Three Duke University School of Medicine faculty members have been honored for their contributions to biomedical science with awards from the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), one of the nation’s oldest medical honor societies. ASCI supports the scientific efforts, educational needs, and clinical aspirations of physician-scientists to improve health.
Brian Mac Grory, MB BCh BAO, MHSc, was awarded a Young Physician-Scientist Award, which recognizes physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research. The focus of his research has been to leverage cross-disciplinary collaborations to advance understanding of an understudied condition: eye stroke (central retinal artery occlusion). He has shown that there is an association between eye stroke and atrial fibrillation, a common, chronic, heart rhythm disorder. His current K23-funded work disentangles this relationship using novel causal inference methodology, population science, and cardiac biomarker science.
Zachary Lorsch, MD, PhD, and Katherine I. Zhou, MD, PhD, received Emerging-Generation Awards, which recognize post-MD, pre-faculty appointment physician-scientists who are meaningfully engaged in immersive research.
Lorsch is an early-career physician-scientist dedicated to exploring gut-brain communication in health and disease. As a research-track gastroenterology fellow, he is merging his neuroscience expertise with clinical knowledge in gastroenterology, working with Diego Bohórquez, PhD, to investigate gut-brain interactions. His long-term goal is to establish a basic science research lab focused on how sensory cells in the gastrointestinal tract communicate with the brain.
Zhou is a third-year hematology/oncology fellow at Duke conducting research under the mentorship of Christopher Holley, MD, PhD, at Duke and Chad Pecot, MD, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Zhou is studying the role of a small nucleolar RNA in triple-negative breast cancer lymphatic metastasis. Her long-term career goal is to become a physician–scientist studying the functions and mechanisms of cellular RNAs in the development and progression of cancer.