The following faculty members were recently appointed to a full or named professorship.
Haiden Huskamp
Professor of Health Care Policy
Harvard Medical School
Huskamp studies mental health policy, prescription drug policy and the financing and utilization of end-of-life care services. She has assessed the effect of implementing comprehensive mental health parity in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program on use of mental health services, total and out-of-pocket mental health spending and the likelihood of receiving appropriate treatment.
Huskamp has also developed a body of research on the impact of pharmacy management tools used to control prescription drug costs on drug utilization, cost, and quality of care. She has written numerous papers on the Medicare Part D drug benefit and its implications for vulnerable populations, including individuals with a mental illness and nursing home residents. She is currently comparing the social costs and benefits of newer psychotropic drugs to assess their social value and identify ways that the value of psychotropic drug spending can be increased.
Anne Becker
Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Becker’s research with ethnic Fijians has provided novel insights into the cultural moderation of risk and phenomenology for eating pathology, suicidal ideation and other health-risk behaviors. Through integration of epidemiologic, clinical narrative and ethnographic data, Becker and colleagues have shown an increased prevalence of eating pathology in the setting of assimilation to globalized cultural values and mass media exposure. This program of research has developed from an initial emphasis on questions most relevant to cultural psychiatry toward a new focus on those relevant to global mental health delivery, including strategies for assessment of—and response to—mental health risk in the setting of social adversities. Both her scholarly and administrative work are currently also focused on developing educational and research initiatives to promote equity and excellence in global health care delivery for biosocially complex diseases and settings.
Steven Balk
Professor of Medicine
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Balk’s lab has focused on the functions of androgens and androgen receptor in prostate cancer development and progression. The lab has identified mechanisms including androgen receptor mutations and intratumoral androgen synthesis that contribute to prostate cancer progression after androgen deprivation therapy. Current efforts are directed at understanding mechanisms of resistance to newly available inhibitors of androgen synthesis and androgen receptor antagonists and at development of novel approaches to target androgen receptor and interacting pathways.
Lloyd P. Aiello
Professor of Ophthalmology
Joslin Diabetes Center
Aiello has made major contributions in several areas of diabetic retinopathy and retinal angiogenesis research, clinical trial organization and design, development of national standards for diabetes management, and education in the field of retinal vascular disease. Aiello’s research has broad importance for many related vascular conditions, including a wide array of vision-threatening disorders as well as ischemic cardiovascular disease and cancer. Aiello’s work characterizing the activity, action and signaling mechanisms of the VEGF pathway in retinal cells provided the fundamental information for development of anti-VEGF approaches and has been critical in moving these novel therapies into clinical evaluation. He has also performed pioneering work on the role of protein kinase-C (PKC) inhibitors in the treatment of diabetic microvascular complications, including diabetic retinopathy. Studies by Aiello were the first to show that PKC activity increases in retinal cells during diabetes, that PKC inhibitors can normalize diabetes-induced abnormalities in cells and in vivo, and that PKC inhibitors ameliorate diabetes-induced retinal hemodynamic abnormalities, diabetes-induced macular edema and vision loss in diabetic patients.
Shelly Greenfield
Professor of Psychiatry
McLean Hospital
Greenfield is an addiction psychiatrist whose federally funded research focuses on developing treatments for patients with substance use disorders, understanding gender differences in substance abuse, and developing integrated health services for substance use and co-occurring disorders. Her recent research has focused on developing and evaluating a manual-based group treatment for women with substance use disorders. Other areas of research include screening for substance use disorders and treatment of vulnerable populations, including those with co-occurring medical disorders. She serves as McLean Hospital’s first chief academic officer and the editor in chief of the Harvard Review of Psychiatry. She was the director of the Partners Addiction Psychiatry fellowship and currently is a distinguished fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, where she was past chair of the Council on Addiction Psychiatry, and serves on the board of directors for the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry.
