Henry Kunkel Young Investigator Award
The Henry Kunkel Young Investigator Award is awarded to a physician scientist, age 45 or younger by Oct. 1 of the year in which they are nominated, who has made outstanding and promising independent contributions to basic or clinical research in the field of rheumatology. This year’s recipients are Katherine P. Liao, MD, MPH, and Amr H. Sawalha, MD.
Dr. Liao is an associate professor of medicine and assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, Boston. She is also the director of VERITY Bioinformatics Core in the Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy Research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, and leads a bioinformatics research group at the Veterans Affairs Healthcare Center, Boston.
While focused on the role of inflammation and cardiovascular disease in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Dr. Liao’s work has enhanced rheumatologists’ understanding of the complex relationship between inflammation, lipids and cardiovascular risk in RA. Current studies are taking a closer look at the impact of inflammation on the small vessels in the heart, its association with higher mortality and preventive strategies.
Her work has also focused on bringing novel approaches from biomedical informatics, such as machine learning and natural language processing, to rheumatology clinical research. At both Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Veterans Affairs Healthcare Center, Dr. Liao and her team develop and apply approaches to accurately identify patients with rheumatic conditions using electronic health record data, increasing opportunities for discovery research with expanded access to clinical data.
Linking electronic health record data with genomic data at the Veterans Affairs Healthcare Center in the Million Veteran Program affords new challenges for analyses, along with opportunities for research. Her team recently used the genomic and clinical data in the program to screen for potential effects of an anti-inflammatory RA therapy across 1,800 other conditions.
Since joining the ACR in 2007, Dr. Liao has served on the ACR and European League Against Rheumatism RA Classification Criteria Committee, co-chaired the Health Services Abstract Review Committee for the ACR/ARP Annual Meeting, and now chairs the ACR’s Research and Publications Subcommittee of the Committee on Registries and Health Information Technology.
Dr. Sawalha is a professor of medicine and pediatrics, chief of the Division of Rheumatology in the Department of Pediatrics and director of the Lupus Center of Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
His work has predominantly focused on lupus, but has expanded to other related immune-mediated diseases, such as vasculitis and scleroderma. His research focuses on elucidating genetic and epigenetic contributions to the pathogenesis of systemic autoimmune and inflammatory diseases. His team applies state-of-the-art genomic, epigenomic and bioinformatics methodologies and subsequent functional studies using both in vitro and in vivo systems to identify and characterize genetic and epigenetic loci and pathways involved in the pathogenesis of immune-mediated diseases.
Dr. Sawalha graduated medical school from the Jordan University of Science and Technology, Irbid, Jordan, in 1998. Five years later, he completed his residency at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, and then his fellowship in rheumatology at the University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor, in 2005.
Between 2005 and 2012, he was on the faculty of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation before returning to the University of Michigan Medical School in 2012, where he held multiple positions: professor of internal medicine and Marvin and Betty Danto Research Professor of Connective Tissue Research, director of the rheumatology training grant funded by the NIH and associate director of the NIH-funded University of Michigan Clinical Autoimmunity Center of Excellence.
Earlier this year, he joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he is also the Vincent Londino Endowed Chair in Pediatric Rheumatology and director of the Division of Rheumatology at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. In this new role, he is establishing and leading a new Autoimmune Genomics Research Center.
Over the years, Dr. Sawalha has authored nearly 150 peer-reviewed manuscripts, book chapters and review articles, and 100-plus abstracts. He serves on several boards and committees, including the Medical Scientific Advisory Council of the Lupus Foundation of America and the Vasculitis Foundation Medical and Scientific Advisory Board, and chairs the ACR’s Abstract Oversight Committee. He has also received multiple awards, including the ACR’s Edmund L. Dubois, MD, Memorial Lectureship Award in 2015 for his work in lupus. In 2014, he was named a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.
“It is humbling to know that my contribution to the field of rheumatology has been recognized by my colleagues,” says Dr. Sawalha. “This award is special, and just to be among the group of previous award recipients is a big honor.”
