YCCI Leadership

Brian R. Smith MD is Deputy Dean for Clinical and Translational Research at the Yale School of Medicine, as well as Contact-PI of Yale's CTSA Award, Chair of the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Professor of Laboratory Medicine, Biomedical Engineering, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Yale University. He is the Chief of Laboratory Medicine and Attending Physician at Yale New Haven Hospital and also an attending physician at the Connecticut VA Medical Center and the Bridgeport Hospital. Dr. Smith received his undergraduate degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, his medical degree from the Harvard Medical School, and his residency/fellowship training at The Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Dana Farber Cancer Center. He is board certified in Pathology / Hematopathology and in Internal Medicine / Hematology-Oncology. In addition to his clinical work, Dr. Smith has an investigative interest in the inflammation-hemostasis interface, especially in relation to biomaterials, as well as in cellular immunotherapeutics, with over 175 publications. His work extends from basic wet bench research through clinical and epidemiological trials (T1-T4). He has been continuously funded by the NIH at the PI-level for over 35 years. Dr. Smith also has educational responsibilities across the scientific pipeline from STEM high school student programs through undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate training, for MDs, PhDs, and MD/PhDs. He is the initiator and long-standing PI of Laboratory Medicine’s post-doctoral T32 training program in Immunohematology and has personally mentored over 50 MD, MD/PhD, and PhD trainees, most of whom hold tenure-track positions at major research universities. Dr. Smith has extensive experience in the didactic aspects of comprehensive training and career development for clinician-scientists, having developed and published curricula in Laboratory Medicine, developed and published new physician-scientist training paradigms in his field.

Dr. Krystal is a leading expert in the areas of alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and depression. Best known for his role in the discovery of the antidepressant effects of ketamine, his work links psychopharmacology, neuroimaging, molecular genetics, and computational neuroscience to study the neurobiology and treatment of these disorders. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. He also serves in a variety of advisory and review capacities for NIAAA, NIMH, Welcome Trust, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Broad Institute, and the Karolinska Institute. Dr. Krystal also serves in a number of leadership capacities. He chairs the Yale Department of Psychiatry and co-leads the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation as well as an MPI of the Yale CTSA. He also serves as Director of the Clinical Neuroscience Division of the National Center for PTSD (VA) and Co-Director of the NIAAA Center for the Translational Neuroscience of Alcohol. Outside of Yale, he serves as editor of Biological Psychiatry and co-Director of the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. He has served in numerous other leadership and advisory roles, some listed below. He also is co-founder of Freedom Biosciences, a start-up that is developing mechanistically novel treatments for depression and PTSD. Dr. Krystal has mentored over 55 young scientists from diverse backgrounds, many of whom have gone on to impactful independent careers including roles as deans, department chairs, scientists with named professorships, CEO/CSOs of biotechnology/pharmaceutical/healthcare companies, and other senior roles. They have received numerous honors, including membership in the National Academy of Medicine.

Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, MBA, is the Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics and the Chair of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at Yale School of Medicine. As Deputy Dean for Biomedical Informatics, Dr. Ohno-Machado oversees the infrastructure related to biomedical informatics research across the academic health system. Previously, Dr. Ohno-Machado was health sciences associate dean for informatics and technology, founding chief of the Division of Biomedical Informatics in the Department of Medicine, and distinguished professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). She also was founding chair of the UCSD Health Department of Biomedical Informatics and founding faculty of the UCSD Halicioğlu Data Science Institute in La Jolla, California. She received her medical degree from the University of São Paulo, Brazil; her MBA from the Escola de Administração de São Paulo, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Brazil; and her PhD in medical information sciences and computer science at Stanford University. She has led informatics centers that were funded by various NIH initiatives and by agencies such as AHRQ, PCORI, and NSF. Prior to joining UCSD, she was distinguished chair in biomedical informatics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and faculty at Harvard Medical School and at MIT’s Health Sciences and Technology Division. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Association of American Physicians, the American College of Medical Informatics, and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics. She is a recipient of the American Medical Informatics Association leadership award, as well as the William W. Stead Award for Thought Leadership in Informatics. She was the inaugural recipient of the Helen M. Ranney award from the Association of American Physicians. Dr. Ohno-Machado organized the first large-scale initiative to share clinical data across five UC medical systems and later extended it to various institutions in California and around the country. Dr. Ohno-Machado has a long track record of building and evaluating predictive models together with clinicians and biomedical researchers, as well as developing new algorithms for privacy-protecting, federated learning across distributed datasets.

