CIMIT Names Recipients Of Young Clinician Research Grants Worth $50,000 Each

Main Category: Medical Students / Training
Also Included In: Public Health
Article Date: 20 Aug 2008 - 3:00 PDT

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CIMIT (Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology) announces that six bright and promising medical professionals have been named recipients of the Young Clinician Award for 2008.

The program is being supported by Johnson & Johnson's Corporate Office of Science and Technology, and each award is worth $50,000. Applicants were nominated by site miners from the CIMIT consortium member hospitals.

Winners are the following: Carlos Roberto Estrada, Jr., MD, Children's Hospital Boston; Alexandra Golby, MD, Brigham and Women's Hospital;; Faisal M. Merchant, MD, Massachusetts General Hospital; Stephanie N. Morris, MD, Newton-Wellesley Hospital; Ashish Nimgaonkar, MD, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; and Satish K. Singh, MD, Boston Medical Center.

Through a generous gift to CIMIT from Johnson & Johnson, the Young Clinician Research Award Program has been renewed to continue to encourage physicians, new to their careers, to create innovative life-saving medical devices and technologies.

"Each awardee brings a fresh perspective to his or her clinical challenges, and we are confident great ideas will emerge," said Youseph Yazdi, corporate director, Science and Technology, Johnson & Johnson. "We are honored to partner with CIMIT because they drive innovation by surrounding these clinicians with inventive engineers and other support to move their ideas forward. It's a critical function."

A dinner to honor the recipients was held at the Boston University Club in Boston, with current and past awardees joining technology leaders from CIMIT and Johnson & Johnson.

CIMIT is the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. A non-profit consortium of Boston-area teaching hospitals and engineering schools, CIMIT provides innovators with resources to explore, develop and implement novel technological solutions for today's most urgent healthcare problems.

Members of the consortium are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Brigham and Women's Hospital, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Newton-Wellesley Hospital and Partners HealthCare.

The winners' areas of expertise are as follows: Dr. Estrada, novel functional bladder tissue engineering; Dr. Golby, functional and structural imaging to optimize brain-tumor resection; Dr. Merchant, novel method to guide radiofrequency catheter ablation of atrial fibrillation; Dr. Morris, ovarian cryopreservation and transplantation for female cancer patients; Dr. Nimgaonkar, endoluminal MRI for improved detection and characterization of pancreatic lesions; Dr. Singh, optically-guided biopsy tools for dysplasia detection at gastrointestinal endoscopy.

"These are very promising researchers," said CIMIT Executive Director John Parrish, MD. "The grants are designed to enable them to pursue their research while continuing their work in the clinic."

Judges were seeking promising projects examining medical-device development as it relates to tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, minimally invasive surgery, metabolic disease and biomaterials. Awards were given to researchers from six medical centers associated with CIMIT: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Newton-Wellesley Hospital.

Those eligible include clinical researchers early in their careers, such as Fellows, Instructors and Assistant Professors. A key criterion was the clinician's desire to solve complex healthcare problems.

Other criteria for selection included fitting in with the CIMIT mission; the potential impact of the clinician's work on patient care; the collaborative nature of the planned work; the innovativeness of the research; the academic excellence of the candidate; and the potential of the candidate to become a "rising star" with a future as a clinical leader in the field.

Site miners at the institutions who helped identify promising candidates are the following: BIDMC, Steven Schachter, MD; BMC, George O'Connor, MD; BWH, Joseph Bonventre, MD, PhD and Fred Schoen, MD, PhD; CHB, Martha Murray, MD and Joseph Pigula, MD; MGH, David Rattner, MD (acting); and NWH, Keith Isaacson, MD.

Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative