Fall 2022’s Awards, Appointments & Announcements in Rheumatology

Lupus Research Alliance Inaugurates Diversity Awards

The Lupus Research Alliance (LRA) inaugurated two new award mechanisms this past summer with the goal of alleviating the racial disparities prevalent in both autoimmune diseases and the biomedical research community. Three notable early career scientists from under-represented groups received the Diversity in Lupus Research Career Development Awards, and two postdoctoral fellows received the Diversity in Lupus Research Postdoctoral Awards. 

Pediatric rheumatologist Andrea Knight, MD, MSCE, based at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), Toronto, a recipient of the Career Development Award, is seeking to understand brain changes in adolescents with lupus. The $600,000 award is generous, she notes, and the four-year funding duration is especially helpful for building a cohort to observe longitudinal changes over time. 

“This award allows my team—including psychologists, neuroradiologists and biomedical engineers—to look at changes in brain structure and cognition over time as the children with lupus become young adults.” 

In addition to her appointment as a clinician investigator at the SickKids Research Institute and associate professor at the University of Toronto, Dr. Knight is chair of the Lupus Section for the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA). She is also co-leader of the CARRA Mental Health Workgroup and has been studying mental health and brain health in lupus patients since her fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), characterizing depression and anxiety. Now, she has expanded her focus to cognition, using advanced brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology to explore whether changes in the brain can be associated with lupus in particular. 

“The hope,” she says, “is to couple the imaging information (from structural, diffusion tensor and functional MRIs) with markers in the blood and assessment of brain function to try and understand how much these changes are related to inflammation due to lupus.” Dr. Knight says the LRA awards are “inspiring and hopeful,” not only for current academic researchers but also for younger scientists pursuing their careers.

Another Career Development Award recipient, Ashira Blazer, MD, MSCI, who is an attending physician, Hospital for Special Surgery, and an assistant professor of medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City, says, “This award is very important for me and also for the field. One of the things that’s been a big issue in rheumatology, and in medicine as a whole is that we don’t have enough investigators of color. They are less likely to get quality mentorship and less likely to have the ability to stay in the pipeline.”