David Coleman, MD serves as the Director of the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, Director of YSM-YNHH Clinical Research, and Co-Investigator of the Yale CTSA UL1 award. Dr. Coleman previously served a 16- year tenure as chair of the Department of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and chief of the medical service at Boston Medical Center. Prior to that he served as chief of medical service at VA Connecticut for 10 years and interim chair of the Department of Medicine at YSM for nearly four years. The first ten years of Dr. Coleman's faculty career were focused on laboratory-based research on the mechanisms of macrophage activation. He had an active teaching and clinical load during this period, and also served as the Director of Hospital Epidemiology and Infection Control and Director of the HIV Care program at academically affiliated Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. In 1993, Dr. Coleman assumed the position of Chief of Medical Service at the VA Medical Service in West Haven Connecticut affiliated with Yale School of Medicine. A decade later, he served as the Interim Chair of the Department of Medicine at Yale School of Medicine and Chief of the Beeson Medical Service at Yale-New Haven Medical Center. During that time he led the school-wide strategic planning process to develop the clinical and population-based research that led to the establishment of the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation and was the basis for the successful application for a Clinical Translational Science Award. Dr. Coleman accepted positions as the John Wade Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine and Physician-in-Chief at Boston Medical Center. He served on the Board of Trustees of the Boston Medical Center, on the Board of Directors of the Faculty Practice Plan of Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine, and was a member of the Executive Committee at Boston University School of Medicine.

An athlete her entire life, Melinda Irwin, PhD, MPH, originally planned on specializing in orthopedics. But college courses in human anatomy, physiology, nutrition, statistics and epidemiology led her to shift gears to public health. She ultimately decided to pursue a PhD, rather than an MD, in order to explore the connection between lifestyle factors and chronic disease. Since joining Yale in 2001, Dr. Irwin has concentrated on the role of lifestyle behaviors in cancer prevention and prognosis.This is increasingly relevant for breast cancer – the focus of much of her work - since mortality has decreased during the past two decades but survivors are at risk for recurrence and debilitating side effects due to treatment. Her work has shown that even after women have been diagnosed with breast cancer, they can substantially lower the risk of both recurrence and mortality by exercising. This holds true even for women who don’t become physically active until after their diagnosis. She has expanded her research into other cancers, showing that a moderate-intensity walking program improved physical functioning and reduced cancer-related fatigue in patients diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Dr. Irwin, who considers herself a biobehavioral researcher, is also examining the effect of exercise and weight loss on cancer biomarkers, showing that weight loss decreased C-reactive protein, a marker of systemic inflammation related to cancer. Her current research interests are focused on examining whether lifestyle behaviors also indirectly improve survival via improvements in medication adherence. “Given the improvement in treatment for many diseases, especially cancer, some people have a window of opportunity to change their lifestyle,” she said. “Others may already be living a healthy lifestyle but have difficulty maintaining it because of treatment, so we need to help them do that.”Dr. Irwin hopes that this line of research will lead to incorporating weight management and exercise management into the clinic as part of reimbursable cancer care, in much the same way that cardiac rehabilitation is now standard of care.Dr. Irwin is interested in the effects of exercise on other chronic diseases and is excited about her role at YCCI, which is allowing her to collaborate with faculty across the Yale campus. She is focusing on creating efficiencies between centers and expanding resources and opportunities for public health and population science research. She is equally eager to foster opportunities for junior faculty and feels better equipped to mentor younger colleagues after taking YCCI’s course on mentoring. “I hope to be able to give back in terms of more collaborations, synergies, efficiencies, and training opportunities,” she said.

Dr Velazquez is chief of the Section of Cardiovascular Medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine, Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital, and Physician-in-Chief of the Heart and Vascular Center for the Yale-New Haven Health System. Through key leadership positions spanning 20+ years, I have pursued my clinical, research and methodologic interests and facilitated multicenter clinical research programs and quality initiatives with substantive focus and impact on vulnerable and underserved populations at high medical risk and have honed the administrative skills required to implement challenging programs in diverse settings globally. As a clinician-investigator, Dr. Velazquez’s major contributions to science include the design, development, and implementation of landmark, randomized clinical trials that have altered international guidelines and the treatment of patients with chronic heart failure and those with concomitant coronary artery disease. Dr. Velazquez has led the Surgical Treatment of Ischemic Heart Failure Trial (STICH). The program, continuously funded by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) since 2002, defined the role for coronary artery bypass grafting in increasing survival of patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. With funding from the NHLBI Global Health Initiative, Dr. Velazquez partnered with colleagues at Moi University in Western Kenya to develop a Center for Excellence for Chronic, Non-communicable Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Diseases, including the country’s first intensive cardiac care and research training program. Dr. Velazquez has authored over 250 peer-reviewed publications, chaired the American Society of Echocardiography’s Taskforce on International Echocardiography, and is an incoming Associate Editor for Circulation Cardiovascular Imaging. He is board certified in Cardiovascular Diseases and is a Fellow in the American College of Cardiology, American College of Physicians, American Society of Echocardiography, and American Heart Association.