Susan Dymecki
Professor of Genetics
Harvard Medical School
Research in the Dymecki laboratory explores the development and function of brainstem neural systems including the serotonergic system, with its involvement in behaviors ranging from respiratory control to aggression; the precerebellar system, with its central role in coordinating locomotor behavior; and the hindbrain choroid plexus, as an organizing center during hindbrain development and as a source of cerebral spinal fluid. The researchers employ novel genetic, embryological and molecular methods in their investigations.
José Baselga
Professor of Medicine
Massachusetts General Hospital
The main interest of Baselga’s laboratory is the development of novel molecular targeted agents for the therapy of cancer, with special emphasis on breast cancer. His laboratory has directed the pre-clinical and early clinical development of therapies against the epidermal growth factor receptor HER1 and the closely related HER2 receptor. Their current work has expanded towards the early clinical development of Src, TGFb, HSP-90, CDK2, mTOR and PI3Kinase inhibitors. Baselga is also chief of the Mass General Division of Hematology/Oncology and associate director of the MGH Cancer Center.
David Hunter
Professor of Ophthalmology
Children’s Hospital Boston
Hunter’s clinical and research interests focus on strabismus and amblyopia. He is collaborating with Elizabeth Engle’s lab to study the genetic contributions of common and complex strabismus and developing new surgical approaches for complex cases. For more than 18 years he has been developing technology to use a retinal laser scan to identify eye disease, including new approaches to identifying amblyopia in young children using a noninvasive, rapid diagnostic scan. This has led to the invention of retinal birefringence scanning (RBS), a patented method that can detect the fixation of the eye from a distance, and the ongoing development of an RBS-based product known as the Pediatric Vision Scanner. He has a special interest in treating amblyopia without eye patches, eye muscle surgery using adjustable sutures to increase accuracy, using botulinum toxin injections into extraocular muscles to avoid eye muscle surgery, and diagnosing and treating strabismus that develops after other types of eye surgery in adults.
J. Woodrow Weiss
Professor of Medicine
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
The Weiss laboratory has performed a series of studies examining changes in sympathetic nervous system activity that occur as a consequence of the dual insults of nocturnal hypoxia and sleep deprivation suffered by patients with sleep apnea. These studies have focused on the mechanisms by which patients with sleep apnea develop waking arterial hypertension. Using human and animal models of cyclic intermittent hypoxia, Weiss and his colleagues have explored plasticity of the peripheral chemoreflex that occur as a consequence of intermittent hypoxic exposure. Most recently, this work has led to the examination of glutamatergc signaling in the carotid body and its contribution to chemoreflex plasticity.
William Carlezon
Professor of Psychiatry
McLean Hospital
Carlezon’s research focuses on nature and nurture issues as they relate to the brain. He studies the processes by which the brain is modified in response to experience, including exposure to stress, drugs, trauma or toxins, and how gene expression affects behavior during adolescence and adulthood. This basic process research is applicable to a variety of psychiatric and neurologic conditions, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction and autism.
Alan Michelson
Professor of Pediatrics
Children’s Hospital Boston
Michelson performs basic, translational and clinical research on platelets and related aspects of hemostasis and thrombosis. A particular focus of his research is antiplatelet therapy, including characterization of novel molecules and mechanisms for therapeutic platelet inhibition and the use of platelet function tests to guide therapy.
Sue Goldie
Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Trained as a physician, decision scientist, and public health researcher, Goldie’s analytic work has focused on viruses of global health importance, vaccine-preventable diseases, and more recently, maternal mortality. In addition to a longstanding commitment to improve women’s health globally, her broad professional interests include using evidence-based policy to reduce global inequities, building bridges between disciplines to tackle critical public health challenges and fostering innovation in education. Goldie is also the Roger Irving Lee professor of public health and director of the Center for Health Decision Science at HSPH and faculty director of the Harvard Institute of Global Health.
