Daniel Singer, HMS professor of medicine at Mass General, received the Society for Medical Decision Making’s 2021 John M. Eisenberg Award for Practical Application of Medical Decision Making Research. The award recognizes an individual or organization that has demonstrated sustained leadership in translating medical decision-making research into practice and taken steps to communicate the principles or substantive findings of medical decision-making research to policy makers, clinical decision makers, and the general public.
Singer was recognized for his work on anticoagulants in atrial fibrillation.
Three HMS researchers were named to be honored by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB). They will receive their awards and give a talk at the society’s annual meeting in April 2022.
Robert Farese, professor of cell biology at HMS, and Tobias Walther, professor of cell biology at HMS, won the 2022 ASBMB-Merck Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to research in biochemistry and molecular biology. The pair’s joint lab studies lipid homeostatis and storage and neurodegernation.
Alex Toker, HMS professor of pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess, won the 2022 Avanti Award in Lipids, which recognizes outstanding research contributions in the area of lipids. He is being recognized for his work on lipid signaling and particularly his studies on phosphatidylinositol 3-OH kinase, or PI3K, and serine/threonine kinase AKT signaling in cancer.
Russell Woods, HMS associate professor of ophthalmology and associate scientist at Schepens Eye Research Institute of Mass Eye and Ear, received the 2021 Low Vision Research Award from Research to Prevent Blindness and the Lions Clubs International Foundation. The award is designed to serve as a catalyst to launch brand new lines of research that target damage to the visual system.
Woods’ research aims to better understand how the visual system responds to the loss of foveal vision. He also plans to develop and evaluate the feasibility of a novel vision rehabilitation intervention that employs perceptual learning, oculo-motor training, and scotoma awareness training. If successful, this vision training approach could potentially open a new category of vision rehabilitation methods for patients with central vision loss.
David Reich, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, was named to receive the 2021 Massry Prize from the Keck School of Medicine of USC with Svante Pääbo of the Max Institute for Evolutionary Genetics in Leipzig, Germany, and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Okinawa, Japan, and Liran Carmel, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
The three scientists are being honored for their work in the field of ancient DNA. Together they revolutionized the study of human evolution and provided deeper insight into who we are and where we came from. The information has already demonstrated how past evolution has favored some traits that are not well adapted for our modern environment. The field will continue to have a major impact on our understanding of human biology and its underpinning for human medicine. The scientists will receive the award and speak at an event in December.
Four HMS students and one postdoc have been named to the 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 in Healthcare list. The individuals and their profiles are:
Adam Beckman is an MD/MBA student who is currently on a leave of absence to serve as a special advisor to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. Beckman leads the office's policy team, with duties including working with the White House on centering the national Covid-19 response around health equity.
James Diao, an MD candidate in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, helped shift national recommendations to eliminate the use of race in kidney function tests through his research. His research found that when race was removed from these tests, diagnosis and outcomes vastly improved. The National Kidney Foundation and American Society of Nephrology cited his research in their new recommendations issued in October.
Victor Lopez-Carmen (known as Waokiya Mani in the Dakota language) is an MD student and co-chair of the United Nations Global Indigenous Youth Caucus, where he advocates for Indigenous issues in international forums. During the pandemic, he founded Translations for our Nations, a grant-funded program that translates accurate Covid-19 information in over 40 Indigenous languages. He's also developed an Indigenous pipeline program at Brigham and Women's to increase representation in the health care workforce. When he graduates from medical school, Lopez-Carmen will be the first male doctor enrolled in the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe.
LaShyra Nolen, an MD student, is working to right the racial injustice and lack of health care access she saw in her community growing up. An advocate for health equity, social justice, and anti-racism in medicine, she has published commentary in both academic and popular press and is also an appointed member of the White House Health Equity Leadership RoundTable.
Shriya Srinivasan, HMS research fellow in medicine at Brigham and Women’s, is developing better ways for human limbs to interact with prostheses through the use of brain-computer interfaces and tissue engineering. Her inventions enable patients to control their prosthesis and receive sensory feedback signals about how the prosthesis is moving and what it's touching. Around 30 amputation patients are using her surgical designs.
Four HMS researchers have been named to the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science. The individuals and their profiles are:
Amin Aalipour, HMS clinical fellow in medicine and a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s, is a physician-scientist focused on improving the early detection of cancers and a co-inventor on four patents for cancer-related biomarkers. One of his inventions is a magnetic wire that enters the bloodstream, and in pig models, collected up to 80-fold more biomarkers than a single blood draw.
Malinda McPherson, a PhD student in the Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology at Harvard and HMS, researches how humans hear music. She discovered humans have at least two distinct systems to process pitch, one of which helps listeners distinguish sounds in noisy environments. Her fieldwork with indigenous groups in the Amazon advances our understanding of the universality of music perception.
Xuyu Qian, HMS research fellow in pediatrics at Boston Children’s, focuses on using brain organoids—3D tissue cultures—to model brain development and diseases and has been published in Cell, Nature Medicine, and Nature Protocols. He was part of a group research effort cited by the CDC as key evidence that Zika virus causes neurological birth defects.
Pranav Rajpurkar, assistant professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, leads a lab focused on artificial intelligence applications for health, including deep learning algorithms for reading chest X-rays and electrocardiograms that can make diagnoses on par with humans. His research has more than 10,000 citations, and he co-hosts the AI Health Podcast.
