CIMIT Names 2009 Recipients of Young Clinician Research Awards

CIMIT Names 2009 Recipients of Young Clinician Research Awards

Seven Innovative Physicians Win $50,000 to Fund Novel Medical Device Research

CIMIT is pleased to announce that seven promising medical professionals have been named recipients of the Young Clinician Research Award for 2009.

Supported by a generous gift from Johnson & Johnson, the 2009 Young Clinician Research Award Program continues to encourage physicians, new to their careers, to create innovative life-saving medical devices and technologies. Applicants were nominated by site miners from the CIMIT consortium member hospitals.

Claire Cronin, MD, MBA	Newton-Wellesley Hospital	Novel 3D reconstruction breast pathology reporting system.
Marilyn L. Moy, MD	VA Boston Healthcare System	A novel system to monitor physical activity and associated physiological responses in the home environment with application to patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
Harald Ott, MD	Massachusetts General Hospital	Myocardial regeneration based on perfusion decellularized cardiac matrix scaffolds.
Robert Riviello, MD	Brigham and Women's Hospital	Innovative wound care technology for low-income settings.
Jennifer E. Rosen, MD	Boston Medical Center	Optically guided differential diagnosis in thyroid nodules
Joan Spiegel, MD	Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center	A novel pressure-sensing syringe for improved airway control
Gerhard Wolf, MD	Children's Hospital Boston	Optimizing mechanical ventilation of critically ill children through the development of continuous non-invasive imaging at the bedside

“These are very creative young researchers,” said CIMIT Executive Director John Parrish, MD. “The grants are designed to enable them to establish their research career while continuing their work in the clinic.”

Judges were seeking “rising stars” in the CIMIT clinical research community examining medical-device development as it related to regenerative medicine, minimally invasive diagnostics and therapies, metabolic disease and biomaterials. Awards were given to researchers at each of the seven medical centers within the CIMIT Consortium: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, and VA Boston Healthcare System.

Those eligible included clinical researchers early in their careers, such as Fellows, Instructors and Assistant Professors. A key criterion was the clinician’s desire to solve complex healthcare problems.

Other criteria for selection included fitting in with the CIMIT mission; the potential impact of the clinician’s work on patient care; the collaborative nature of the planned work; the innovativeness of the research; the academic excellence of the candidate; and the potential of the candidate to become a “rising star” with a future as a clinical leader in the field.

Site miners at the institutions who helped identify promising candidates are the following: BIDMC, Steven Schachter, MD; BMC, George O’Connor, MD; BWH, Frederick Schoen, MD, PhD; CHB, Martha Murray, MD and Joseph Pigula, MD; MGH, Warren Sandberg, MD, PhD; NWH, Keith Isaacson, MD; and VA BHS, Brian Hoffman, MD.

CIMIT is the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. A non-profit consortium of Boston-area teaching hospitals and engineering schools, CIMIT provides innovators with resources to explore, develop and implement novel technological solutions for today’s most urgent healthcare problems.

Members of the consortium are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Newton-Wellesley Hospital, Partners HealthCare, and VA Boston Healthcare System.