Current Trainees

Talal El Zarif is an Internal Medicine resident in the Physician-Scientist Training Program (PSTP) at Yale University. He grew up in Sidon, Lebanon, and holds a medical degree from the Lebanese University. After graduating from medical school, he joined the lab of Professor Matthew Freedman in the Department of Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Harvard Cancer Center as a post-doctoral research fellow to study cancer epigenomics. During his time there, Dr. El Zarif also led clinical and translational research at the Lank Center of Genitourinary Oncology under the mentorship of Professor Toni Choueiri. His work focused on predictive biomarkers, clinical outcomes, and toxicities of immune checkpoint inhibitors among patients with cancer and has been published in Nature Medicine, Cancer Cell, Journal of Clinical Oncology, European Urology, and others and was presented at several national and international meetings. Dr. El Zarif is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research and is interested in a career as a physician-scientist specializing in hematology/oncology.

My career goal is to actively solve clinical infectious problems, provide patient care, and develop individualized management strategies for chronic infections as a physician-scientist.

I'm Marc, a PGY-1 in internal medicine who ultimately will be training in Heme/Onc as a part of the phsyician-scientist program. Originally an organic chemist in undergrad, I transitioned into cancer cell biology for my PhD. In Neil Ganem's lab we discovered that loss of the Hippo Pathway potently potentiates melanocyte transformation into melanoma even in the absence of oncogenic BRAF signaling as well as what miRNA permit whole-genome doubled cancer cells to escape arrest. Along the way I was fortunate enough to help out with multiple projects ranging from finding new kinases that mediate Hippo pathway signaling (Sanghee Lim's work), what controls cell fate following mitotic slippage (Amanda Bolgioni's work), and finding ways to selectively target whole-genome doubled cancer cells (Ryan Quinton's work).

Omar El-Charif is a resident physician in the Department of Internal Medicine at Yale New Haven within the Physician-Scientist Training Program. Dr. El-Charif's research interests involve using high-throughput multi-omic data to develop predictive signatures that personalize diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic decisions. His expertise includes Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS), transcriptomics, functional SNP analysis, and eQTL-mapping. He is also passionate about teaching-learning and medical education. Aside from work, he loves to listen to, play, and compose music, and pursue the best of each dish in town.

Sukrit Narula is an internal medicine resident at Yale New Haven Health. He completed his undergraduate training at Stanford University where he graduated with honors. He then obtained his medical degree from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he graduated with a Distinction in Research. Sukrit is part of the ABIM Physician-Scientist Research Pathway wherein he will undergo fellowship training with the Cardiovascular Medicine section. Prior to Yale, his research in cardiovascular disease epidemiology was conducted at the Population Health Research Institute in Canada. He has been an author on multiple peer-reviewed manuscripts, including first author publications in high impact journals like The Lancet and the Journal of The American College of Cardiology.

I completed my MD/PhD at Augusta University (Medical College of Georgia) in type 1 diabetes genetics. My career goal is to be an academic pulmonary and critical care physician. Outside of medicine and research, I enjoy outdoor activities and hanging out with my two- and four-legged family members!

Etienne Leveille is a hematology & oncology fellow in the ABIM Physician-Scientist Research Pathway at the Yale School of Medicine. He completed his medical school at McGill University, where he also studied the genetics of Parkinson’s disease and hereditary spastic paraplegia under the supervision of Dr. Ziv Gan-Or and mechanisms of inhibition of apoptosis in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma with Dr. Nathalie Johnson. While at McGill , Etienne was also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the McGill Journal of Medicine. In addition to his clinical work as a resident, Etienne is a member of the Center of Molecular and Cellular Oncology and studies B-cell dynamics and oncogenic signaling in B-cell malignancies under the mentorship of Dr. Markus Müschen.

I completed my BS in Biological Sciences at the University of Arkansas BS followed by MD and PhD in Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. My specialty interest is in endocrinology with a research interest in Bone and Skeletal biology. My hobbies include cooking, soccer, playing with our 3 dogs.Yale is such an amazing place to work. From your co-residents to fellows to attendings and leadership, everyone has been so genuinely nice and helpful. You never feel alone, and everyone wants you to succeed. When you put that kind of environment together with the great minds and resources that Yale offers, there is so much opportunity for you to become a successful Physician Scientist. Selected articles:MacLeod RS, Cawley KM, Gubrij I, Nookaew I, Onal M, O’Brien CA. Effective CRISPR interference of an endogenous gene via a single transgene in mice. Scientific Reports. 9, 17312 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-53611-6 MacLeod RS, Meyer MB, Xiong J, Cawley KM, Liu Y, Onal M, Benkusky NA, Thostenson JD, Pike JW, O’Brien CA. Deletion of a putative promoter-proximal Tnfsf11 regulatory region in mice does not alter bone mass or Tnfsf11 expression in vivo. PLOS ONE. 16(5): e0250974 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0250974

Phyllis is a cardiology fellow in the ABIM Physician Scientist Training Program. She is completing her post-doctoral research fellowship under Dr. Rohan Khera through the T32 Implementation Science Fellowship. She graduated from Yale College with a B.S. in Physics and then completed her M.D./Ph.D. at Columbia University, where she developed machine learning methods to improve the phenotyping of stroke in the electronic health record and improve the power of genome-wide association studies in the UK Biobank. Most recently, she completed her internal medicine residency at Yale New Haven Health. Her interests include the development of methods to improve precision medicine in cardiology, harmonization of multi-modal and multi-site data, and characterizing the gray areas between clinical trial and real-world patient populations.

