David Cohen
Robert H. Ebert Professor of Medicine and Health Sciences and Technology
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Cohen studies the regulation of hepatic lipid and glucose metabolism. His laboratory has described novel roles for lipid-binding steroidogenic acute regulatory transfer-related (START) domain proteins in the control of nutrient homeostasis in the liver and of thermogenesis in brown adipose tissue. Cohen also serves as director of Hepatology in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endoscopy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and as director of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.
Kirk Daffner
J. David and Virginia Wimberly Professor of Neurology
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Daffner’s research has focused on the biological foundations of attention to novelty in humans and the changes associated with normal aging and neurological disease. As chief of the Division of Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology and director of the Center for Brain/Mind Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he has fostered a world class interdisciplinary center dedicated to excellence in patient care, teaching, and clinical research in the fields of cognitive neurology and dementia.
Lisa Diller
Professor of Pediatrics
Children’s Hospital Boston
Diller is a pediatric oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital. She is an internationally recognized leader in the field of childhood cancer survivorship, both as clinical expert and as a researcher. Her research focuses on understanding the health of survivors as they age, including their risk of secondary and subsequent cancers and their risk of chronic illness after treatment. This research has influenced survivorship care models, aiding care providers in decision-making about disease-surveillance in cancer survivors and helping cancer centers design appropriate services for cancer survivors. In addition, she is a senior clinician in the pediatric oncology program at the Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Center, and has a clinical focus in neuroblastoma. She has been a leader in developing clinical trials for children with neuroblastoma locally and within national cooperative groups.
Gordon Harris
Professor of Radiology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Gordon Harris joined MGH Radiology in 1997, and serves as director and founder of the MGH 3D Imaging Service and Radiology Computer Aided Diagnostics Laboratory, as well as the DF/HCC Tumor Imaging Metrics Core. Harris and his team have developed computer techniques for analyzing medical images, and some of these methods have been licensed to companies and FDA approved for clinical use. The 3D Imaging Service and Tumor Imaging Metrics Core have been models of dedicated services for providing image processing and analysis for clinical exams and clinical trials, servicing multiple hospitals around the world. He has published and presented extensively on the work of the lab, and has maintained a high level of grant support in neuroimaging research, stroke, and tumor imaging.
Maureen Jonas
Professor of Pediatrics
Children’s Hospital Boston
Jonas is the clinical director of the Center for Childhood Liver Disease, medical director of the Liver Transplant Program and training director of the Pediatric Hepatology and Transplant fellowship program at Children’s Hospital. Her career has been dedicated to the care of children with a wide variety of hepatobiliary disorders and she has mentored a series of academic practitioners in this field. Jonas is an internationally recognized expert on the epidemiology and treatment of viral hepatitis in children.
David S. Ludwig
Professor of Pediatrics
Children’s Hospital Boston
Ludwig directs the Optimal Weight for Life (OWL) clinic and the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Children’s Hospital Boston. He has a joint appointment in Nutrition at the School of Public Health. Ludwig uses clinical trials, mechanistic feeding studies and observational analyses to examine the effects of diet on hormones, metabolism and body weight regulation.
John Maltsberger
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
McLean Hospital
Clinical teaching has been the focus of Maltsberger’s career, with Suicide as a central study focus. Trained in adult, adolescent, and child psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, he has served on the faculty at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and McLean Hospital. Maltsberger is past president of the American Association of Suicidology, a member of the Academy for Suicide Research and was engaged in the creation of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, serves on all three editorial boards of the English language suicide journals, and is the author of many clinically based articles and books.
Vamsi Mootha
Professor of Systems Biology and Medicine
Massachusetts General Hospital
Mootha’s research focuses on mitochondria. His laboratory, which is based at Massachusetts General Hospital and Broad Institute, utilizes genomics, computation, and large-scale biological approaches to systematically investigate mitochondrial physiology. His group characterized the mitochondrial proteome and has coupled this inventory with computation to discover the channel machinery responsible for calcium uptake into the organelle. He and his collaborators have discovered nearly one dozen genes underlying orphan mitochondrial disease and is currently focusing the discovery of biomarkers and therapeutics for this challenging collection of disorders.
Tina Young Poussaint
Professor of Radiology
Children’s Hospital Boston
Poussaint’s research focuses on pediatric brain tumor imaging used for diagnosis, staging and response-to-therapy. She serves as the principal investigator and director of the Neuroimaging Center (NIC), a critical arm of the NIH-funded Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium (PBTC) where she promotes and coordinates the imaging component of brain tumor research in children across a nation-wide consortium. Dr. Poussaint also serves as chair of its Neuroimaging Committee. She has been involved in numerous clinical and research collaborations in pediatric neuroradiology and has recently served as the President of the American Society of Pediatric Neuroradiology.
James Rathmell
Professor of Anaesthesia
Massachusetts General Hospital
Rathmell is an anesthesiologist specializing in pain medicine and serves as chief of the Division of Pain Medicine in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Much of his published work and international reputation is based on the use of image-guidance to improve the safety of pain treatment. He has designed, conducted, and published numerous international, multicenter clinical trials examining novel analgesic agents and devices. Rathmell is devoted to establishing the highest international standards for the education of physicians in pain medicine.
David Reich
Professor of Genetics
Harvard Medical School
Reich’s research focuses on using genetic data to learn about population mixture. In medical genetics, he has played a leading role in using the mixture of African and European ancestry in the history of African American history to find risk factors for prostate cancer and other diseases that occur at different rates across populations. In studies of human history, he has played a leading role in showing evidence of sub-Saharan African mixture into Europeans; documenting mixture between highly diverged populations in India, and documenting gene flow from archaic Neanderthals and Denisovans into modern humans.
Douglas Ross
Professor of Medicine
Massachusetts General Hospital
Ross is co-director of Thyroid Associates at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is thyroid section editor of UpToDate. He is a member of the National Thyroid Cancer Co-operative Study and has done outcome analysis of patients with thyroid cancer. Other research interests have included the effects of subclinical hyperthyroidism on bone.
Elizabeth Thiele
Professor of Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Thiele’s main interests have been in epilepsy and in tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC), a multisystem genetic disease. Her work on epilepsy has led to innovations in dietary therapy, in particular a low glycemic index treatment approach that effectively treats many patients with drug-resistant epileptic seizures. Her interests in TSC range from defining the neuropsychological and behavioral features of the disease to systematic investigation of the diverse nature and neurological consequences of the brain lesions. She is also committed to educating physicians, nurses, and the community about the medical and social aspects of epilepsy and TSC. Thiele is director of the MGH Pediatric Epilepsy Program and director of the Herscot Center for Tuberous Sclerosis Complex.
Marco Zenati
Professor of Surgery
VA Boston HealthCare System
Zenati’s research focuses on innovative computer-assisted therapeutic interventions, image-guidance, MEMS-microsystems and medical robotics with special emphasis on the cardiovascular system. He actively collaborates with researchers at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT and with the European Community-funded EUROSURGE and SAFROS Projects. Zenati’s Medical Robotics & Computer Assisted Surgery Laboratory has been continuously funded by the NIH and his research has resulted in significant contributions to the literature, issue of patents and spin-off of companies. Zenati is also involved in clinical outcomes research in cardiac surgery and currently serves as study chairman for the REGROUP Trial. He will serve as chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the VA Boston HealthCare System and associate surgeon in the Division of Cardiac Surgery at Brigham & Women’s Hospital.
