Dominic Raj, M.D., M.B.B.S., professor of medicine, biochemistry and molecular biology, and director of the Division of Renal Diseases and Hypertension, took home the 2014 Distinguished Researcher Award as faculty, residents, and students from throughout GW’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) participated in the Health and Medicine Research portion of GW’s 19th Annual Research Day. The two-day event — co-hosted by the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Office of the Provost — showcased research from across the university, with the second day focused exclusively on health-related research.
Earlier in the academic year, Raj, an expert in kidney disease and hypertension, received a pair of multimillion-dollar grants from the National Institutes of Health to examine the role of gut microbiome on inflammation and cardiovascular disease. Joining him as 2014 research day winners were fourth-year M.D. students Bradley Anderson, Devin Patel, Anita Sivaraman, and Sarah Todd, all of whom received the Stuart Kassan Research Fellowship Award; fourth-year M.D. student Maureen Banigan, who won the 2014 Doris Deford Speck and George Speck, M.D. Endowed Prize; and Wenge Zhu, Ph.D., assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular medicine, who received the 2013 Elaine H. Snyder Cancer Research Award. This year’s poster award winners were Robin Stiller, MSI; Lindsay Marszal, MSII; and Samantha Ahle, MSIV.
“Today we celebrate one of the three key missions of our school — education, training, and research,” said Jeffrey Akman, M.D. ’81, RESD ’85, Walter A. Bloedorn Professor of Administrative Medicine, vice president for health affairs, and dean of SMHS. “We celebrate the work of our undergraduates, our grad students, our faculty, our fellows and mentors who generate new information and new ideas, and who develop scholarship to advance our fields in health and medicine.”
Elaine Ostrander, chief and distinguished investigator at the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute, presented the SMHS keynote address, titled “Genetics of Complex Traits: Understanding Breed Variation in the Domestic Dog.” Ostrander encouraged her audience to think creatively.
“When faced with a problem, don’t do the tried and true,” she said. “Think about a novel way of attacking the problem.”