Dr. Brandon Lee completed his MD and PhD in Immunology at the University of Chicago. He conducted his research with Dr. Juliane Bubeck Wardenburg and showed that Staphylococcus aureus hemolysin-alpha expression suppressed the formation of T cell memory and cytokine production during skin infection, impeding the development of protective, adaptive immunity to S. aureus infection. His research interests are focused on host-microbe communication and interactions; specifically, how microbes may interpret and adapt to signaling by the host immune response.

Shan Parikh is a clinical fellow in cardiovascular medicine and a member of the Physician-Scientist Research Pathway at Yale School of Medicine. He completed both a medical degree and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. As a Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt (Department of Pharmacology, Vanderbilt Center for Arrhythmia Research and Therapeutics), Shan utilized human induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes for the investigation of contractile dysfunction and arrhythmogenesis in inherited cardiomyopathies. As a physician-scientist at Yale, Shan is interested in investigating cardiac disease and delivering state of the art care to patients with cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Briggs is a physician-scientist at Yale University. He is a clinical instructor in the Department of Internal Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Immunobiology. His lab studies immunity to parasitic infections and works closely with the Craft Lab at Yale, Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, and the Fujiwara Lab at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Dr. Briggs provides subspecialty outpatient care in Travel and Tropical Medicine at Yale and West Haven VA.

I am a fellow in the Division of Digestive Diseases. My research is focused on better understanding the relationship between metabolic disease (diabetes, steatotic liver disease), progression of liver fibrosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma for the purposes of improving clinical risk stratification. I am also interested in gene-environment interactions and how they influence the implementation science of screening for gastrointestinal cancers. Prior to beginning a career in medicine, I completed a Master’s in Public Health (MPH) with a concentration in Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, at which time I was awarded the Dr. Theodore Colton Prize for Excellence in Epidemiology. I then worked in health system program monitoring and evaluation for several international health non-governmental organizations prior to attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and then joining the Internal Medicine residency at Yale New Haven Hospital. Selected publications: Mezzacappa C, Mahmud N, Serper M, et al. Hepatocellular carcinoma is associated with diabetes and longitudinal blood glucose control in a national cohort with cirrhosis. Hepatology Communications. (2023). https://journals.lww.com/hepcomm/fulltext/2023/12010/hcc_is_associated_with_diabetes_and_longitudinal.21.aspx Mezzacappa C, Rossi R, Jaffe A, Taddei TH, Strazzabosco M. Community-level factors associated with hepatocellular carcinoma incidence and mortality: an observational registry study. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-23-0902 Mezzacappa C, Wang Z, Lu L, Risch H, Taddei TH, Yu H. Detection of hepatocellular carcinoma methylation markers in salivary DNA. Bioscience Reports. (2024). doi: https://doi.org/10.1042/BSR20232063 Mezzacappa C, Larki NR, Skanderson M, Park LS, Brandt C, Hauser RG, Justice A, Yang Y-X, Wang, L. Development and validation of case-finding algorithms to identify pancreatic cancer in the Veterans Health Administration. Dig Dis Sci. (2024). doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10620-024-08324-w Wang LL, Grimshaw AA, Mezzacappa C, Larki NR, Yang Y-X, Justice AC. Do polygenic risk scores add to clinical data in predicting pancreatic cancer? A scoping review. https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-23-0468 Rodriguez NJ, Zheng N, Mezzacappa C, Canavan M, Laine L, Shung D. Disparities in access to endoscopy for patients with upper gastrointestinal bleeding presenting to emergency departments. Gastroenterology. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2022.10.001 Singh V, Mezzacappa C, Gershkovich P, et al. Systems approach to enhance Lynch syndrome diagnosis through tumour testing. J Med Genet. (2022). https://jmg.bmj.com/content/jmedgenet/early/2022/09/17/jmg-2022-108770.full.pdf Zhang Y*, Mezzacappa C*, Shen L, et al. Cancer tracking system improves timeliness of liver cancer care at a Veterans Hospital: A comparison of cohorts before and after implementation of an automated care coordination tool. PLOS Digital Health. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pdig.0000080 *Shared first authorship.

