatments in real-world settings, and research to improve guideline-recommended use, affordability, and adherence.
- Bruce Landon, professor of health care policy in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, for his formative research and key insights about primary care, quality of care, delivery system structure, and financial incentives that have led to reforms to primary care payment, Medicare Advantage, and quality measurement programs.
- Emily Oken, HMS Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute Professor of Population Medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare, for research on the nutritional and environmental influences on women’s health during the reproductive years and children’s long-term health, advancing understanding of pregnancy health and chronic disease risk while shaping scientific research and public policy.
- Jordan Smoller, HMS professor of psychiatry at Mass General, for his leadership in the discovery of shared and distinct genomic influences across psychiatric disorders, illuminating how genetic variation relates to the structure of psychopathology.
- Kimberly Stegmaier, the HMS David G. Nathan Professor of Pediatrics at Dana-Farber, for developing highly innovative methods of genetic and chemical genomic screening of cell phenotypes, which she successfully applied to understand pediatric cancer biology and discover drugs to treat specific cancers.
- Michael Yaffe, HMS instructor in surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, for discovering phospho Ser/Thr-binding domains in proteins and revealing how they regulate signaling pathways controlling the cell cycle or in response to stress, which helped advance the use of computational tools to understand how proteins interact and how enzymes recognize and act on specific targets within cells.
Founded in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences as the Institute of Medicine, the NAM works to address pressing challenges in health, science, medicine, and related policy while advancing solutions across sectors. Together with the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, collectively known as the National Academies, the NAM provides independent, objective analysis and guidance to help address complex challenges and inform public policy decisions.
Adapted from NAM materials.
