2021 Scholars

A native of Connecticut, Dr. Michael Alperovich is a Board Certified plastic surgeon, full-time faculty member, and Director of the Craniofacial Fellowship at Yale University. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University, attended the University of Oxford for graduate school receiving Distinction honors, and graduated Alpha Omega Alpha from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Alperovich completed a plastic surgery residency and a craniofacial fellowship at New York University's Department of Plastic Surgery. He has clinical expertise in facial, breast and body aesthetic surgery. Notably, Dr. Alperovich is a national leader in gender affirming facial surgery and previously taught one of the first courses in the United States on this topic. Watch a video with Dr. Michael Alperovich>> Dr. Alperovich has been named to Connecticut Magazine's "Top Doctors" list for consecutive years and to New York Magazine's New York Metro "Top Doctors" list. He has been invited nationally and internationally as a visiting professor and guest faculty to speak about craniofacial, gender affirming and aesthetic surgery. Dr. Alperovich has authored over one hundred and fifty peer-reviewed publications and multiple plastic surgery book chapters. He serves on the Editorial Board of plastic surgery journals as well as contributes as an ad hoc reviewer for several other journals.

My overarching interests are in the promotion of cardiometabolic health in diverse populations through understanding the relationships between cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and metabolic risk factors. My research is focused on the intersection between obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and CVD with a sub-focus on elucidating mechanisms of CVDs in OSA. Over the last 3 years, my work has focused on improving our understanding of the role of OSA in the occurrence, severity, and outcomes of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). I have recently uncovered a strong association between abnormal myocardial flow reserve (a reduction in the capacity of the heart to increase its blood flow in proportion to its demands) and severe obstructive sleep apnea. Abnormal myocardial flow reserve may be a marker of disease of the small blood vessels of the heart (coronary microvascular dysfunction). My work has been presented at national conferences such as the Scientific Sessions of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. The findings of my research are published in major peer-reviewed scientific journals such as JACC, JACC Cardiovascular Imaging, Circulation Quality of Care and Cardiovascular Outcomes, JAHA, and Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Dr. Aneni is a child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist. She is an assistant professor of child psychiatry, biomedical informatics, and data science. The overall goal of her research is to improve access to preventive interventions for adolescents at risk for substance use and mental health problems. Her research interests focus on developing, testing, and implementing preventive digital interventions, particularly culturally informed family-based interventions for racial/ethnic minorities in community-based settings. She is also investigating the utility of digital tools in identifying adolescents at risk for substance use and mental disorders through digital biomarkers and machine learning approaches. Dr. Aneni’s research is supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Center for Technology and Behavioral Health, National Institutes of Health (NIH) AIM-AHEAD program, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation.

Rachel Beekman began her medical training in her home state of New York at Stony Brook University School of Medicine but has since relocated to New Haven, where she completed her neurology residency and neurocritical care fellowship at Yale New Haven Hospital. Rachel is the first Yale alumni to continue as faculty in the department of neurocritical care. Rachel has a passion for treating survivors of cardiac arrest and is building a multi-disciplinary cardiac arrest program. In her spare time Rachel loves being mom to her two young boys and spending family time at all the beautiful Connecticut parks.

Dr. Nina Brodsky is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Section of Critical Care Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine. She received her M.D. from the University of Maryland, completed her Pediatric residency training at The Children's Hospital at Montefiore, and her Pediatric Critical Care fellowship at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital. Her research interests include the genetic and environmental etiologies of immunodeficiency and pathologic inflammation, as well as signaling and mechanisms of disease in patients with these conditions. Dr. Brodsky is particularly interested in human T cell developmental immunology and regulation of inflammation in health and disease. Her goal is to uncover and develop targeted translational therapies to improve immune responses during vaccination, infection, and immune-mediated diseases.

