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.

Nathan M. Johnson MD, PhD attended the University of Oregon from 2007-2012 where he obtained his B.S. in Biology. During this time he was a member of Prof. Charles Kimmel’s Lab studying zebrafish craniofacial development and pathways of early bone development through the generation of transgenic reporter lines. He went on to work as a Laboratory Technician in Dr. Lisa Maves lab from 2012-2015 at Seattle Children’s Hospital developing a zebrafish model of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). This model was used for high throughput drug screening, and subsequently, for elucidating the mechanisms behind identified drugs. During this time he was also part of projects characterizing the causal gene of Acromelic Frontonasal Dysostosis (AFND) in collaboration with Dr. Michael Cunningham, and evaluating the role of private binding site recognition in steering lineage specifications for master regulators of myogenesis and neurogenesis in collaboration with Dr. Stephen Tapscott at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He joined the Physician Scientist Program at Tulane University School of Medicine in 2015, earning his MD and PhD in immunology and cell-based immunotherapy in 2022. His graduate work was in the laboratory of Dr. Stephen Braun at the Tulane National Primate Research Center and involved the generation of genetically modified T cells targeted to HIV envelope protein utilizing a CAR T cell approach. In a reversal of the critical step in the HIV viral lifecycle whereby virus targets CD4+host cells using its Env glycoprotein, their genetic modifications featured a CD4 directed CAR, effectively steering host immune responses to target and kill Env expressing infected cells. Their CAR constructs featured two novel aspects: bicistronic inclusion of an maC46 domain to prevent viral infection of transduced T cells and a starting population for transduction of CMV- specific T cells aimed to impart in vivo persistence based on the long-lasting effector memory properties observed in CMV immune responses. They hypothesized that continuous stimulation of CD4-CAR T cells through their rhCMV-specific TCR would maintain activated T effector memory CTL capable of targeting HIV infected cells. The constructs were tested in a non-human primate model, the rhesus macaque, to show both clinical relevance and safety. In 2022 he joined the Yale Physician Scientist Training Program (PSTP), completing his Internal Medicine Residency in 2024, and currently joining the section of Rheumatology to complete his fellowship. He aims to build off his prior experience with genetic engineering, immunology, and cell-based immunotherapy to explore new therapeutic options for those suffering from rheumatologic conditions.

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. Etienne is a member of the Center of Molecular and Cellular Oncology and studies ferroptosis and other novel therapeutic approaches 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.

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. Jeremy B. Jacox, MD, PhD, is an Instructor in the Department of Medicine (Medical Oncology) at Yale School of Medicine and a Medical Oncologist at Smilow Cancer Hospital. He earned his bachelor’s degree from MIT before pursuing his MD and PhD at Yale University School of Medicine. Under the mentorship of Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov, Dr. Jacox completed his doctoral studies in immunobiology, focusing on how intracellular circuits based on growth factors regulate macrophage and fibroblast interactions in both homeostasis and melanoma. His work was supported by a Ruth Kirchstein F30 NRSA Fellowship from the National Cancer Institute, and his PhD dissertation work awarded with Distinction and the MD/PhD Prize from Yale. Dr. Jacox completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital through the Physician-Scientist Training Program and continued his specialized training with a fellowship in Hematology/Oncology at Yale Cancer Center. His clinical practice primarily focuses on the treatment of patients with gastrointestinal cancers. During his post-doctoral fellowship, mentored by Dr. Mandar D. Muzumdar, Dr. Jacox investigated the impact of obesity and extreme dietary conditions on the development of pancreatic cancer. He also explored how targeting the tumor microenvironment can enhance anti-tumor immunity in pancreatic cancer. His research efforts have been supported by the ASCO Conquer Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, the Yale Cancer Center Advanced Training Program for Physician Scientists (T32), and the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (KL2). Dr. Jacox's interests include community service and his faith, DIY (home and auto), and being with his family. Since meeting his spouse on the Yale shuttle bus, they have raised a family of five precious children together, his greatest accomplishment.

Dr. David Schoenfeld, MD, PhD, is an Assistant Professor (Medical Oncology) in the Department of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Cancer Center. At Yale Cancer Center, he is a member of the Skin and Kidney Cancer Program and specializes in the care of patients with melanoma and advanced skin and kidney cancers. 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, as well as a T32 research fellowship. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Medical Oncology. Dr. Schoenfeld’s research aims to gain a better understanding of the tumor immune microenvironment in renal cell carcinoma and melanoma, develop better biomarkers of response and toxicity to immunotherapy, and bring new immunotherapies to patients through preclinical studies and early phase clinical trials. He is a member of the Cancer Immunology Research Program at Yale Cancer Center. He has also been the recipient of a NCI K12 Immuno-Oncology Training Program Award and a Kidney Cancer Research Program Academy of Kidney Cancer Investigators – Early Career Scholar Award from the Department of Defense. Through his bench-to-bedside research efforts, Dr. Schoenfeld hopes to contribute to the development of more effective and safer treatment options for cancer patients, while providing compassionate and comprehensive care.