Examples of Projects

Class of 2025
MD: Rutgers New Jersey Medical School
Mentor: Dr. Todd Allen

Sam grew up in Central Jersey (which is distinct from North or South Jersey), but fell in love with Boston when he attended Gordon College in Wenham, MA. He started his research journey in dedicated immunology, working with a mouse model of eosinophilic asthma at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, but was soon won over by the world of infectious diseases when he spent a year culturing and cataloguing the species of Leishmania in the mountain villages of Olancho, Honduras. He returned home to complete the M.D./Ph.D. program at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, where his thesis work investigated the anti-fungal capabilities of Plasmacytoid Dendritic Cells (PDCs) and how they are affected or dysregulated by chronic HIV infection. He then completed his internal medicine residency at the University of Virginia. For his fellowship research, he has joined the lab of Dr. Todd Allen at the Ragon Institute, where he will work on T cell responses to HIV, with a focus on CAR T cell immunotherapy and CRISPR gene editing.

Class of 2025
MD: Mayo Medical School
Mentors: Drs. Roby Bhattacharyya and Ruanne Barnabas

Originally from Arizona, Dipesh studied Genetics/Cell Biology at Arizona State University, received his MD at Mayo Medical School, and completed IM residency at University of California, San Diego. His interest in ID started early on as an undergraduate student, working in the lab studying biochemical properties of antimicrobial clay-mineral mixtures. During medical school and residency, he investigated the clinical outcomes of patients with C. difficile infection and the effects of diagnostic stewardship strategies for C. difficile testing. He went on to serve as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the CDC, where his work was primarily international and included healthcare-associated outbreak investigations, implementation of infection prevention and control programs, and research on antibiotic utilization/antimicrobial-resistant Gram-negative bacteria surveillance. Dipesh’s current research with his mentors Dr. Roby Bhattacharyya and Dr. Ruanne Barnabas draws on his prior experiences but confronts an entirely different pathogen: developing a point-of-care, affordable, molecular assay to diagnose high-risk types of HPV and studying how to best implement this diagnostic in low-resource communities at-home and abroad.

Class of 2024
MD: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Mentor: Dr. Yonatan Grad

Rachel grew up in Springfield, Illinois and received her BA in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago. As an undergraduate student, she studied the oncogenic properties of human papillomavirus. She received her MD from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and then stayed at Johns Hopkins for internal medicine residency and a hospitalist year. As a resident her research focused on the safety of boric acid for treatment of vulvovaginal candidiasis in the setting of pregnancy. Her current research with her mentor Dr. Yonatan Grad is focused on the development of antimicrobial resistance in the setting of doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis, which is increasingly being prescribed to reduce the incidence of bacterial sexually transmitted infections.

Class of 2024
MD: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Mentor: Dr. Matthew Waldor

Alisse was born in Canada and moved to the US to complete her BS in Biology and Global Health at Georgetown University. After graduating, she worked on several global health projects including improving access to medications in Uganda and researching for a Women and Girls empowerment project at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Alisse received her MD from Mount Sinai where she researched HIV prevention with a focus on understanding the challenges associated with PrEP uptake. Under the mentorship of Sheela Shenoi, she spent a year in South Africa completing a Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellowship working on expanding access to HIV treatment and prevention. She completed residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Boston for her Infectious Disease fellowship. During fellowship Alisse is working to evaluate the immunogenicity of a novel cholera vaccine with Dr. Matthew Waldor. She is also interested in clinical trials and further understanding the effects of antibiotics on the microbiome during periods of neutropenia, and how this affects morbidity and mortality among the hematopoietic stem cell transplant population.

Class of 2024
MD: Harvard Medical School
Mentor: Dr. Suzanne McCluskey

Prior to fellowship, Cameron Nutt studied anthropology and health policy at Dartmouth, received his M.D. from Harvard, and completed medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He previously worked with the nonprofit organization Partners In Health and the Ministries of Health of Rwanda and Liberia under the mentorship of Dr. Paul Farmer and Dr. Agnes Binagwaho, contributing to health care delivery research in Rwanda and supporting Partners In Health’s response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Cameron’s recent research included two trials of the antiviral remdesivir in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and a registry-based analysis of the impact of race-based algorithms for renal function estimation on racial disparities in kidney transplant evaluation. His current work under Dr. Suzanne McCluskey focuses on barriers to antiretroviral therapy adherence in the era of integrase inhibitor-based HIV treatment in Uganda and South Africa, and on evolving patterns of HIV drug resistance in these settings.

