Purpose
In 2017 and 2018, Stanford ChEM-H provided funding to physician-scientists with a strong background in chemistry or molecular engineering to develop an independent research program, as they complete their clinical residency or fellowship. The program was designed for trainees who hold M.D./Ph.D. degrees and are committed to pursuing research-intensive training in any of the clinical departments at Stanford University. Research areas of greatest interest are ones that bridge the physical sciences or engineering with medicine.
2018 ChEM-H Physician-Scientist Research Fellows
Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD
Vineeta received her bachelors degree in Biophysics from Stanford and completed her medical training in the Harvard-MIT MD/PhD program, where she pursued an MD through the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program and a PhD in Biophysics. Her graduate work was in the area of genome-wide association studies and population genetic inference from large scale genotyping, targeted sequencing, exome sequencing, and whole genome sequencing datasets. During her postdoctoral work at Flatiron Health, she led efforts to link real-world electronic health record data to tumor sequencing data for >25,000 patients, and conducted studies to discover both known and novel clinico-genomic associations in this dataset. Vineeta is back at Stanford as an Internal Medicine resident and plans to pursue Oncology fellowship training. As a ChEM-H fellow, Vineeta plans to investigate the role of inherited (“germline”) risk for cancer (e.g., BRCA mutations) and the relationship between germline genomic variation and therapeutic response (e.g., BRCA mutations and PARP inhibitors).
Edward Pham, MD, PhD
Ed’s commitment to a career in translational medicine was motivated by his mother’s successful battle against chronic hepatitis C. He began his journey in biomedicine during his undergraduate study at UCLA, where he majored in bioengineering and pursued research on protein engineering for therapeutics delivery. He then went on to complete his medical and graduate training at Stanford in the laboratory of Jeffrey Glenn as an HHMI and Soros fellow, studying the molecular virology of hepatitis C to identify novel targets as a basis for new antiviral strategies. He completed his internal medicine training at Case Western Reserve University in the Harrington Physician-Scientist pathway and is now excited to be back at Stanford to pursue fellowship training in Gastroenterology and Hepatology. He is looking forward to joining the ChEM-H scientific community as his fellowship research seeks to understand at the chemical level how the intestinal microbiota modulate the progression of non-alcoholic hepatitis (NASH) and ultimately seek to harvest the therapeutic potential of our gut microbiota to combat NASH, a disease that is predicted to be the number one indication for liver transplantation in the US by 2020 with no effective therapeutics currently. Ultimately, his career goal is to become a physician-scientist in the field of gastroenterology and hepatology, dedicated to translating discoveries in the laboratory into new ways of preventing, diagnosing, and treating complex gastrointestinal & liver diseases.
2017 ChEM-H Physician-Scientist Research Fellow
Marie Hollenhorst, MD, PhD
Marie’s interest in a career as a physician-scientist began during her time as an undergraduate at Stanford where she studied biology. She subsequently enrolled in the Harvard-MIT MD/PhD program, where she pursued an MD through the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program and a PhD in Chemical Biology. She carried out her thesis work in the research group of Christopher T. Walsh, focusing on the biosynthesis and biological activity of a family of natural product peptide antibiotics. She completed internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a fellowship in transfusion medicine at Harvard. She is thrilled to be back at Stanford for Hematology fellowship and excited to become a part of the ChEM-H community. Going forward, she hopes to combine her clinical interests in non-malignant hematologic disease with her background in chemical biology in order to bring a chemical approach to the study of benign blood diseases.
