Recent Awards and Honors for the BIDMC Community

Below is a list of awards, honors and accomplishments the BIDMC community received in recent months.

The Pew Charitable Trusts selected Mark Andermann, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at BIDMC, and Shingo Kajimura, MD, Investigator in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism at BIDMC, to join its 2020 class of Innovation Fund investigators. The award aims to encourage collaborative projects within the Pew’s biomedical network.

The American Red Cross of Massachusetts recognized two BIDMC staff members for their work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dan Barouch, MD, PhD, Director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at BIDMC, received the Global Citizen Hero Award and Monique Mohammed, Blood Bank Manager, received the Blood Services Hero Award.

Elliot Chaikof, MD, PhD, the HMS Johnson and Johnson Professor of Surgery at BIDMC and Christiane Ferran, MD, PhD, the HMS Lewis Thomas Professor of Surgery at BIDMC each received the inaugural Blavatnik Therapeutics Challenge Awards (BTCA) at Harvard Medical School. Administered by HMS and funded by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the BTCA program aims to accelerate therapeutics research throughout HMS and its affiliated hospitals, help investigators navigate the intricacies of intellectual property development and licensing and spur the creation of new companies.

Joseph Feuerstein, HMS associate professor of medicine and associate clinical chief of gastroenterology at Beth Israel Deaconess, was one of seven individuals to receive the American Gastroenterological Association’s 2021 Outstanding Service Award, which honors individuals who have contributed significantly to society's health and welfare. This year’s awardees are members of the AGA Institute Clinical Guidelines Committee and Clinical Practice Updates Committee who comprised the rapid review working group for COVID-19 guidance. The award will be presented virtually in May 2021.

Aaron Grant, PhD, a research scientist in the Department of Radiology, was recently awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Project Grant (R01) to further develop hyperpolarization technology, which holds substantial promise for diagnosis and treatment monitoring in cancer through its sensitivity to glycolysis, a metabolic pathway that is up-regulated in many cancers and is generally reduced following successful intervention. R01 funding is the original and historically oldest NIH grant mechanism for health-related research and development.

Grace C. Huang, MD, Director, Office for Academic Careers and Faculty Development, and Edward K. Rodriguez, MD, PhD, Chief of Orthopedic Surgery, each received the 2021 A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award, part of Excellence in Mentoring Awards given by Harvard Medical School. Matthew L. Wong, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, was a recipient of the Young Mentor Award. Harvard Medical School established the Excellence in Mentoring Awards to recognize the value of quality mentoring relationships and the impact they have on professional development and career advancement in clinical medicine, teaching, research and administration.

Salvia Jain, MD, of the Division of Hematology and Oncology at BIDMC, received the NCI K08 Career Development Award for her work in developing immunotherapy platforms for patients with T-cell lymphomas.

Lissa Kapust, LICSW and Program Manager in Neurology at BIDMC, received an award from the Parkinson Foundation to support patients with Parkinson’s Disease who live at alone. The goal is to create a program that can be eventually replicated.

Camilia Martin, MD, Associate Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at BIDMC, and Steven Horng, MD, Emergency Medicine Physician at BIDMC, received capital funding through the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center. The grants will support Martin’s work investigating lactation outcomes and breastmilk composition and Horng’s project “Creating and Integrating an Echocardiogram and Electrocardiogram Extension to the MIMIC Database.”

Nancy Oriol, MD, Associate Professor of Anesthesia, received the Pearl Birnbaum Hurwitz Humanism in Healthcare Award from the Arnold Gold Foundation. The annual award celebrates women who have been change agents, who advocate for the vulnerable, and who significantly impact the lives of innumerable people.

Martin Pollack, MD, Chief of the Division of Nephrology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, as our 2020 Distinguished Medical Honoree. His NephCure-funded studies have discovered one of the biggest breakthroughs in kidney disease research over the past 20 years—the discovery of the APOL1 gene’s association with FSGS. Mutations in the APOL1 gene carry up to a ten-fold increased risk among Black individuals for developing kidney disease.

Dhruv Singhal, MD, co-director of the Boston Lymphatic Center – formerly the Lymphatic Center at BIDMC/Boston Children's Hospital – and a faculty member of the Department of Surgery (Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery), recently received an R01 grant from the NIH/NHLBI for his lymphedema research project. 

Alex Toker, PhD, Professor of Pathology, and Wenyi Wei, PhD, Professor of Pathology, have been named National Cancer Institute (NCI) Outstanding Investigators. This award supports accomplished leaders in cancer research, who are providing significant contributions toward understanding cancer and developing applications that may lead to a breakthrough in biomedical, behavioral, or clinical cancer research. Below are profiles of the most recent NCI Outstanding Investigator Award recipients.

Wenxin (Vincent) Xu, MD, Clinical Fellow of the Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine at BIDMC, was awarded an ASCO Young Investigator Award. The award provides funding to promising investigators who are undergoing a career transition from a fellowship program to a faculty appointment to encourage and promote quality research in oncology.

Robert Yeh, MD, MSc, received the Joseph A. Vita Award from the American Heart Association (AHA). This recognizes the contributions of a mid-career investigator whose work, published in the AHA journals during the last five years, has had great impact in the field of cardiovascular biology or cardiovascular health. 

Rebecca Zash, MD, infectious disease physician at BIDMC, received a grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation as part of its 2020 Clinical Scientist Development Awards. The funding will support Zash’s work in studying the adverse cardiometabolic impact of antiretroviral treatment regimens among pregnant and post-partum women.

John Zupancic, MD, Neonatologist at BIDMC, was named the recipient of the 2020 Massachusetts Medical Society Henry Ingersoll Bowdith Award for his outstanding initiative, creativity and leadership in the field of public health outreach and advocacy.

Boston Lymphatic Center - formerly the Lymphatic Center at BIDMC/Boston Children's Hospital – was recently designated as a Comprehensive Center of Excellence by the Lymphatic Education & Research Network. This is the highest possible designation.