Class of 2024
MD/PhD: University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
Mentors: Dr. Michael Gilmore and Dr. Ashlee Earl

Matthew Phillips completed his BS in Marine Science and Biology from the University of Miami where he stayed for graduate training. He joined the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Miller School of Medicine, earning his M.D. and a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology under the mentorship of Dr. Maria Abreu looking at the effects of marine pollutants on the gut and microbiome. Switching coasts, he completed his Internal Medicine residency at University of Southern California/Los Angeles General Medical Center before coming to Boston for Infectious Disease Fellowship at Mass General Brigham. During fellowship he will be working under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Gilmore and Dr. Ashlee Earl characterizing the genetic and phenotypic mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in Enterococci and investigating new environmental reservoirs of these organisms. Broadly speaking, his research interests involve using a one health approach to study antimicrobial resistance and microbiomes.

Class of 2023
MD: University of Pennsylvania
Mentor: Alex Tsai

Kayty Himmelstein is interested primarily in the intersections of racial and economic justice and health. She previously worked as a high school math teacher in New York City and Chicago, and received an M.S.Ed. in Adolescent Mathematics Education from St. John’s University. She received her MD from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and completed Internal Medicine-Primary Care residence at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her prior research has examined disproportionate punishment of LGBTQ youth by schools, police, and courts; the projected impact on women healthcare workers of raising the minimum wage to $15/hour; and financial underinvestment in hospitals serving patient of color. In her fellowship, she is working with Dr. Alex Tsai of psychiatry to examine access to surgical care for people of color living with HIV and HCV. 

Class of 2023
MD: Harvard Medical School
MPH: Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Mentor: Louise Ivers, MD MPH DTM&H

Wilfredo was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in New York where he received his BA in Biology and Romance Languages from New York University. He studied at Harvard Medical School and completed clinical training in the Global Health Equity Residency at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Since 2012, he has worked extensively in rural Haiti under the mentorship of Dr. Louise Ivers, focusing on cholera vaccine campaign delivery and the epidemiology of diarrheal diseases. His career goal is to work at the interface of epidemic disease epidemiology, implementation science and global health equity. To this end, in fellowship he will continue his research on diarrheal diseases in Haiti, while also focusing on HIV care delivery in the Dominican Republic. Specifically, he will use mixed-methods and cohort designs to study outcomes, barriers and facilitators of HIV care among migrants living with HIV on the island with the goal of developing novel care delivery approaches for migrants with HIV.

Class of 2023
MD: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Mentor: Steven Grinspoon, MD

Sam Schnittman completed his BA in Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by his MD at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He completed his internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco, where he worked under the research mentorship of Peter Hunt, MD, on the mechanisms underlying and ramifications of persistent immune activation and inflammation in treated HIV. His current research, under the mentorship of Steven Grinspoon, MD, will expand on this prior work, leveraging the ongoing REPRIEVE trial as well as serum biomarkers, flow cytometry, multi-omics platforms, and novel imaging modalities to understand the pathways of immune activation and dysregulation that lead to non-AIDS-related comorbidities in people with treated HIV. With the goal of targeting therapeutic interventions to reduce inflammation-related cardiometabolic outcomes, he will also work with Dr. Grinspoon and the Metabolism Unit to learn how to design and implement clinical trials.

Class of 2022
MD: Stony Brook University School of Medicine
Mentors: Drs. Mark Siedner, Ingrid Bassett, Emily Wong

Dr. Castle completed her Internal Medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, during which she had the opportunity to work clinically in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. After joining the Partners Infectious Disease Fellowship Program in 2019, her research interests evolved to focus on the interplay between tuberculosis and noncommunicable diseases. As a Fogarty Global Health Fellow, Dr. Castle will spend the second year of her training at the African Health Research Institute in South Africa where she will examine the co-epidemics of tuberculosis and diabetes in an HIV endemic, population-based cohort. In the summer following her subspecialty clinical year, she will also partake in the Program in Clinical Effectiveness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to build the requisite analytical skills necessary for completion of her research project and a career path as a clinical epidemiologist. Her future research will expand the cross-sectional population data into a longitudinal cohort to further explore the relationship between tuberculosis and chronic metabolic diseases.

