Year 3. November 25. Fall Conference Season – We Were Really Busy!
The fall is a time when many of our trainees and faculty convene for scientific meetings. I am always impressed by the depth and breadth of our participation in these conferences, and I use this week’s post to share what many of our UCLA Department of Medicine (DoM) colleagues have been up to. We also had a successful Research Town Hall where we had important discussions about our strategies to support our research faculty and to position the DoM for even greater success as an environment in which research innovation and scientific breakthroughs are the norm.
Inaugural Comprehensive Liver Research Center Conference Connects and Educates
The UCLA Comprehensive Liver Research Center (CLRC), launched just a few months ago, has already raised its profile and is promoting its mission with its inaugural symposium on Oct. 11. Attended by more than 120 trainees, faculty, and researchers, the symposium was an astounding success, with speakers from as far away as Spain sharing their latest research developments on liver disease.
Like other enrichment activities at the CLRC, such as its monthly speaker series, the symposium was geared toward trainees and students. It was also meant to attract those who have not conducted liver research and are interested in expanding their knowledge on liver diseases.
The symposium was co-led by CLRC Director and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Digestive Diseases Rajat Singh, MD, MBBS and Vatche Agopian, MD, co-director of the CLRC, director of the Dumont-UCLA Liver Cancer Center at DGSOM and an associate professor of surgery.
“The symposium has been a collaborative approach to share information, and I think everybody has something to take away from this,” Dr. Singh said. Dr. Agopian added, “Students, graduate students, postdocs, junior faculty and even established faculty — they all have things to learn from one another.”
Attendees learned from a wide range of speakers. UCLA faculty Jihane Benhammou, MD, PhD, Alexander Nguyen, MD, PhD, Alvin Chan, MD, MPH and Arpan Patel, MD, PhD gave talks on their research, as did postdoctoral scholars Debajyoti Das, PhD and Xu Xiao, PhD. Guest speakers hailed from Duke, Harvard, UCSD, Cedars-Sinai, Stanford, UCSF and the Center for Cooperative Research in Biosciences in Bilbao, Spain. I closed with a keynote talk on the mechanisms that underpin fatty liver disease. I learned a lot from my fellow speakers, and no doubt the rest of the attendees did as well!
The lectures were accompanied by many fascinating projects presented by UCLA students and postdoctoral fellows during the day’s poster session, such as the one by Courtney Labrecque, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Benhammou’s lab. Dr. Labrecque has been investigating the mechanisms behind improved outcomes in a cohort of Veterans who took statins while being treated for hepatocellular carcinoma — a type of liver cancer — with immunotherapy. She and her team modeled how statins can change the expression of one type of protein that is responsible for the body’s immune response, a key step in their understanding of the drug’s potential anti-cancer benefits in this patient population.
“The CLRC symposium was a great experience for me as a new postdoc in the field to be able to directly learn from experts in the field during their talks as well as network and discuss my own work with them,” Dr. Labrecque said. “Drs. Singh and Agopian and the conference organizers did an excellent job putting together the symposium and I am already looking forward to next year!”
It is clear that the CLRC’s efforts to promote scholarship among our trainees and early-career researchers, especially with regards to metabolic dysfunction-associated fatty liver disease (MASLD), are paying off. The symposium is likely to spark collaborations that will lead to even more advancements in understanding MASLD and other liver conditions. Many of our external speakers and guests hold leadership positions at their own liver centers.
“I think it’s important for the outside world to know all of the great liver research that goes on here, and that’s exactly the feedback we got from all the visiting professors, who gave excellent talks themselves — that it’s incredible what we have going on at UCLA,” Dr. Agopian said.
“The symposium helps put the liver center, which is kind of in its infancy right now, on more of the national map and hopefully the international map in terms of what we’re doing”, Dr. Singh added.
Visit this link for a program of all speaker presentations. Congratulations to the CLRC on its first symposium. I look forward to many more!
DoM Cardiology at the Heart of AHA Scientific Sessions
The UCLA Division of Cardiology was well represented at the annual American Heart Association (AHA) Scientific Sessions in Chicago last week. Twelve fellows, seven residents, one intern and around 50 faculty members shared their research and insights in posters, presentations and on panels.