Dr. Shapiro is an experienced clinical epidemiologist who has had continuous grant support from the NIH for more than 35 years and has been PI of 6 competitive NIH R01 grants, 2 competitive K-24 grants, and was the site PI of a subcontract for the major clinical site of 5 additional competitive R01 grants. Currently, he is actively engaged in research on the effectiveness of human papillomavirus vaccine in clinical practice, on determining which serotypes of Streptococcus pneumoniae should be included in a conjugate pneumococcal vaccine designed exclusively for adults, on the effectiveness of immunoprophylaxis of infants and vaccination of pregnant women to prevent RSV infections in children and on a number of different topics related to patients with Lyme disease. The Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society gave him the Stanley A. Plotkin Lectureship in Vaccinology Award (2014) in recognition of career achievement in research on vaccinology and the Distinguished Physician Award (2017) “for an extensive and distinguished career in pediatric infectious diseases.” Dr. Shapiro is Vice Chair for Research of the Department of Pediatrics, Co-Director of Education and Director of Child Health Research for the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation/CTSA, Co-PI of Yale’s KL-2 Institutional Career Development Core (and for more than 20 years has been director or co-director of the KL-2 and of the K-12 that preceded it), Co-PI of Yale’s TL-1 NRSA Training Core and Deputy Director of Yale’s PhD Program in Investigative Medicine in Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is also Director of Grant Writing and Evaluation for Yale’s Office of Physician Scientist Development. He directs multiple, intensive, full semester, graduate-level courses about writing grants as well as about how to design and to analyze clinical and translational research studies. He is primary or secondary mentor for 4 faculty members with NIH career development awards. He has mentored numerous (>60) medical students, residents, fellows, and junior faculty members, many of whom are now members of ladder faculty at leading academic institutions and have received NIH grant support for their own independent research studies. Dr. Shapiro has an important leadership role in the educational programs of Yale’s CTSA and was site director of a randomized clinical trial of the effectiveness of a curriculum to improve mentoring that has evolved into an annual 5-session course (10 hours) on mentoring that he has directed for 14 years. He also has been directing the mock study session program at the annual Translational Science meeting. Dr. Shapiro has a long-standing commitment to developing the careers of young investigators and is on the faculty of numerous NIH training grants.

Dr. Cantley performed his clinical Internal Medicine training at the University of North Carolina followed by Nephrology fellowship training at the Beth Israel and Brigham and Women's Hospitals in Boston. He then entered research training at Harvard in the laboratories of Dr. Franklin Epstein and Dr. Guido Guidotti before accepting a faculty position at the Beth Israel. In 2000 Dr. Cantley moved from Harvard to Yale where he established his research focus on the reparative tubular responses to kidney injury. Dr. Cantley’s laboratory has on-going NIH R01 support for research in kidney disease since 1995, focusing on the growth factor signaling and cellular response pathways involved in kidney tubule formation, injury and repair. Dr. Cantley’s laboratory has long-standing expertise in defining intracellular signaling pathways that regulate cell activation states as well as the use of murine models of acute kidney injury. During the past 15 years his lab has investigated the role of the immune system in regulating tubular cell signaling, leading to the investigations of macrophage function in response to injury, repair and cystogenesis. His lab has found that macrophages are critical regulators of both initial injury and subsequent repair, and that cross-talk between macrophages and surviving tubular cells determines the macrophage expression profile that induces tubule repair. Dr. Cantley’s lab has also identified activation of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase and MAPK pathways as critical regulators of epithelial cell migration and morphogenesis during both development and repair. Dr. Cantley’s lab has had ongoing NIH R01 support for this research since 1995. Dr. Cantley was a PI On the Yale Nephrology T32 training grant, where 45 trainees have worked on their research in his laboratory, many of which have moved on to academic research positions, or leadership positions in the research divisions of major Pharmaceutical companies.