Class of 2022
MBBS and DM: University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica 
Mentors: Emily Hyle, MD MSc, and Bisola Ojikutu MD MPH

Jodi completed her MBBS and DM at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, after which she was recruited to serve as the clinical coordinator for the Center for HIV/AIDS, Research and Education Services (an urban specialized clinic serving the third largest cohort of PLHIV in Jamaica). She subsequently did her Internal Medicine residency at the University of South Carolina prior to joining the MGH/BWH Infectious Diseases fellowship program in 2020. She is broadly interested in the cost effectiveness of interventions that address COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy, HIV prevention and HIV treatment in the US Black population. She has a particular focus on non-U.S. born immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, and women of reproductive age. During her fellowship she completed the Program in Clinical Effectiveness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to further bolster her research skills. She will be co-mentored by Drs. Emily Hyle and Bisola Ojikutu while conducting qualitative, quantitative, and modeling studies in her area of interest.

Class of 2022
MD/PhD: Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University
Mentors: Dr. David Mooney, Harvard Bioengineering and the Wyss Institute

Prior to joining the MGH/BWH Infectious Diseases fellowship program, Alex matriculated to the Baylor College of Medicine MD/PhD Program where he performed his thesis work in the Rice University Department of Bioengineering followed by Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. For his graduate work, he synthesized and characterized novel biomaterials for the treatment of infected tissue defects in the laboratory of Dr. Antonios Mikos. For his research during fellowship, he has joined the laboratory of Dr. David Mooney at the Wyss Institute where he plans to study pathogen mechanobiology. Clinically, he is interested in device-related infection and the host/pathogen/device interface.

Class of 2021
MD/PhD: Emory University School of Medicine
Mentors: Dr. Roby Bhattacharyya/ Dr. Nir Hacohen, MGH and the Broad Institute

Pierre completed his MD/PhD at Emory University School of Medicine, went on to Internal Medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, then joined the MGH/BWH Infectious Diseases fellowship program. He is broadly interested in the quantitative intersection between antibiotic therapy, host immune responses and microbial physiological states and how these affect clearance of infections and resistance evolution. For his graduate research work, he developed mathematical models of bacterial population and evolutionary dynamics within hosts during acute and chronic infections. He utilized antibiotic pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic experiments as well as in vitro analyses of bacterial mutation, selection and fitness to complement and parameterize these models. His clinical training prompted an enhanced interest in the impact of host immune responses on infection dynamics, and as a result, he is working under the mentorship of Drs. Roby Bhattacharyya and Nir Hacohen at the Broad Institute to acquire new expertise in qualitative and quantitative immunological profiling during infectious syndromes. Specifically, he is exploring the immunopathogenesis of sepsis by characterizing the relative abundance, transcriptional states and kinetics of immune cells at diagnosis and during the clinical course of patients with sepsis.

Class of 2021
MD: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Mentors: Mentors: Andrea Ciaranello, MD, MPH and Jagpreet Chhatwal, PhD at MGH

John is interested in public health and outcomes research through methods of comparative and cost-effectiveness for improving health outcomes in vulnerable populations and decreasing health disparities. During his fellowship, he is working with Dr. Andrea Ciaranello at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center (MPEC) and Dr. Jagpreet Chhatwal at the Institute for Technology Assessment to develop a computer-based simulation model of infectious morbidity and mortality among people with opioid use disorder in order to project the clinical and economic impact of the opioid use epidemic in the US. His academic interests stem from his prior research in HIV microsimulation modeling at MPEC. He received his MD at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Internal Medicine-Pediatrics residency at Tulane University in New Orleans, he also completed an applied epidemiology fellowship at the CDC researching the global impact of anti-smoking messaging and health warning labels on knowledge of the harms of tobacco.