“We’re proud to have had not just phenomenal faculty participation, but also a great showing by our UCLA housestaff,” Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine and Cardiologist Eric Yang, MD said.
This year’s conference was a particularly special one for the DoM. Dr. Yang and Janet Han, MD — both associate program directors of the UCLA Cardiology Fellowship Program and who are committed to medical education locally and nationally — were actively involved in organizing the conference. Dr. Yang was on the AHA cardio-oncology sessions planning committee, while Dr. Han served on the planning committee for electrophysiology sessions.
In addition to working behind the scenes, DoM faculty were also right in the spotlight. The UCLA transcatheter valve replacement (TAVR) team, led by Olcay Aksoy, MD and Jeanne Huchting, NP, was selected for the AHA’s Aortic Stenosis Honor Roll, a new initiative to promote earlier awareness of heart valve disease that is being spearheaded by Gregg Fonarow, MD, director of the Ahmanson-UCLA Cardiomyopathy Center and co-director of the UCLA Preventative Cardiology Program. In an especially proud moment for UCLA Cardiology, Professor of Medicine and Human Genetics Stephen Young, MD received his Distinguished Scientist Award, one of the highest honors the AHA bestows.
As always, I was very impressed by the scholarship of our trainees and appreciative to their mentors for helping make them successful. They presented studies on genetic testing in peripartum cardiomyopathy, the cardiovascular impacts of cancer drugs in different populations, the effects of vagus nerve stimulation on electrophysiology, and much more.
Elizabeth Hutchins, MD, a cardiology fellow in the UCLA STAR Program, is a shining example of the excellence demonstrated by our fellows at AHA Scientific Sessions. She and her team analyzed risk factors for major cardiovascular events in 6,000 UCLA cancer patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors, finding multiple cardiometabolic and inflammatory markers that correlated with adverse cardiac outcomes. Furthermore, patients who experienced these adverse outcomes had significantly higher mortality rates compared to those who did not, underscoring the critical need to identify and manage patients at high risk for cardiovascular disease undergoing treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors.
This important and impactful study was a true example of cross-discipline collaboration, bringing together faculty, fellows and trainees from cardiology, hematology-oncology, endocrine and informatics.
Click here for a full list of presentations from UCLA residents, fellows and faculty. Congratulations to the TAVR team and Dr. Young on your awards, and to all of our participants on your excellent work!
Cardiovascular Theme Research Symposium Brings Together Cardiac Biology Scholars
Staying a little longer in the heart, many DoM LEADERS in cardiovascular biology also participated in the annual UCLA Cardiovascular Theme Research Symposium, a one-and-a-half-day program that featured talks from UCLA faculty and guest lecturers from nine other world-class institutions. Early-career and experienced researchers alike shared insights on cardiovascular epigenetics, cell signaling, cell metabolism, modeling, therapies and more.
The event was led by Cardiovascular Theme Director Arjun Deb, MD and was organized by Associate Professor of Pediatrics Marlin Touma, MD, PhD and DoM cardiology faculty Xinjiang Cai, MD, PhD, Rene Packard MD, PhD, Jeffrey Hsu, MD, PhD, and Julia Mack, PhD, alongside UCLA Assistant Professor Pearl Quijada, PhD. More than 250 people registered to attend.
DoM faculty who gave talks included Thomas Vondriska, PhD; René Packard, MD, PhD; Karen Reue, PhD and Song Li, PhD; Utibe Essien, MD, MPH. Lejla Medzikovic, PhD, a post-doctoral scholar in the Eghbali lab; and Soon-Gook Hong, PhD, a post-doctoral scholar in the Mack lab, gave lectures as well during the Early Career Investigator session. For more information on their presentations and others given at the conference, please visit this link.