Dr. Cecelia Calhoun, MD, MPHS, MBA, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology) and (Hematology/Oncology) at Yale University School of Medicine, specializing in the care of individuals with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). She also serves as the Medical Director of the Adult Sickle Cell Program at Smilow Cancer Hospital. Dr. Calhoun's research focuses on addressing educational and healthcare obstacles faced by adolescents with sickle cell disease, employing mixed methods to find effective solutions. Her career is dedicated to designing and implementing evidence-based interventions that support a successful transition from youth to adult care for individuals with sickle cell disease. As an NIH-funded investigator, she collaborates with hematology colleagues nationwide, utilizing Implementation Science methods to improve outcomes for patients with sickle cell disease across their lifespan. Dr. Calhoun's expertise and dedication make her a respected figure in the field of hematology, particularly in the realm of sickle cell disease and health equity. Her commitment to improving outcomes for individuals with sickle cell disease underscores her valuable contributions to the academic and medical community.

Dr. Cudahy is an assistant professor in infectious diseases with a research interest in HIV and tuberculosis co-infection. He currently conducts research in South Africa focusing on improving treatment outcomes in people co-infected with tuberculosis and HIV by investigating biomarkers of treatment response and analysis of within-host tuberculosis strain diversity. Dr. Cudahy is board certified in Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases.

Eyiyemisi Damisah, MD, Neurosurgeon who treats adults and children with medication refractory epilepsy and movement disorders. She specializes in minimally invasive approaches and advanced brain mapping technologies for the treatment of epilepsy. She also has extensive experience with implantable devices such as DBS, RNS, and VNS that stimulate specific nerves to halt seizures movement disorders or other psychiatric conditions. She is the division chief of epilepsy and functional neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine. Dr Damisah’s research focuses on the neural mechanism of threat processing in humans and neuroanatomical substrates of higher order cognition that can be modulated for the treatment of threat-based disorders such as anxiety and PTSD. She codirects the Center of Brain and Mind Health. The center brings engineering psychiatry and neurosurgery to develop technology to treat patients with neurological disorders and functional movement disorders. Dr. Damisah received her bachelor's degree in 2006 from Biola University in Religious Studies. She obtained her MD, Neurosurgical residency, and Functional Neurosurgery fellowship at Yale School of Medicine. She started her clinical practice as the Director of the Epilepsy Surgery Program in 2019 and opened the Damisah Lab at Yale in 2021.

Rupak Datta, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Medicine and an Assistant Hospital Epidemiologist at the Veterans Affairs Connecticut Healthcare System. He completed his undergraduate training at Tufts University, earned his MPH at the Yale School of Public Health, and received his MD/PhD at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. The central focus of his research is to improve clinical outcomes and reduce adverse events among older adults through antimicrobial stewardship. His research has been supported by the NIA Imbedded Pragmatic Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias Clinical Trials Collaboratory, Yale Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center, Yale Center for Clinical Investigation, and Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America. His areas of interest include healthcare epidemiology, antimicrobial resistance, and quality improvement.

I am an Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Yale School of Medicine and Director of the Hidradenitis Suppurativa Clinic. My current research endeavors seek to uncover the underlying pathogenesis of inflammatory conditions. During my postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Andrew Wang, I explored fundamental allergy biology and the role of manmade xenobiotics in the development of allergic disease. Over the course of my postdoctoral training and during my PhD in the laboratory of Katya Ravid, DSc at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, I developed an interest in the impact of the external environment – from food preservatives and additives in topical products to the nutrients we ingest – on inflammation in the body, and in particular, at the skin barrier. Undergraduate School: Middlebury College Undergraduate Major: Biochemistry Medical School: Boston University, School of Medicine Internship: Newton Wellesley Hospital, Newton MA Residency: Yale New Haven Hospital

