CIMIT names six Career Development Award winners

THIS PAGE HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING

CIMIT is pleased to announce six recipients of Career Development Awards. Each recipient will receive a grant of $40,000.

Rajiv Gupta, MD, PhD, Massachusetts General Hospital Dr. Gupta and his team of researchers, who recently were co-winners of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, are focused on low-cost, disposable telerobotic manipulators for image-guided interventions. Dr. Gupta seeks to study low-cost, disposable telerobotic manipulators for image-guided interventions.

Virna Sales, MD, Children’s Hospital Boston As part of her CDA designation, Dr. Sales was named winner of the Shore Fellowship. It was named after Drs. Miles and Eleanor Shore, in recognition of their work for women's education at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Sales’s area of research interest is tissue-engineered heart valves. Children and infants who need replacements for their malformed heart values frequently face numerous surgeries as they grow up. Her career development grant is to study the design and creation of biomaterials for pulmonary valve replacements in congenital heart disease.

Satish Singh, MD, Boston Medical Center Dr. Singh is researching the development of a novel, optically-guided biopsy device for lower gastrointestinal endoscopy. Through his career development grant, Dr. Singh plans to acquire of deeper knowledge and skills in biomedical engineering, optical physics and signal processing.

Chong Wing Yung, PhD, Children’s Hospital Boston. Dr. Yung is pursuing research in developing an extracorporeal biomedical device to clear pathogens from the bloodstream. This career development grant will permit Dr. Yung to study the development of a nanomagnetic-microfluidic separator for sepsis control.

Two-career development awards were given in the Clinical Systems Innovation program to Ronald Dixon, MD, MA, an internist and primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Amanda Gruber, MD, a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital.

Ronald Dixon, MD, MA, Massachusetts General Hospital Dr. Dixon’s research will explore alternative methods of patient-centric healthcare delivery, with a focus on access to primary care. His research interests include virtual clinical encounters, remote monitoring in disease prevention and point-of-care testing with primary care kiosks. He will also study mechanisms to sustain quality and integration of primary care with the emergence of retail medicine.

Amanda Gruber, MD, McLean Hospital The focus of Dr. Gruber’s research will be human-robot interaction in healthcare in the development of dialog incorporating cognitive-behavioral techniques on mobile home robots to enhance compliance with health-related behavior changes. The award will allow Dr. Gruber to re-focus her career trajectory and leverage her diverse experience in industry robotics, academic research and clinical practice.

The purpose of the CDA awards is to help investigators enhance their current discipline by acquiring new knowledge through the mentoring process that could be complementary to their research. In evaluating applications for CDA award, consideration is also given to doctors who have shown evidence of creative research while following a dynamic path of clinical activity.