ThinkResearch Podcast

Yonatan Grad, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). Using a combination of genomics, microbiology, mathematical modeling, and epidemiological tools, his lab investigates how pathogens evolve and spread. In collaboration with hospitals and public health institutions, his projects include studying outbreaks, as well as the biology and epidemiology that underlies the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance. He earned his MD and PhD at Harvard Medical School, trained in internal medicine at BWH, and in infectious diseases at BWH and Massachusetts General Hospital. He completed his research fellowship at the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at HSPH with Marc Lipsitch.

Elena Aikawa, MD, PhD, is professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, director of the Vascular Biology Program at the Center for Interdisciplinary Sciences, founding director of the Heart Valve Translational Research Program, and associate head of section of Cardiovascular Life Sciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She holds editorial positions at Circulation Research, Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, PLoS ONE, and Arteriosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. Aikawa’s research focuses on the development of new therapies to prevent, treat, and cure calcific aortic valve stenosis.

Jane Wilkinson is senior director of alliance and project management of the Genomics Platform at the Broad Institute, where she manages the platform’s external collaborations and alliances. Wilkinson has over 20 years of high-throughput genomics experience from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Genome Center where she was a key leader on the Human Genome Project, and at Monsanto Company where she led a new directive in plant genomics. During her time at the Broad, she has worked on various genomic initiatives including cancer, mendelian, and infectious and common diseases.

Lotfi Merabet, OD, PhD, is a clinician-scientist who is investigating how the brain adapts to visual impairment. He is director of the Laboratory for Visual Neuroplasticity at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Schepens Eye Research Institute. He is staff optometrist in the vision rehabilitation service at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and associate professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School.

Janet Mullington, PhD, is the program director of the Clinical Research Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), and professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. Mullington has a national and international reputation of excellence in the area of the role of sleep in human health and disease, with a focus on inflammation and host defenses. She also works to better understand the impact of sleep on cardiovascular, endocrine, and neurobehavioral function.

Isaiah A. Cochran, MD, is a resident physician in family medicine at Halifax Health and immediate past national president and chair of the board of trustees for the American Medical Student Association. Cochran went to undergrad at Waynesburg University in Pennsylvania, and attended medical school at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine, where he graduated in 2019. Cochran’s interests lie in the politics of medicine. He hopes to use his developing knowledge as a family medicine physician to fight for equity, equality, and justice for individuals in and outside of healthcare, and perhaps one day seek public office.

Alexander P. Lin, PhD, is director of the Center for Clinical Spectroscopy in the department of radiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. He is also an investigator at the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Laboratory at BWH, visiting research associate at the Center of MR Research at the University of Illinois Chicago, and is affiliated with Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital. His research focuses on translating magnetic resonance spectroscopy to the clinic, with an emphasis on traumatic brain injury.

Osama Rahma, MD, is a principal investigator at the Center for Immuno-Oncology and Gastroenterology (GI) Cancer Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His research focus is on drug development of combinational immune therapeutics, with the goal of moving immunotherapy to GI cancers and understanding the resistance mechanism to immunotherapy in GI cancers. Rahma received his medical degree from University of Damascus, completed his residency in internal medicine at East Carolina University, and a geriatrics fellowship at University of Hawaii.