2022 Scholars

Irene Chernova, MD, PhD is an Instructor in the Department of Medicine who's studying the role of B cells in lupus nephritis in the Craft laboratory.  Dr. Chernova received her MD and PhD in Immunology at the University of Pennsylvania and then completed her Internal Medicine and Nephrology fellowship training at Yale New Haven Hospital.  The Craft lab allowed her to combine her interest in clinical kidney disease and love of kidney physiology with her training in Immunobiology and tackle questions regarding immune cells survival in the inflamed kidney.  Specifically, Dr. Chernova is interested in how the unique ionic environment of the kidney influences the survival and function of infiltrating lymphocytes as well as broader questions concerning ion-immune cell interactions which she hopes will form the foundation of her independent laboratory.

Johanna Elumn, MSW, PhD is an Instructor at the Yale School of Medicine. She has served as director of several projects including Women on the Road to Health (WORTH Transitions) and The Share Project (TSP). She is a fellow of the Program to Increase Diversity in Behavioral Medicine & Sleep Disorders Research (PRIDE) at the NYU School of Medicine and the Lifespan/Brown Criminal Justice Research Training Program on Substance Use, HIV, and Comorbidities. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the NIMH Interdisciplinary HIV Prevention Training Program of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA). As a social worker, her direct service experience focused on designing, evaluating, and implementing services for those involved in the criminal legal system at all stages of their contact, from pre-arrest to reentry. Dr. Elumn's research focuses on health disparities among people involved in the criminal legal system using CBPR approaches. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Southern Connecticut State University. At SCSU she teaches an Inside-Out course on Research Methods at Manson Youth Institution.

Dr. Geer is an Instructor of Medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine in the division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine. Her research interest is the domain of stroke and sleep-disordered breathing with a focus on cognitive and functional outcomes following stroke.

Dr. Jeff Gehlhausen is a medical dermatologist and clinical instructor at the Yale Department of Dermatology.  He sees outpatients at the Yale Medicine Dermatology location in New Haven, CT. Dr. Gehlhausen is originally from southern Indiana. His internship in internal medicine was at Vanderbilt University, and he completed his clinical dermatology training at Yale University where he served as a chief resident. During his residency, he obtained significant additional clinical training in the management of complex autoimmune disorders like lupus erythematosus and dermatomyositis at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. Dr. Gehlhausen focuses his clinical work on lupus erythematosus and dermatomyositis and has a broad interest in complex medical dermatology and general dermatology like acne and skin cancer. In addition to seeing patients, Dr. Gehlhausen is a scientist with training in biochemistry, molecular biology, and immunology. “I have long held an interest in these often hard-to-diagnose autoimmune skin diseases that can be very challenging to treat. These patients have and continue to serve as my inspiration for both clinical and basic science research,” Dr. Gehlhausen says. One of his research passions is lupus erythematosus and other autoimmune diseases. Dr. Gehlhausen also is very engaged in academics and medical education in the Yale Dermatology program, working with both medical students and Dermatology residents. He has authored multiple Dermatology textbook chapters and > 40 peer-reviewed publications. Undergraduate School: Indiana University; Bloomington, INUndergraduate Major: InformaticsMedical School: Indiana University School of Medicine; Indianapolis, INAdditional Training: PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Indiana UniversityInternship: Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Internal Medicine prelim Dermatology Training: Yale School of Medicine/Yale New Haven Hospital

Chenxi Huang finished her PhD program in Biomedical Engineering at Yale University in 2015. Her PhD thesis focuses on dealing with outliers in cryo-EM reconstruction of large molecules. Her research interests are fundamental issues of and innovative mathematical and computational approaches to biomedical data analysis, identification and integration of critical information in and across various imaging modalities, and sparse representations in detection and estimation for massive high-dimensional and noisy data. Prior to her PhD, she received her bachelor degree in Information Engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University and Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Yale University.

Snigdha Jain is an Instructor in the Section of Pulmonary, Critical care and Sleep Medicine at Yale School of Medicine. Dr. Jain completed her medical school at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and residency in Internal Medicine at University of Iowa before starting her fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. She joined Yale as a post-doctoral fellow in the NIA-funded T32 Geriatric Clinical Epidemiology and Aging-Related Research program to pursue her research interest of improving health outcomes of critically ill older adults.  Her research interests include improving patient-centered outcomes of older adults with serious illnesses including critical illness and advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with an emphasis on health equity. Her research investigating differences in healthcare delivery as a potential mechanism for disparities in outcomes of older adults hospitalized with critical illness, and distressing symptoms among them, has been funded by the NIA Grant for Early Medical and Surgical Specialists Transitioning to Aging Research (GEMSSTAR) Award, the Parker B. Francis Family Foundation Fellowship Award, the Yale Pepper Research and EducScholar Award, and the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation Scholar Award.