The symposium also featured awards for exceptional poster presentations. One winner was DoM faculty member Kelsey Jarrett, PhD, a post-doctoral scholar in the Tarling-Vallim Lab, who presented research on how sex differences in bile acid metabolism impact cholesterol homeostasis and cardiovascular disease. The other two winners were Marina Angelini, PhD of the Olcese lab and Kyle Scranton of the Ottolia lab.
“The Cardiovascular Theme Symposium is always a fun way to see what everyone else is working on and get feedback on our work. I look forward to attending each year,” Dr. Jarrett said. “I received such excellent feedback at my poster, and I was honored to receive the poster award! I hope it is a sign of good things to come for future publications!”
Congratulations to Dr. Jarrett for her award and to the symposium’s organizers on such a robust and successful scientific conference!
DoM LGBTQ+ Champions Bring Education and Excellence to WPATH and GLMA
Attendees at the annual conferences of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) and GLMA had the good fortune of learning from a group of our DoM LGBTQ+ Champions, who shared insights from their clinical work and their experience building LGBTQIA+ health-related educational programs.
“As gender-affirming health care becomes more politicized, and access to exceptional health care is threatened, it is increasingly important to share the results of successful initiatives focused on the best practices in education and care delivery for transgender and gender-diverse people,” Amy Weimer, MD, medical director of the UCLA Gender Health Program, said.
Dr. Weimer attended the WPATH conference, which was held in Lisbon, Portugal in late September. She and Pauline Nguyen, MD; Jessica Bernacki, PhD; Rebecca Rada, DO, MS, MBA; and Emery Chang, MD led a symposium called “A Strategic Approach to Leveraging Clinical Care Services to Create Multilevel Education and Training Opportunities Focused on Transgender Healthcare.” Their presentation described their efforts to launch the UCLA Primary Care LGBTQ+ Health Fellowship Program — the first of its kind in the world — and the LGBTQ+ health track of the UCLA Family Medicine Residency Program along with other initiatives. It also included an exercise during which participants conducted a SWOT analysis of their own organizations to help them figure out how to develop similar programming at their institutions. Additionally, Dr. Chang, Dr. Rada, Gifty-Maria J. Ntim, MD, MPH, and Kashia Rosenau, PhD presented posters.
Front row: Emery Chang, MD
Around the same time, George Yen, MD, director of the UCLA LGBTQ+ Health Fellowship, was sharing learnings from the program’s success with a different audience thousands of miles away in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the GLMA conference, he and the directors of similar programs across the country led a special workshop on how LGBTQIA+ health-focused fellowships can improve clinician expertise and advance health equity for patients and communities. Participants learned to identify unmet health care needs among LGBTQIA+ populations, were taught the foundational elements of a fellowship program aimed to address these issues and discussed why it was important to expand these programs to more institutions.
I am proud that the UCLA DoM leads in advancing the health of LGBTQIA+ individuals and that our impact is being felt across the country and around the world. Congratulations to our LEADERS who took part in WPATH and GLMA!
DoM Pulmonology Division Brings Expertise to CHEST Conference
DoM LEADERS in the UCLA Division of Pulmonology had an impressive showing at the American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) Annual Meeting last month in Boston, where more than a dozen residents, fellows, faculty and staff shared their research in presentations or posters.
“Mona” Xiaomeng Deng, MD, chief resident for quality and safety, presented a case on a patient she encountered at the VA who had a benign lung tumor that was causing them to cough up blood.
“As someone pursuing a career in pulmonology and critical care, I’m especially grateful for the amazing support from our residency program and department of medicine that allows us to attend the annual CHEST conference every year,” Dr. Deng said. “It’s inspiring to see so many residents, fellows and faculty from UCLA and the West LA VA come together to share our work.”
Additional resident participants included Kamya Bijawat, MD; Samuel Bolivar, MD; Jenny Chen, MD; Andrew Hong, MD; Hector Filizola, MD; Shadi Namanpour, MD; and Corbett Walsh, MD. Fellows included Nitin Agrawal, MD; Siyuan Cao, MD; Catherine Durant, MD; Cher Huang, MD; and Jing Ren, MD. Housestaff excellence was on full display: internal medicine resident Dr. Bijawat’s abstract presentation on residents’ experience of moral distress in the ICU was named one of the top four at the conference, and Dr. Agrawal, a pulmonary and critical care medicine fellow, was recognized for his outstanding case study on a Hispanic patient with diffuse panbronchiolitis, an inflammatory airway condition rarely seen outside of East Asia.
