Rheumatology Health Professionals

In addition, Dr. Gravallese continues serving as the Myles J. McDonough Chair in Rheumatology, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Massachusetts (UMM) Medical School.

Since last year, Dr. Gravallese has also been preparing for the role of ACR president. After sitting on the ACR’s Executive Committee as the College’s secretary for two years, she will serve as president-elect for one year and then be named ACR president in November 2019.

She received her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed her residency and fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston.

Dr. Gravallese began her career as a scientist interested in rheumatoid arthritis. She conducted research at Harvard Institutes of Medicine and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where she joined the Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians as an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

As a graduate of the Hedwig van Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program at Drexel University, she is dedicated to preparing senior women faculty at schools of medicine, dentistry and public health to move into leadership positions.

Dr. Antony Rosen Moves Precision Medicine Forward

As vice dean for research and director of the Division of Rheumatology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Antony Rosen, MD, says the world of medicine has entered a new era of precision diagnosis and precision treatment, according to an article published by the Center for Innovative Medicine at Johns Hopkins.¹

As a leading advocate of precision medicine, he explains, “This enormous web of interconnected things” has dramatically changed the way healthcare practitioners analyze data, recognize patterns, absorb information and make decisions.

“That remains our calling, to bring science to the caring practice of individuals with disease, for prevention, monitoring, therapy and cure,” says Dr. Rosen. “The tools of the modern era are greatly affecting our ability to accomplish those goals, and that’s what we are calling precision medicine.”

For example, he says not all patients with certain diseases are alike. Recognizing the subtype of a disease a patient has will lead to customized treatment.

“If you have a group of 100 people with the same disease, they really should be divided into homogeneous subgroups,” says Dr. Rosen. “It’s important to identify these subgroups and understand what the disease mechanisms are that impact them in specific ways.”

Clinicians at multidisciplinary Centers of Excellence are already engaged in such practices. By recognizing subgroups and studying patient blood and tissue samples, Dr. Rosen says they will “discover mechanisms that underlie (each patient’s) disease, with the hope of finding targeted treatment.”