2009-12-07

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the ASH Scholar Awards program. During this 25-year period, ASH has supported more than 200 fellows and junior faculty in both basic and clinical/translational research by providing partial salary or other support during the critical period required for completion of training and achievement of status as an independent investigator.  

Each day, ASH News Daily will feature current ASH Scholars. To find out more about the ASH Scholar Awards program, please visit www.hematology.org.

Anil Chauhan, PhD

Dr. Chauhan is an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Iowa.  Dr. Chauhan received his PhD from the International Centre for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering in Italy, and he completed his postdoctoral training in the field of thrombosis and hemostasis at the Immune Disease Institute and Harvard Medical School. The major focus of research in Dr. Chauhan’s laboratory is on the role of adhesion molecules such as von Willebrand factor and fibronectin in thrombosis and inflammation. Dr. Chauhan’s laboratory uses intra-vital microscopy to study the interaction of platelets and leukocytes with the endothelium followed by stimulation/injury. Most of his work involves genetically modified mice combined with disease models such as atherosclerosis and ischemic stroke. Dr. Chauhan’s ASH Scholar Award focuses on investigating the role of von Willebrand factor-cleaving protease ADAMTS13 in ischemic stroke.

Todd A. Fehniger, MD, PhD

Dr. Fehniger is an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Oncology, at Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Fehniger earned his MD and PhD from The Ohio State University, where, under the mentorship of Dr. Michael Caligiuri, he studied the role of cytokines in innate immunity. Afterward, Dr. Fehniger moved to Washington University School of Medicine, where he completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in medical oncology. He performed his postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Timothy Ley, where he unraveled mechanisms of natural killer cell cytotoxicity. Dr. Fehniger’s laboratory is interested in the cellular and molecular programs responsible for controlling natural killer cell development and activation. Currently, this involves understanding the role of microRNAs in natural killer cell biology. Dr. Fehniger’s clinical interests are in lymphoma, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and developing innate immune therapeutic strategies for patients with hematologic malignancies. His research is supported by ASH, NIH, ASCO, the Mallinckrodt Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Naoto Hirano, MD, PhD

Dr. Hirano is an assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School. He attended medical and graduate school at the University of Tokyo, receiving both an MD and PhD.  Dr. Hirano completed a residency in internal medicine at the University of Tokyo Hospital and the Jichi Medical University Hospital. After completing a fellowship in hematology-oncology at the University of Tokyo Hospital, he served as an attending physician at the International Medical Center of Japan in Tokyo. Dr. Hirano completed his postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Lee Nadler at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Dr. Hirano’s research focuses on the development of novel cancer immunotherapy and the elucidation of the pathogenesis of immune-mediated aplastic anemia. As a translational researcher, he has always conducted his scientific inquiries with an eye toward translation to the clinic.

Siobán Keel, MD

Dr. Keel is an acting instructor in medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. Dr. Keel graduated from Carleton College as a biology major and earned an MD from the University of Minnesota, where she also completed clinical training in internal medicine. She completed subspecialty training in hematology at the University of Washington, where she studies erythropoiesis in Dr. Janis L. Abkowitz’s laboratory and is transitioning from a mentored fellow to an independent junior faculty member. Her primary laboratory research focus is to understand normal and disordered red cell development. She studies the heme export protein, feline leukemia virus subgroup C receptor (FLVCR), which is required for terminal red blood cell differentiation. Her work is aimed at discovering the pathophysiology of the erythroid marrow failure in animals with dysfunctional FLVCR and its implication for understanding ineffective erythropoiesis in clinical settings. Dr. Keel is board-certified in hematology and internal medicine by the American Board of Internal Medicine and attends on both the inpatient leukemia and hematology consult services and maintains a general hematology clinic at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Her research is also supported by a KO8 from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

Allison King, MD, MPH

Dr. King is a pediatric hematologist and an assistant professor at the Washington University School of Medicine. She earned her MD at the University of Missouri and trained in pediatrics and hematology at Washington University and St. Louis Children’s Hospital. During her fellowship, she completed training in clinical investigation in Dr. Michael DeBaun’s laboratory and earned an MPH at St. Louis University. She is currently a PhD candidate in education. Dr. King’s research lab is focused on educational and cognitive outcomes of children with sickle cell disease. She studies challenges for children that are related to disease morbidity, family/social structure, and socioeconomic factors. Current interventions to improve outcomes include a tutoring and memory rehabilitation program for students with sickle cell disease and a parenting program for the caregivers of young children with sickle cell disease. She is also conducting health-education interventions to increase the awareness and understanding of sickle trait among African Americans in the St. Louis community. Dr. King’s work is supported by ASH, NHLBI, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, HRSA, and the NMDP.

