In 1993, the Women in Academic Medicine Committee, originally chaired by the late Mrs. Jane D. Claflin, Honorary Trustee, was formed to facilitate the academic careers of women in science at Massachusetts General Hospital.
This Committee, with the sponsorship of the Executive Committee on Research, established the Claflin Distinguished Scholar Awards in recognition of the fact that maintaining research productivity during child-rearing years is a significant obstacle to career advancement for of women. The awards provide $50K in support per year for two years.
Since 1993, over 100 women have received Claflin Distinguished Scholar Awards, many of whom have gone on to become leaders both at the hospital and in their respective fields of research.
This year, eight new scholars were named, four of whom are included in this second post. Be sure to check out part one to get to know the other four scholars and their work.
We honor and congratulate the 2022 Claflin Scholars!
“I feel incredibly fortunate to work at MGH, an institution that is filled with supremely talented women physicians and investigators, conducting practice-changing research, while simultaneously caring for their children, partners, families and communities. Receiving the MGH Claflin Award affords me the needed support to pursue research on an important and frequently raised concern among the patients I care for, and at a pivotal point in my career. I am honored to be included among such an impressive cadre of scientists who have received this award before me and alongside me.”
Dr. Jimenez is the Chair for Quality and Safety in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School (HMS).
She is nationally recognized in the field of Radiation Oncology for the treatment of breast cancer. Her research has informed consensus guidelines and she has made novel contributions in proton beam therapy for patients with breast cancer.
She serves as the principal investigator of multiple clinical trials exploring the prevention of cardiac toxicity after breast radiotherapy.
“It is a great honor to receive this award and follow in the footsteps of the inspiring previous recipients. As a newly independent researcher with two young kids, it is a critical but challenging time to maintain productivity in the lab. The Claflin award will allow me to fund extra (wo)manpower in the lab to help build new portable MRI hardware. This extra support will also help me expand the scope of the research to open doors for future funding opportunities.“
Dr. Cooley is an Instructor in Investigation at the A.A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School.
As a doctoral student, she led the ground-up development of a portable MRI scanner for human brain imaging, and recently began the development of a Magnetic Particle Imaging (MPI) animal scanner for functional brain imaging.
She also worked on the development of educational NMR/MRI systems, including the classroom “tabletop” MRI systems currently used in 6.03 and several graduate-level classes at MIT.
Her research interests lie in the development of high-impact imaging systems based on new approaches to hardware, image encoding, and signal processing. Her primary scientific contribution has been the development of a portable MRI brain scanner that uses a new image encoding technique.
“Winning the Claflin award has energized me to do more and to continue developing national and international recognition through high-quality science that will contribute to the improvement of human health. I am determined to dedicate my career to exploring the molecular basis of urogenital tract disorders and applying this knowledge to identify new diagnostic/therapeutic targets for these diseases. In addition, with the support of this award, I hope to inspire and show underrepresented women that having children does not mean sacrificing their careers and that it is possible to balance work and life as a woman in science.“
Dr. Battistone is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS), as well as an early-stage and underrepresented in Medicine (URiM) Investigator who has been leading jer research group since April 2021.
Her research focuses on exploring the molecular basis of mucosal immunity in the urogenital tract, with the aim to identify new diagnostic/therapeutic targets for kidney injury and male infertility.
She and her team use an innovative multidisciplinary approach that makes use of different state-of-the-art techniques as well as mouse models to describe how specialized epithelial cells and immunocytes communicate in the urogenital tract.
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