Claudia-Santi F. Fernandes, Ed.D., LPC, MCHES, NCC is a youth mental health and substance misuse expert with experience in public schools, clinical settings, and research institutions. Previously, her work focused on a practitioner-based approach that concentrated on health education, social and emotional learning (SEL), and school climate. She served as a former public school teacher, bilingual school counselor in New York City, and part of the founding leadership team at Bard High School Early College Newark where she developed and oversaw student-centered policies, programs, and structures. As part of her doctoral studies, she explored facilitators and barriers to the implementation of school wellness policies. She was also a project director at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence where she led the earlier stage of development for the inspirED Online Resource Center. Recognizing the impact and reach of evidence-informed, technology-based interventions to improve mental health and well-being in youth, she completed her postdoctoral studies in the design and evaluation of digital interventions at the Yale School of Medicine. Since her transition to a research career, she continues to apply a public health approach to reach more students and to improve youth mental health and well-being outcomes in schools with a specific focus on reducing the risk of suicide. Currently, Dr. Fernandes is the Director of Research and Evaluation at Born This Way Foundation and an assistant clinical professor in the Child Study Center and of Biomedical Informatics and Data Science at the Yale School of Medicine. She is a former Yale Center for Clinical Investigation Scholar and assistant Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) where she received a career development award by NIH/NCATS to design and to evaluate a digital game to prevent suicide among youth who misuse substances, including opioids. In her current role, she remains the Founding Director of Youth4Wellness at Yale and collaborates with XRPediatrics, CHIL@Yale, and The ACCESS Lab. She previously worked with the play2PREVENT Lab. In her role at the play2PREVENT Lab, she served as the Deputy Director of Mental Health & Well-Being and the Project Director of a NIH-/NIDA-funded Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) initiative to address opioid misuse in youth in school-based health centers. She was also a Guest Editor in the Supplemental Issue in Prevention Science Journal highlighting the coordinated efforts among 10 HEAL research projects across the nation in preventing opioid misuse. Other research interests focus on youth-led participatory action research and the translation of policies into practices and successful transitions from high school to post-secondary education, employment, and healthcare. Dr. Fernandes aims to use evidence-based research to inform federal-, state-, and local-level policies and to provide support to schools in their youth-led implementation efforts. She served on the Board of Directors for the Connecticut Association of School-Based Health Centers as Treasurer. Dr. Fernandes also practices as a licensed professional counselor and serves on the Digital Well-Being Advisory Board at the Peer Health Exchange.

Karim Ibrahim is an Assistant Professor at the Yale Child Study Center. His translational neuroscience research focuses on brain networks associated with emotion regulation impairments in childhood-onset psychiatric disorders. Dr. Karim Ibrahim’s research is interdisciplinary and integrates multimodal imaging methods including functional and structural MRI, machine learning, and network neuroscience/connectomics approaches to identify biomarkers relevant to child psychopathology. His recent interests lie in using and developing tools predictive modeling/machine learning approaches that leverage large-scale neuroimaging datasets, including data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, for identifying robust brain-based biomarkers. Among other things in this area, his research also investigates dynamics of the human functional connectome and large-scale networks, how brain connectivity is altered in mental health disorders (such as a disruptive behavior disorders, anxiety disorders, and autism spectrum disorder) and the neural response to treatment in youths. As a licensed clinical child psychologist, he also has extensive experience in developmental psychopathology, including assessments and cognitive-behavioral interventions for autism spectrum disorder, mood, anxiety, and disruptive behavior. Karim completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Yale Child Study Center T32 research program in Translational Developmental Neuroscience and through an award from the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation multidisciplinary research training program.

Dr. Kaye is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, using a combination of circuit and computational approaches to understand adaptations to the danger in the environment and how those adaptations underlie PTSD. He graduated from the University of California M.D., Ph.D. program, where he used two-photon imaging and computational modeling to understand the organization of visual motion processing. Then, he joined the psychiatry residency at Yale, where he worked in Alex Kwan's lab on using calcium and neurotransmitter imaging to understand how arousal states change after stress, and also developed computational models of PTSD.The lab will focus on understanding how neuromodulatory circuits reprogram one another to create adaptive responses to traumatic experiences. Underlying this idea is the central problem of developing a mechanistic and functional understanding of stress and anxiety. The lab uses microendoscope and two-photon imaging of calcium and neurotransmitter sensors, large-scale electrophysiology (Neuropixels), computational analysis of behavior (DeepLabCut), and single cell transcriptomics to understand this problem.