Faculty participants in the CHEST conference included Colleen Channick, MD; Richard Channick, MD; Swetha Gogineni, MD; Grant Turner, MD; and Rajan Saggar, MD. Respiratory therapists Matthew Dartt, assistant director of respiratory care services at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center, and Joseph VanVleet, navigator at the UBreathe Program, gave a talk as well.
For a full rundown of all the presentations given at CHEST by DoM faculty, fellows, and trainees, visit this link. Congratulations to Dr. Bijawat, Dr. Agrawal and all of Team DoM Pulmonology on the outstanding scholarship they shared at CHEST!
UCLA Endocrinologists Learn and Lead at CACE Conference
UCLA faculty were front and center at the annual meeting of Clinical Association of California Endocrinologists (CACE), which took place Sept. 6-8 right at the Universal Hilton Los Angeles. UCLA Torrance Specialty Care Endocrinologist and Proceedings Associate Editor Dianne Cheung, MD, MPH finished out her two-year term as the organization’s president, paving the way for incoming President Jennifer Han, MD — also an endocrinologist based at UCLA Torrance — to take the reins. The event was co-chaired by immediate past President Jane Weinreb, MD, chief of the Division of Endocrinology at the VA, and Treasurer Kyrstin Lane, MD, who practices endocrinology at UCLA’s Santa Monica office.
Three of the conference’s 11 speakers hailed from the DoM:
Melissa Lechner, MD, PhD, an assistant professor in the UCLA Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism, led a lecture on the diagnosis, clinical course and management of endocrine immune-related adverse events (IRAEs) following immunotherapy for cancer, including thyroiditis, hypophysitis and type 1 diabetes. She also discussed the link between IRAEs and cancer outcomes, along with the data that enables better prediction of IRAE risk and the need to counsel patients with preexisting endocrine autoimmune conditions on the risk of severe IRAEs during cancer therapy.
Matthew Freeby, MD, assistant clinical professor of medicine, director of the Gonda Diabetes Center and associate director of diabetes clinical programs at DGSOM, spoke on the limitations of using hemoglobin A1c to assess the risk of diabetes complications. He also discussed how to overcome them by pairing hemoglobin A1c and continuous glucose monitoring data to make diabetes care decisions.
Albert Shieh, MD — an endocrinologist with an appointment in the UCLA Division of Geriatrics who practices medicine at UCLA’s offices in Westwood and Torrance — reviewed the natural history of menopause-related bone loss and the importance of risk stratification of fracture risk. He also discussed the benefits of using osteoanabolic therapy as initial therapy in patients at high risk of fracture and the clinical approach to treatment transitions, such as mitigating post-denosumab rebound bone loss, and the rationale for a bisphosphonate holiday.
I was lucky enough to have the chance to join our DoM colleagues at the CACE meeting and to witness their tremendous work in bringing together 151 attendees from across the state. Kudos to our endocrinology LEADERS for spearheading a wonderful conference that will surely spark new collaborations that advance patient care!
Research Town Hall Highlights Priorities and Progress on Research Mission
A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking with many of you at our Research Town Hall in Westwood, where research faculty convened to network and discuss issues of importance to the DoM’s research missions. I shared progress on our research initiatives within the strategic plan, including the results of a research faculty survey that identified areas where our researchers would benefit from more support. The survey findings were very informative.
The survey was sent to 419 research faculty with responses received from 46%. Assistant Professors were over-represented among the respondents. Roughly two-thirds of responses came from those who primarily conduct clinical research, with laboratory researchers accounting for about 37% of responders. The survey asked respondents to rank the priority for improvement in major areas of research support.
The top three priorities ranked by research faculty were the categories of “research personnel”, “administrative support”, and “research resources”. With regards to research personnel, we found that the top three needs were the need for shared research personnel across divisions, access to part-time study coordinators and better strategies to identify and recruit postdoctoral scholars.