Larry Benowitz
Professor of Ophthalmology
Children’s Hospital Boston
Benowitz’s current projects focus on optic nerve regeneration, particularly the molecular signals that enable the eye’s projection neurons to regrow their connections. He is exploring ways to enhance the rewiring of brain connections and improve functional outcomes after stroke or spinal cord injury and the role of inosine in the stimulation of a cell-signaling pathway that controls the expression of a group of genes required for axon growth.
Susan Redline
Peter C. Farrell Professor of Sleep Medicine
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Redline’s research addresses the etiologies and consequences of sleep disorders across a wide range of health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, hypertension, falls and fractures, sickle cell acute lung syndrome and neurocognitive function. Her work has quantified risks of adverse health outcomes that are independently related to sleep apnea and insufficient sleep in large samples of children and adults. She established a national Sleep Reading Center that has supported the incorporation of sleep measurements into large cohort studies, including the Sleep Heart Health Study, the Hispanic Community Health Study and Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. Her genetic epidemiological studies have established sleep apnea to have a strong genetic component, identifying initial candidate genes for sleep apnea. Her research also includes controlled clinical trials and comparative effectiveness research addressing the role of sleep apnea treatment in reducing cardiovascular disease and diabetes in adults, and in improving behavior and cognitive function in children.
Ann-Christine Duhaime
Professor of Surgery
Massachusetts General Hospital
Duhaime’s clinical interests include rain and spine tumors; pediatric neurosurgery; functional neurosurgery including pediatric epilepsy, spasticity and movement disorders; craniofacial surgery (including craniosynostosis), hydrocephalus and brain cysts, and congenital spine and brain malformations including tethered cord and Chiari malformations. Her research on traumatic brain injury during immaturity investigates age-dependent differences in injury response and repair, as well as mechanisms of accidental and inflicted injuries. Her work includes longstanding collaborations with bioengineers at both the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth to study the biomechanics and consequences of various mechanisms of head injury in patients of different ages, from infants to adolescents. She is co-director of the Divisions of Pediatric Neurosurgery and Neurosurgical Trauma and Intensive Care at Mass General.
Judith Palfrey
Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Palfrey’s research focuses on providing services to children through the intersection of health and education. She is currently directing a large grant titled Opening Doors that is designed to improve services for children with disabilities from traditionally underserved communities. Palfrey and colleagues are working with several newly immigrated families and families from the inner urban core of Boston. In Chile, she is involved in the Un Buen Comiensa project that brings together health and education services to improve health and developmental outcomes for preschool children.
Piero Anversa
Professor of Anesthesia
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Anversa’s work has led to the recognition that the heart is an organ permissive for myocardial regeneration, which can be mediated by exogenous progenitor cells, endogenous progenitor cells or both. He has documented hematopoietic stem cell transdifferentiation and demonstrated the therapeutic potential of bone marrow cells for the damaged heart. Additionally, Anversa’s lab has shown that the heart belongs to the group of constantly renewing organs, where the capacity to replace cells depends on the persistence of a stem cell compartment. Currently, the researchers are testing whether the damaged coronary circulation and scarred myocardium can be replaced with new coronary vessels and cardiomyocytes, rebuilding the failing heart.
Eleftheria Maratos-Flier
Professor of Medicine
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Maratos-Flier’s major interest is the role of the central nervous system in regulating feeding behavior and energy homeostasis. Her lab is focused on particular hypothalamic-striatal pathways and in particular on the role of the hormone leptin and the neuropeptide MCH in modulating motivated behavior. Maratos-Flier and colleages integrate changes in observed behavior with changes in gene expression and signaling pathways and neuronal electrophysiology. Her laboratory initially discovered the orexigenic role of MCH using RT-PCR differential display and have since followed up on its role by generating over-expressing and knockout mice. As leptin also plays a critical role in body weight regulation, Maratos-Flier recently explored the effects of leptin on motivated behavior. The lab is currently pursuing the molecular mechanisms by which leptin induces changes in behavior.