Simón Méndez-Ferrer, PhD

Dr. Méndez-Ferrer was recently appointed assistant professor in the Tisch Cancer Institute, Department of Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York. He earned his PhD in physiology at the University of Seville, Spain. His postdoctoral research in Dr. Paul S. Frenette’s laboratory focused on the regulation of the hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) bone marrow (BM) niche by the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). His studies demonstrated that HSCs do not circulate steadily or randomly under homeostasis, but rather follow a physiologically regulated rhythmic release. Circadian HSC trafficking is orchestrated in the central nervous system (CNS) by core genes of the molecular clock that regulate HSC attraction to their BM niche by rhythmic secretion of norepinephrine from nerve terminals, activation of the b3-adrenergic receptor, degradation of Sp1, and down-regulation of Cxcl12. These studies showed for the first time that the CNS directly regulates the function of a stem cell niche in peripheral tissues and suggested significantly higher yields if HSCs were harvested from the blood at the acrophase. His recent studies have identified, using nestin expression, the cells targeted by the SNS in the BM regulating HSC traffic as mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), suggesting a heterotypic association of HSC-MSCs in the BM niche.  

Alex C. Minella, MD

Dr. Minella is an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University School of Medicine. He is a graduate of Yale and Vanderbilt University Medical School, and he completed clinical training in internal medicine and hematology-oncology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. For his postdoctoral research training, Dr. Minella joined Bruce Clurman’s laboratory at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where he focused initially on oncogenic regulation of the cyclin E protein and the functional interplay between cyclin E and p53 in controlling cell proliferation and genome stability. In the latter half of his postdoctoral training, Dr. Minella studied the physiologic consequences of cyclin E dysregulation, utilizing a mouse model of impaired Fbw7 ubiquitin ligase pathway function. This work led him to the study of hematopoietic cell differentiation, with particular focus on erythroid maturation in vivo, which he found was defective in the setting of high cyclin E. At Northwestern, Dr. Minella continues to focus on the role of cell-cycle controls in the regulation of normal and malignant hematopoiesis. In addition to ASH funding, Dr. Minella has received grants from the National Cancer Institute, Leukemia Research Foundation, Schweppe Foundation, and Sidney Kimmel Foundation.

Ivan Maillard, MD, PhD

Dr. Maillard is a physician-scientist with research interests in the regulation of hematopoietic stem cell homeostasis, T-cell immunology, and the Notch signaling pathway. Dr. Maillard obtained his medical training from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and a PhD in immunology and virology through the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. He then completed hematology-oncology training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he was subsequently appointed as an instructor in medicine. During this time, Dr. Maillard studied the importance of the Notch pathway at early stages of lymphoid development, in the maintenance of adult hematopoietic stem cells, and in immune recovery after bone marrow transplantation. Since 2007, Dr. Maillard has worked as an assistant professor in the Center for Stem Cell Biology, Life Sciences Institute, and the Division of Hematology-Oncology, Department of Medicine, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Current interests in the Maillard laboratory include the role of Notch signaling in alloimmunity, particularly in the setting of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and immune-mediated bone marrow failure. In addition, his laboratory investigates the epigenetic regulation of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells by histone methyltransferases.

