Networking for Academics – Conquering the Fear Factor

Elena Aikawa, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Dr. Elena Aikawa is Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is also Director of the Vascular Biology Program at the Center for Interdisciplinary Sciences (CICS), Founding Director of the Heart Valve Translational Research Program (HVTRP) and Associate Head of Section of Cardiovascular Life Sciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Dr. Aikawa is a passionate advocate for the early imaging and treatment of calcific aortic valve disease. Dr. Aikawa’s Research Program focuses on the development of new therapies to prevent, treat and cure calcific aortic valve stenosis, a disease that currently has no treatment options other than valve replacement. She was at the forefront in the discovery of inflammation-dependent mechanisms of cardiovascular calcification. Her studies contributed to the discovery of calcifying extracellular vesicles as a precursor of microcalcification. More recently she used systems approaches, involving multi-omics and network medicine, to identify novel therapeutic targets.

Dr. Aikawa has been a member of the Working Group on Calcific Aortic Valve Stenosis and the Alliance of Investigators on Calcific Aortic Valve Disease of the National Institutes of Health. She holds editorial positions at the Circulation Research, Journal of Extracellular Vesicles, PLoS ONE and Arteriosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. Dr. Aikawa has delivered more than 150 keynote lectures, invited talks and cardiovascular grand rounds, and has authored more than 200 articles on cardiovascular pathobiology. Her research program has been continuously supported by NIH funding.

In addition to her strong interest in cardiovascular research, she also enjoys educating and mentoring young scientists. Throughout her career, she has trained a number of research fellows, medical students and PhD candidates. Dr. Aikawa remains committed to advancing the careers of women in science and medicine. She cofounded the BWH Committee for Internationally Trained Women Faculty in 2004 and founded the annual Women in Medicine and Science Symposium at BWH in 2012. She was recently elected as Vice-chair of the Women’s Leadership Committee of American Heart Association Council on Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology. In 2016, Dr. Aikawa was elected as President of the International Society for Applied Cardiovascular Biology (ISACB). She is serving as the society’s first female president.

Natalie Artzi, PhD
Assistant Professor, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Dr. Natalie Artzi is an Assistant Professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. She is a principal Research Scientist at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at MIT, and is an Associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Leveraging material science, chemistry, imaging and biology, Dr. Artzi’s group is dedicated to designing smart material platforms and medical devices to improve human health.

Dr. Artzi pioneered basic understanding of tissue:biomaterial interactions and concepts learned have changed the way we view materials. Materials and devices are now being ‘personalized’ by considering specific tissue microenvironments that are altered in the face of disease. Her multidisciplinary team works on developing materials for diagnosis and therapy, and exploit the toolkit available for material scientists to create multifaceted medical devices. Dr. Artzi graduate thesis work at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) under the direction of Prof. Moshe Narkis defined how polymer:nano-filler interactions dictate structure:function relationships.

Dr. Artzi pioneered basic understanding of tissue:biomaterial interactions and concepts learned have changed the way we view materials. Materials and devices are now being ‘personalized’ by considering specific tissue microenvironments that are altered in the face of disease. Her multidisciplinary team works on developing materials for diagnosis and therapy, and exploit the toolkit available for material scientists to create multifaceted medical devices. Dr. Artzi graduate thesis work at the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) under the direction of Prof. Moshe Narkis defined how polymer:nano-filler interactions dictate structure:function relationships.

Erin McKenna, MBA
Deputy Director & Senior Project Manager, Boston Biomedical Innovation Center

Erin is the Senior Project Manager for the Boston Biomedical Innovation Center (B-BIC). Erin brings to B-BIC over sixteen years of medical device product development and commercialization. She started her career in Research and Development at Boston Scientific, and launched several vascular graft and peripheral embolization products before shifting her focus to identifying and implementing company-wide product development lifecycle process improvements. Ms. McKenna holds MBA and MS degrees in Global Management from Babson College and a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology.

Sandro Santagata, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Dr. Sandro Santagata is an Associate Professor in Pathology at Harvard Medical School and practices Neuropathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston Children Hospital. He studied Neuroscience at Amherst College, and then entered the Medical Scientist Training Program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine (MSMM). He trained with Eugenia Spanopoulou and Stuart Aaronson and investigated the mechanism of genetic recombination in the immune system and how defects in this system result in immunodeficiency disorders. He subsequently trained in internal medicine at MSSM in 2003 and then joined the Anatomic Pathology Residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he sub-specialized in Neuropathology. He is board certified in Anatomic Pathology and Neuropathology. He completed a research fellowship with Susan Lindquist at the Whitehead Institute/MIT studying stress responses in cancer and started his independent research laboratory in the BWH Department of Pathology in 2013. He is a member of the Ludwig Center at Harvard, the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science and the HMS Laboratory for Systems Pharmacology. He is leading efforts to generate multi-dimensional tumor atlases as part of the Biden Moonshot Human Tumor Atlas Network (HTAN). His work focuses on identifying therapeutic vulnerabilities in brain tumors and in implementing new technologies for imaging tumors.

Frank S. David, MD, PhD
Innovation Strategist at the BRI, Founder and Managing Director of Pharmagellan

Dr. Frank David serves as Innovation Strategist at the BRI, as well as Founder and Managing Director of Pharmagellan, a Boston-area biotech consulting firm. He previously held healthcare strategy roles at AstraZeneca and Leerink Partners. Frank is co-author of “The Pharmagellan Guide to Biotech Forecasting and Valuation,” a writer about biomedical innovation at Forbes.com and the Pharmagellan blog, and an active participant on Twitter (@Frank_S_David).