Dr. Maudry Laurent-Rolle received her B.S. from Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus in Biology in 2001. She then obtained her MD and PhD from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her dissertation research was funded by an NIH pre-doctoral fellowship, which allowed her to examine the molecular mechanisms by which flaviviruses inhibit host innate immune responses.  She completed residency training in Internal Medicine at Albert Einstein/Montefiore Medical Center in 2016 then joined the Infectious Diseases Fellowship program here at Yale University. Her research focus is on vaccine design and development of antivirals. She is originally from the beautiful Caribbean island of Dominica, known for its many rivers, tropical rainforests, and natural hot springs.

Dr. Longbrake is an associate professor in the Department of Neurology. She graduated summa cum laude from Cedarville University in 1998, then earned combined MD/PhD degrees at the Ohio State University. Her dissertation research focused on the neuro-immune response to traumatic spinal cord injuries. Dr. Longbrake then completed her neurology residency at Washington University in St. Louis. From 2013-2016, Dr. Longbrake was a Sylvia Lawry fellow of the National MS Society. During her fellowship, she was involved in numerous MS clinical trials and focused her research on better understanding the effects of modern MS disease modifying drugs. Dr. Longbrake is a member of the Alpha Omega Alpha Society and the American Academy of Neurology. She joined the Yale faculty in 2016. At Yale, she is Director of Clinical Research in the Neuroimmunology division, designing and implementing numerous clinical trials and other human research studies. She is also the Program Director for the Neuroimmunology Fellowship at Yale. Dr. Longbrake's research focuses on working towards personalizing management strategies for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and detecting the disease at the earliest physiologic signs of damage, before clinical symptoms develop. MS is a heterogeneous disease which at times causes minimal disability and at other times is neurologically devastating within years, despite appropriate treatment. By the time the first symptoms emerge, the disease has already caused permanent neurologic damage. No predictive algorithms or biomarkers currently exist to detect pre-clinical disease or to stratify risk and guide treatment decisions at the time of diagnosis. Dr. Longbrake's current work focuses on early-stage MS and identifying the earliest immunologic and radiologic changes associated with disease. One area of particular interest is the microbiome/metabolome and how it relates to the immune system and MS clinical course. Dr. Longbrake has extensive experience in designing/implementing clinical trials, both investigator-initiated and industry-sponsored.

Dr. McAdow received her MD and PhD in Microbiology from the University of Chicago. Her doctoral studies investigated the interactions between Staphylococcus aureus virulence factors and the host coagulation cascade during the pathogenesis of bacterial infection under the mentorship of Dr. Olaf Schneewind. She came to Yale University for her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology and stayed for fellowship in Maternal Fetal Medicine. Dr. McAdow cares for patients pregnancy complications. She is the recipient of one of the inaugural Yale Physician Scientist Development Awards and a training grant from the Foundation for the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine and the American Association of Obstetrics and Gynecology Foundation. Her research, conducted under the mentorship of Dr. Anne Eichmann in the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center, investigates the molecular mechanisms of endothelial dysfunction in preeclampsia, a common complication of pregnancy that jeopardizes the health of the mother and fetus. Her other research interests include the biology of labor induction and fetal growth restriction.

Julia Rosenberg is a graduate of Cornell University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Yale Pediatric Residency, and the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program. She is the Associate Director of the Yale Pediatric Immigrant and Refugee Clinic, and her work focuses on access to mental and behavioral health care for immigrant and refugee children and families and addressing disparities in access to care.

Dr. Shin completed Allergy and Clinical Immunology fellowship training (2017-2020) at Yale and joined the Yale Section of Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology as a faculty in 2020.  As an Allergy and Immunology specialist, she cares for patients with wide range of allergic and immunologic diseases. Dr. Shin also joined Dr. Insoo Kang's laboratory in 2018 and has been studying the immune system of patients with immune deficiency and/or immune dysregulation using in-depth immune profiling techniques. Dr. Shin’s overall research goal is understanding how immune alterations occur and affect the pathogenesis of such disorders in relation to their genetic defects, clinical presentations and comorbidities.