Tammy Morrish, PhD

Dr. Morrish is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. Her undergraduate training was in biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. Her graduate work was completed at the University of Michigan in the Department of Human Genetics in the laboratory of Dr. John Moran. Dr. Morrish’s graduate work identified a mechanism of human LINE-1 retrotransposition that occurs at sites of DNA damage, including telomeres. For this work, Dr. Morrish was awarded a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship. Her postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Dr. Carol Greider focuses on mechanisms of telomere maintenance by recombination in primary hematopoietic and tumor cells. She is examining how various genes involved in homologous recombination may increase or decrease telomere lengths due to changes in telomere recombination. These studies utilize a mouse model for B-cell lymphoma, which lacks telomerase. Dr. Morrish’s current interests include determining which genes contribute to subtelomeric recombination and whether certain primary cells, such as mesenchymal cells, have higher rates of telomere recombination. Before receiving an ASH Scholar Award, she was a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Fellow.

Vivian G. Oehler, MD

Dr. Oehler is an assistant member at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an assistant professor at the University of Washington (UW). She graduated from Harvard University and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and completed clinical training in internal medicine and hematology-oncology at UW. As a translational researcher in hematology, Dr. Oehler examines molecular signatures that distinguish chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) progenitor cells from normal hematopoietic progenitor cells to define mechanisms involved in CML progression and the effects of tyrosine kinase inhibitor therapy on the underlying natural history of CML disease. The most promising candidates derived from these large patient-based studies are examined in vitro and in vivo to better understand their role in disease progression and therapy resistance. A primary goal is to use these findings to improve patient care. Dr. Oehler is board-certified and sees patients at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and UW. She has received research support from ASH, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the V Foundation for Cancer Research, and NIH. 

Christopher Y. Park, MD, PhD

Dr. Park is an instructor in pathology and attending hematopathologist at Stanford Hospital and Clinics and postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Irving L. Weissman at Stanford University School of Medicine. He completed his undergraduate work at Yale College and received his MD and PhD from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. He then completed his residency and fellowship training in anatomic pathology and hematopathology at Stanford. Dr. Park’s work investigates how genetic/epigenetic changes accumulate in a stepwise fashion to induce myeloid leukemias and seeks to identify the cell ultimately targeted for transformation. Dr. Park’s work focuses on the interactions between microRNAs and their mRNA targets in hematopoietic stem cells and/or progenitors and seeks to identify those interactions that mediate leukemia initiation, progression, and transformation. His approach involves comparing highly purified populations of normal and malignant stem cells in primary patient samples, followed by functional validation studies of candidate disease genes using knockout and lentiviral mouse models of disease. Special emphasis is placed on performing such validation studies using primary human disease tissue in improved xenograft models to increase the relevance of experimental findings to human disease.

Ryan Phan, PhD

Dr. Phan earned his PhD from Columbia University, where he studied the role of Bcl6 proto-oncogene in B-cell development and lymphomagenesis in the laboratory of Dr. Riccardo Dalla-Favera. He received his postdoctoral fellowship training at Harvard Medical School in Dr. Frederick Alt’s lab, where he is focusing on the molecular mechanism of chromosomal translocations observed in mature B-cell lymphomas. This fellowship is the next step in moving his career toward a tenure-track position at UCLA/VA Medical Center. Dr. Phan’s research is centered on understanding the molecular pathogenesis of B-cell lymphoma, with special emphasis on determining the mechanisms by which the genetic lesions occur and elucidating how these lesions contribute to the development of B-cell lymphomas.

Rodger Tiedemann, PhD

Dr. Tiedemann is a New Zealand-trained hematologist and fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia. In 1997, Dr. Tiedemann completed his medical and surgery degrees at the University of Auckland and simultaneously completed a PhD in molecular medicine, examining antigen-presenting cell and lymphocyte activation by superantigens. He completed dual clinical and pathology hematology fellowships in 2005. In 2006, he won the national Hematology Society of Australia and New Zealand (HSANZ) Young Investigator Award. From 2005 to 2009, he was a research fellow at Mayo Clinic in Arizona, and in 2007 he was awarded a Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation (MMRF) fellowship. Dr. Tiedemann is currently assistant professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic and is engaged in high-throughput genome-scale RNA interference screens in multiple myeloma to identify uniquely vulnerable novel therapeutic targets. His peer-reviewed publications include articles in Blood, Cancer Cell, JCI, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Immunology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He is co-author of two U.S. patent applications.

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