Our research strategy implementation team is actively working on solutions to improve the availability and support provided by research personnel, starting with centralized teams to augment your existing support on the division level. We are piloting a centralized clinical trials office with personnel to support start up and expansion of clinical trials in six divisions and are assessing whether we can create other centralized roles, including for administrative support. We are also piloting a centralized pre-award team for smaller divisions and have established a centralized purchasing team that provides division purchasers with additional support, such as training, peer guidance and an extra hand when there are staff shortages.
To address the need for better orientation to the available support services, the team has launched a research faculty onboarding program that builds upon the robust model used by the Department of Medicine Professional Group’s yearlong initiative for new clinical hires. Our goal is to ensure everyone has the support they need to be successful in their roles. We are also working on optimizing our hiring process by streamlining the positions approval process, transitioning to standardized job descriptions for all roles and tracking hiring timelines. For postdoc recruitment specifically, we are planning a focus group to learn more about how these challenges are manifesting.
To boost retention of our exceptional research administration staff, we are looking into professional development opportunities and are continuing to recognize our research administrators for their work, including an annual appreciation event. This effort is also being supported by a workgroup under the education domain of the strategic plan, which will provide recommendations to the DoM on best practices for strengthening mentorship and career development for all staff.
With regards to resources, many of you expressed a need for access to biorepositories and to real-time biospecimens for translational research. Assistant Dean for Research Infrastructure James Wohlschlegel, PhD is assembling a comprehensive list of all available core services in the DGSOM. DoM Vice Chair for Research Judith Currier, MD is assisting with this process through the collection of updated information from DoM based cores.
Additional activities in progress from the Research Strategic Plan include the development of a DoM Research Website and other activities to promote the visibility of research updates and opportunities across the DoM.
We also reviewed results of the wellness survey data from research faculty. In 2024, the overall physician burnout rate decreased 5% among physician-scientists, and this year’s burnout rate is lower than the overall department mean. This corresponds to better scores across the board on more granular domains of faculty wellness, including ratings on support from leadership, mentorship, and job satisfaction.
However, there is still much room for improvement. Burnout among women physician-scientists have decreased overall but continues to remain far higher than it is among men and among clinicians. Our wellness focus groups for women in medicine have aimed to identify structural issues that contribute to this high burnout rate. They have expressed a need for more childcare programs and for a platform to engage with a community of fellow women physician-scientists. Our Senior Executive Clinical Vice Chair Tisha Wang, MD has conducted a listening tour to further understand the gender burnout gap. She learned that the top three priorities for women research faculty are an improved grant submission process (pre-award support) and research infrastructure; better professional coaching and development; and improved transparency around full-time equivalent (FTE) allocation, endowed chairs and tenure.
Our Wellness Office has launched several initiatives to improve faculty wellness across the DoM. For an in-depth summary, please see the Sept. 9, 2024 edition of the newsletter. For women physician-scientists who are seeking community, I encourage you to check out the DoM Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion’s Women In Medicine (WIM) group. They frequently host luncheons, child-friendly meet-ups and other events, such as their upcoming WIM Networking Conference on March 8, 2025.
Work to implement the Research Strategic plan continues and we look forward to providing future updates. Anyone who has questions, comments or ideas for how we can better support our research faculty should reach out to our research leaders, including Dr. Currier, Carol Mangione, MD, MSPH, Gregory Brent, MD and me. We want to be as responsive as possible to your needs at the level of the department, and our communication lines are always open. Thank you to all those who made our Research Town Hall a success, and to our research faculty for your continued excellence. Your work is a core part of our mission to Transform Patient Care, Lead in Innovation and Advance Health for All!
Dale
P.S.
As you read this, many of you are gearing up for Thanksgiving Celebrations with your families. I wish you happy holidays. Each year, I admonish everyone not to overeat, but I suspect that this admonishment is falling on deaf ears. Indeed, the DoM administrative team took a head-start on festivities with a Thanksgiving Lunch last week.
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