The Weill-Washington Reasearch Foundation Clinician-Scientists
Clinician-scientists play an essential role in bridging bench and bedside, though due to the extra demands and complexity of their training, this career path has become increasingly difficult to pursue. In response, the Weill Neurohub, in conjunction with the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences and the Washington Research Foundation, have established the Weill-WRF Clinician-Scientist Awards to provide early-career support and mentoring for outstanding clinicians who have also shown extraordinary potential for careers in brain disease research.
The 2024 Clinician-Scientist Awardees
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Odmara Baratto Chang, MD, PhD
Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care
UCSF
Research Focus:
Understanding and developing tools for the prevention of perioperative neurocognitive disorders.
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Samuel Emerson, MD, PhD
University of Washington
Department of Neurosurgery
Research Focus:
Growing organoids from patient tumor tissue as a rapid method to test brain tumor treatment susceptibility and personalize individual patient care.
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Ekin Guney, MD
Department of Pathology
UCSF
Research Focus:
Deciphering how neuronal signaling regulates the development of glioma and medulloblastoma tumors.
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Juliane Gust, MD, PhD
University of Washington
Department of Neurology
Research Focus:
Uncovering the activation factors required for CAR-T cells to be able to access brain tissue and more effectively clear tumors
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Rebecca Hendrickson, MD, PhD
University of Washington
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Research Focus:
Provide new, objective measures for PTSD symptoms and use them to assess treatment response and adjunct therapy options.
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Winson Ho, MD
UCSF
Department of Neurological Surgery
Research Focus:
Development of novel immunotherapeutic strategies for adult and pediatric brain tumors.
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Richard Jin, MD, PhD
UCSF
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Research Focus:
Understanding how the developing brain protects against pathogens and how immune-challenges impact neurodevelopment and behavior.
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Sarah Kaufman, MD, PhD
UCSF
Department of Neurology
Research Focus:
Identifying the mechanisms that underlie protein aggregation and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia.
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Ying Li, MD, PhD
UCSF
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Research Focus:
Investigating the role of neurotransmitters in the efficacy of antipsychotic therapies.
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Carson Moseley, MD, PhD
UCSF
Department of Neurology
Research Focus:
Employing immunologic and genomic approaches to investigate neuroinflammatory disorders.
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Monica Sanchez-Contreras, MD, MSc, PhD
University of Washington
Department of Laboratory Medicine & Pathology
Research Focus:
Investigating Somatic mtDNA Mutations as Early Biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease to offer a new way to diagnose and track neurodegenerative disease in the peripheral blood.
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Jacob Young, MD
UCSF
Department of Neurological Surgery
Research Focus:
Exploring how inflammatory signaling contributes to brain tumor evasion of anti-cancer immunotherapies.