Jennifer Edelman, MD, MHS is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Public Health. Certified as an internist, HIV specialist and in Addiction Medicine, she serves as an HIV provider and the physician consultant in the Addiction Medicine Treatment Program at the Yale-New Haven Hospital Nathan Smith HIV Clinic. Her research focuses on optimizing HIV prevention and treatment in the context of substance use, including opioid, alcohol and tobacco use. To this end and applying a range of methodologies, she leads and collaborates on NIH-funded projects to evaluate novel and implement evidence-based addiction treatment in medical settings, especially HIV treatment settings. In addition, her work has focused on understanding harms associated with opioid use among people with HIV. She collaborates with community-based and public health partners to promote HIV prevention, including use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). She mentors trainees, including post-doctoral fellows and public health students, and is Associate Director of the Research on Addiction Medicine Scholars (RAMS) Program and co-Director of Education at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation. She recently assumed the role as Co-chair of the Department of Medicine's Diversity Committee Funding and Resource subcommittee and regularly serves on NIH grant review committees and is Associate Editor of Addiction Science and Clinical Practice. Dr. Edelman received her undergraduate degree from Cornell, her master 's degree in health science from Yale University, and her MD from Columbia University.

Chyrell D. Bellamy, PhD, MSW is Professor of Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry, Director of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH), Director of Peer Support Services & Research and Director of the Yale Lived Experience Transformational Leadership Academy (LET(s)Lead). In addition, Dr. Bellamy is a Senior Policy Adviser for the Office of the Commissioner for the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (DMHAS). Dr. Bellamy’s expertise is in 1) community based participatory research and co-design with communities of color and with communities of people living with psychiatric illness, substance use and addictions, HIV, homelessness, and incarceration histories; 2) research expertise on healthcare disparities: sociocultural pathways of recovery from illness and other transformative experiences; 3) development of culturally responsive interventions; 4) qualitative research methods; and 5) development and training on community and clinic based psychosocial and wellness interventions. In her capacity as Director of Peer Services and Research she provides instruction on peer curricula development and training based on her research and practice experience with peer employees since 1993 (beginning with women living with HIV); training of peers to conduct research; research and evaluation on the effectiveness of peer support; and leadership training for people with lived experiences, via the LET(s)LEAD: Lived Experience Transformation Leadership Academy. With a deep commitment to community-based participatory research (CBPR), Dr. Bellamy brings personal and professional expertise as a frontline service provider, clinician, social worker, community educator and organizer, trainer, program evaluator, community and academic researcher in the health and behavioral health fields, and openly identifies as a person with lived experience of multiple marginalized identities including mental illness, trauma, and addictions, and these experiences inform her research and community practice.

Dr. Nicola Hawley is an Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Chronic Disease) at the Yale School of Public Health and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. She also serves as Associate Director for Dissemination and Implementation Science at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation. Trained as a human biologist, Dr. Hawley is an internationally recognized expert in maternal and child health, with particular expertise in the developmental origins of obesity and related chronic diseases. Her interdisciplinary research bridges epidemiology, anthropology, and global health to examine how early life exposures—during pregnancy, infancy, and childhood—shape long-term health. She employs a life-course perspective and mixed-methods approaches across cross-sectional, cohort, and randomized controlled trial designs to identify critical windows for intervention. A hallmark of her work is the integration of community-engaged and culturally responsive strategies to address maternal and child health disparities in under-resourced and Indigenous settings. While her primary research focus is on Pacific Islander communities in Samoa, American Samoa, and the US, Dr. Hawley has built long-standing collaborations in South Africa, Uganda, New Zealand, and the United States, contributing to global evidence on perinatal health, childhood growth, and intergenerational disease risk. For the past 15 years, Dr. Hawley has used methods in Dissemination and Implementation (D&I) Science to study the etiology, measurement, and prevention of obesity-related chronic diseases across the lifespan. A global health researcher by training, she is a mixed-methods expert and advocate for community-engaged approaches to research interventions and development of health policy. Since joining the faculty at Yale ten years ago, Dr. Hawley has mentored >50 Master of Public Health Students and numerous PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career faculty. Her current research portfolio includes NIH- and PCORI-funded studies addressing gestational and Type 2 diabetes, prevention of excess gestational weight gain, childhood obesity, and cardiometabolic risk across generations. She is also leading efforts to develop culturally grounded interventions that span pregnancy through adolescence, aiming to disrupt the intergenerational transmission of chronic disease. As a mentor, Dr. Hawley plays a central role in training the next generation of US and global health scientists, serving as primary mentor on multiple NIH career development awards (K01, K99, F30, F31) focused on Pacific Islander health.