Dr. Korn obtained her MD, PhD degrees at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. She completed internal medicine residency at Yale and started rheumatology fellowship in July 2017 via the ABIM physician-scientist pathway. She joined the laboratory of Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov in July 2018 for her post doctoral training.

Dr. Martinez is an Instructor in the Section of General Internal Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, core faculty at the Equity Research and Innovation Center, and lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. Martinez is a maternal-child public health nutrition investigator and implementation scientist with a focus on translating effective interventions into public health policy and practice in disparity populations. She has extensive experience using social and behavioral theory in research design, piloting, implementation and evaluation. Dr. Martinez’s research focuses on how community-based behavior change, health communication, and systems-level interventions can be used to encourage healthy lifestyle behaviors and the effects these interventions have on reducing the risk of overweight and obesity across the life cycle. Her current work aims to improve maternal-child nutrition in the WIC population through breastfeeding protection, promotion, and support. Her current research also examines the role of food security in nutrition-related cardiometabolic outcomes in disparity populations.

Emily Olfson is a physician-scientist whose research focuses on the genetics of childhood-onset psychiatric conditions. She received her MD-PhD from Washington University in St. Louis where her dissertation in Human and Statistical Genetics focused on the genetics of smoking and alcoholism in the laboratory of Dr. Laura Bierut. She then completed residency and fellowship training in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry in the Yale Solnit Integrated Program. At Yale, Dr. Olfson also pursued research training focused on the neurogenomics of trichotillomania, excoriation disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and childhood anxiety disorders in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Fernandez. Under the mentorship of Dr. Fernandez and Dr. Michael Bloch, she has developed the first DNA sequencing study focused on parent-child trios impacted by body-focused repetitive behaviors (tabsstudy.org). Dr. Olfson works clinically with adults and children in the Tic and OCD Program in the Yale Child Study Center. She has received research support from the NIMH, AACAP, IOCDF, Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation, and Alan B. Slifka Foundation through the Riva Ariella Ritvo endowment.

The surveillance and epidemiology of vaccine-preventable respiratory diseases, especially pneumococcal disease, is my passion. I want to determine how to efficiently and effectively protect populations from pneumococcal disease, both invasive (bacteremia, meningitis) and non-invasive (otitis media, non-bacteremic pneumonia). I'm interested in respiratory disease surveillance, serotype replacement, antibiotic resistance, vulnerable populations, vaccine schedules, vaccine advocacy, and overcoming vaccine hesitancy. You can find me on Twitter @StephPerniciaro.

Dr. Steele is an addiction neuroscientist committed to developing treatments for individuals who suffer from substance use disorders (SUDs). Currently, his lab targets dysregulated circuits in SUD with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to elicit neuroplastic change. The goal is to identify malleable circuits that, with chronic treatment, could lead to positive long-term outcomes treating SUDs. Acute and chronic neuroplasticity is assessed with both electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).Dr. Steele earned a Ph. D. in psychology with an emphasis in cognitive and biological psychology from the University of Minnesota in 2011. He completed two post-doctoral fellowships at the Mind Research Network (2011-2015; Albuquerque, NM) and the National Institute of Drug Abuse (2015-2019 Baltimore, MD). As of January 2020, he joined the Department of Psychiatry of the School of Medicine at Yale University as an Assistant Professor. He is affiliated with Hartford Hospital and Hartford Healthcare with his primary lab located on the campus of the Institute of Living in the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center.

Dr. Chantal Vogels is an Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. Her main research interest is in the ecology and evolution of arthropod-borne (arbo)viruses of public health importance.  Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Vogels has applied her expertise to the development of SARS-CoV-2 diagnostic assays and genomic surveillance. Together with her colleagues, she developed SalivaDirect, a simplified and flexible platform to enhance SARS-CoV-2 testing capacity. Additionally, she helped to establish the Yale SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Surveillance Initiative through which over 19.000 samples have been sequenced. Currently, Dr. Vogels is developing amplicon-based sequencing approaches for other emerging viruses such as Powassan virus, dengue virus, and monkeypox virus by utilizing currently implemented sequencing workflows. With these tools, she is studying 1) the emergence and spread of the tick-borne Powassan virus, 2) the impact of dengue virus genetic diversity on control tools such as the virus-inhibiting Wolbachia bacterium, and 3) the identification and characterization of emerging West Nile virus variants.

Dr. Zakiniaeiz’s work broadly focuses on investigating the neural and molecular circuitry underlying several types of addictions and at-risk populations, such as alcohol use disorder, tobacco smoking, prenatally cocaine-exposed adolescents, and gambling disorder, using two neuroimaging techniques – functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET). Her work also emphasizes the importance of sex as a biological variable in the study of addiction.