Evangelos (Evan) Oikonomou is a clinical fellow in cardiovascular medicine, a post-doctoral research fellow in the Cardiovascular Data Science (CarDS) lab, and a member of the ABIM Physician-Scientist Research Pathway at Yale. His work focuses on the intersection of applied computer vision and statistical machine learning, with a specific focus on developing tools for the improved phenotyping of cardiovascular disease using scalable approaches that can be deployed at minimal cost using existing care pathways. He graduated as valedictorian of his class from the University of Athens Medical School in Greece, before pursuing a Ph.D. (D.Phil.) degree at the University of Oxford, where he was recognized with the Radcliffe Department of Medicine Graduate Prize for his scientific work. In 2019 he joined the Physician-Scientist Training Program at the Yale School of Medicine, and he has since completed his internal medicine residency and his core clinical fellowship in cardiology. He is a recipient of an F32 NRSA fellowship award from NHLBI (National Institutes of Health), and his work has been recognized through numerous Young Investigator Awards sponsored by the American Heart Association, American College of Cardiology, Northwestern Cardiovascular Young Investigator Forum, the European Society of Cardiology and European Association of Preventive Cardiology. He has led a broad portfolio in applied artificial intelligence in cardiovascular and cardiometabolic medicine. First, he has defined and translated a key interplay between the perivascular adipose tissue and vascular inflammation in humans into a clinically actionable algorithmic tool that can refine cardiovascular risk on routine cardiac CT scans. Second, he has developed and validated deep learning algorithms for the efficient diagnosis of common and rare cardiomyopathies specifically adapted for point-of-care echocardiography. Finally, he has led an extensive body of work on defining treatment effect heterogeneity across clinical trials, with direct implications for evidence translation and the design of new adaptive trials with data-driven predictive enrichment. His work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including the Lancet, Lancet Digital Health, European Heart Journal, JACC, Circulation, JAMA Cardiology, Diabetes Care.

Dr. Eric Isaac Elliott obtained his MD and PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in 2018. His research was conducted in the laboratory of Dr. Fayyaz Sutterwala and Dr. Suzanne Cassel on Nucleotide-Binding Leucine Rich Repeat-Containing Receptors (NLR) that form inflammasomes; central to his thesis work was the regulation of NLRP3 inflammasome activation by mitochondria and the novel role for the mitochondrial phospholipid cardiolipin in NLRP3 and caspase-1 recruitment. His research interests remain focused on innate immune mechanisms for sensing pathogens and cell stress, and how activation or dysregulation of these systems relate to infectious disease susceptibility and auto-immune/inflammatory disease processes. Select Publications:Elliott EI, Miller AN, Banoth B, Iyer SS, Stotland A, Weiss JP, Gottlieb RA, Sutterwala FS, Cassel SL. Cutting Edge: Mitochondrial Assembly of the NLRP3 Inflammasome Complex Is Initiated at Priming. J Immunol. 2018 May 1;200(9):3047-3052.Ulland TK, Jain N, Hornick EE, Elliott EI, Clay GM, Sadler JJ, Mills KA, Janowski AM, Volk AP, Wang K, Legge KL, Gakhar L, Bourdi M, Ferguson PJ, Wilson ME, Cassel SL, Sutterwala FS. Nlrp12 mutation causes C57BL/6J strain-specific defect in neutrophil recruitment. Nat Commun. 2016 Oct 25;7:13180.Elliott EI, Sutterwala FS. Monocytes Take Their Own Path to IL-1β. Immunity. 2016 Apr 19;44(4):713-5.Elliott EI, Sutterwala FS. Initiation and perpetuation of NLRP3 inflammasome activation and assembly. Immunol Rev. 2015 May;265(1):35-52.Iyer SS, He Q, Janczy JR, Elliott EI, Zhong Z, Olivier AK, Sadler JJ, Knepper-Adrian V, Han R, Qiao L, Eisenbarth SC, Nauseef WM, Cassel SL, Sutterwala FS. Mitochondrial cardiolipin is required for Nlrp3 inflammasome activation. Immunity. 2013 Aug 22;39(2):311-323.

Dr. David Schoenfeld is an Instructor of Medicine (Medical Oncology) and cares for patients with melanoma and advanced skin and kidney cancers at the Yale Cancer Center and Smilow Cancer Hospital in New Haven. He received his medical degree and a Ph.D. in Cellular, Molecular, and Biomedical Studies from Columbia University as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program. He then joined the ABIM Physician-Scientist Training Program at Yale through which he completed Internal Medicine residency and Hematology/Oncology fellowship training. Dr. Schoenfeld’s research interests include bench-to-bedside cancer research and helping develop novel cancer therapies. He is investigating the tumor immune microenvironment and testing new immunomodulatory drugs and combinations in preclinical models, with the goal of bringing new treatments to patients by conducting early phase clinical trials. His research has been supported in part by the Yale Cancer Center-Advanced Training Program for Physician-scientists T32.