Dr. Kristen Nwanyanwu is a vitreoretinal surgeon and national expert in diabetic retinopathy who graduated with highest honors from the University of Michigan. Her degrees in African-American Studies and Biochemistry became the foundation for her career as a health disparities researcher. At the University of Pennsylvania, she earned her medical degree and MBA from the Wharton School. She is a board-certified ophthalmologist and a practicing vitreoretinal surgeon. She completed residency at the University of Michigan and vitreoretinal surgery fellowship at the Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After joining the Yale faculty, she was selected for the YCCI Junior Faculty Scholars Program through which she completed her Master of Health Science. Dr. Nwanyanwu’s work engages communities not often served in the development of interventions to decrease preventable blindness from diabetic retinopathy. Dr. Nwanyanwu has assembled a team with expertise in health equity, research, biostatistics, and translational research, and mixed methodologies to address diabetic retinopathy. She supports the implementation science for the Community health Accelerator (CHEA), the Equitable Breakthroughs in Medicine Development (EQBMed) Partnership.

Brian Sevier is the Chief Operations Officer (COO) for the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI). As part of the YCCI, Brian is leading a team of professionals and infrastructure resources to support translational research and science; from study design and development, to study activation, and operational enrollment and recruitment services. This includes supporting activities for the Yale CTSA (UL1, KL2, and TL1) award from the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS). He has been involved in academic research administration for over 20 years, and has previously led contracts and grants administration for the University of Florida Health Sciences Center, and clinical research operations at the University of Florida Office of Clinical Research, UF Health Cancer Center, and the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute, where he most recently held the role as Director of the Office of Clinical Research and COO for the UF CTSI.

Rhonda has more than 35 years of leadership experience in clinical research administration. She is a transformational leader specializing in organizational structure and development and reengineering of operations to gain greater efficiency and cost savings. As the Executive Director of Investigator Services for YCCI she provides strategic development and operational oversight to creation and provision of services to support faculty in their research initiatives. Prior to her role at Yale, she was a Principal Research Consultant at Huron Consulting Group running large-scale University based projects, the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Phase Up Research and the Chief Operating Officer of GuideStar Clinical Trials Management. In each of these distinct roles she was responsible for strategic development, implementation and management of service lines and products in support of clinical trials at research sites across the country. Prior to her fifteen years in consulting Rhonda was the Associate Center Director for Scientific Administration of the Louisiana Cancer Research Consortium, a joint effort between Tulane University, Louisiana State University, and Xavier University of Louisiana. In this capacity, she was responsible for establishing a centralized administration to oversee and manage the scientific programs - basic, translational and clinical research core facilities. Rhonda additionally served as the Executive Director of Clinical Research and Compliance Services for two prestigious medical centers (MUSC and USF/Moffitt Cancer Center). Her experience makes her uniquely adept at program development, start-up and re-engineering of research operations in complex health care organizations. Rhonda holds a PhD in Health Administration, a BA in Business Administration and Management and is a certified professional business coach, success coach and a certified research contract professional Her guidance and comprehensive knowledge base have lead health care organizations in the creation of efficient research infrastructures positioned for growth, compliance and financial stability.

Chris Chaisson is the Interim Executive Director for Administration, Systems, and Workforce Development at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (YCCI), Yale School of Medicine. Chris has led research administration operations funded by NIH-NCATS as well as other YCCI strategic research initiatives, managing investigator service center resources, education and training initiatives, and research cores. Chris has been an academic researcher for over 25 years and has extensive experience in leading complex research units including university/hospital, VA, and other healthcare setting-based teams. Her experience spans the phases of research, ranging from co-investigator developing standard operating procedures for lab-based procedures on international vaccine development studies, through multi-center clinical trials, real world evidence (RWE) studies, and implementation science. Most recently, she led a corporate-based team collaborating through academic partnerships to disseminate RWE results through changes in health insurance benefit design (e.g., elimination of prior authorization for guideline concordant medication for opioid use disorder), incorporation into large ambulatory care practices, as well as academic avenues such publication and conference presentations. Previously while on the faculty of the Boston University School of Public Health, Chris directed a research service center and spent over ten years supporting research as part of the Boston University CTSI.

Michael King serves as the Assistant Director for Research Administration & CTSA Management. Michael has served YCCI for several years, beginning in 2017 as a Project Manager for Research Administration. Michael has been instrumental in managing Yale CTSA efforts and clinical research infrastructure projects, with an emphasis on managing the pilot program, implementing new research software such as the Advarra eRegulatory and Electronic Data Capture systems, and other efficiency tools. In Michael’s previous role as a Project Manager for the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, he supported efforts to prepare and submit the Center’s Cancer Center Support Grant (CCSG) application, as well as managed administrative & business operations for the Center’s Shared Resource Science Cores