2019 Recipients of the Zucker Research Prizes
We are pleased to announce this year’s recipients of the Zucker Research Prizes. The prizes are awarded annually and are made possible by generous gifts from the Zucker family. The Milton O. Zucker, MD, FACS, and Natalie V. Zucker Award is awarded annually to a woman scientist on the School of Medicine faculty for outstanding career achievements in research. The Zucker Family Prize is awarded annually to Tufts University School of Medicine faculty for a career of outstanding research. As always, there was an outstanding pool of nominees making selection very difficult. The award winners this year are: Drs. Dominique Michaud, Andrew Levey and Jonathan Davis.
Milton O. Zucker, MD, FACS, and Natalie V. Zucker Award
Dominique Michaud, ScD, is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine. She has devoted her career to better understanding the causes of cancer, particularly pancreatic cancer. Her research has focused on studying behavioral factors and medical conditions that contribute to immune dysregulations and impact carcinogenesis. Her recent projects have focused on the role of periodontal disease, oral health and risk of cancer, and the role of the oral microbiome in cancer progression. In addition, her research includes using pre-diagnostic blood DNA methylation to predict immune status and evaluate how different immune profiles are associated with cancer risk.
Michaud was Director of the Graduate Program at Brown University prior to moving her research to Tufts in 2010 and has devoted substantial effort mentoring, training over 20 students and post-doctoral fellows and numerous junior scientists. She has been engaged in teaching throughout her career and continues to teach multiple courses at Tufts in the Masters of Public Health program. Her research is highly collaborative and multi-disciplinary and has resulted in over 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals, and 10 book chapters. She has been a Principal Investigator on 7 NIH grants and has received multiple other awards from foundations including an American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Lung Cancer Innovative Science Award. She has performed substantial service on NIH review panels and is currently a standing member of the Cancer, Heart, and Sleep Epidemiology NIH review panel. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Cancer Causes and Control, and on the Editorial Boards of multiple other cancer related journals.
The Zucker Family Prize
Dr. Andrew Levey is Professor of Medicine and Dr. Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman Professor Emeritus at Tufts School of Medicine and Chief Emeritus of the William B. Schwartz Division of Nephrology at Tufts Medical Center. Dr. Levey’s research interests include measurement and estimation of kidney function, epidemiology and clinical trials in chronic kidney disease (CKD). For the past 20 years, he has been at the forefront of the development of equations to estimate glomerular filtration rate (GFR) from serum creatinine, cystatin C and novel filtration markers using large databases, including the widely-used Modification of Diet in Renal Disease (MDRD) Study and Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Collaboration (CKD-EPI) equations. He leads CKD-EPI and is a founding member of the Chronic Kidney Disease Prognosis Consortium (CKD-PC). The use of GFR estimating equations to estimate kidney function and inform prognosis has transformed research, clinical practice, and public health in CKD.
Dr. Levey is a widely recognized authority on clinical practice guidelines in CKD. He has trained a large cadre of clinical researchers in nephrology and led the Division’s NIDDK-supported training grant (T32) in clinical trials, epidemiology and outcomes research from 1999-2018. He was Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases from 2007-2016.
He received the Distinguished Faculty Award from Tufts School of Medicine in 2004 and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Boston University School of Medicine in 2013. The National Kidney Foundation honored him with the President’s Award in 1998, Garabed Eknoyan Award in 2002, and David W. Hume Award in 2012, and the American Society of Nephrology honored him with the Belding H. Scribner Award in 2013. He was inducted into the Association of American Physicians in 2016. He has been recognized by Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate) as a highly cited researcher (top 1% most cited works in the field) yearly since 2014.
Dr. Jonathan Davis is Vice-Chair of Pediatrics and Chief of Newborn Medicine at the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center and Professor of Pediatrics at Tufts School of Medicine. His research has focused on neonatal drug development for the prevention and treatment of a variety of neonatal conditions. He has authored over 200 manuscripts and book chapters and received over 60 grant awards from the NIH, the FDA, the March of Dimes, and many others. He is currently funded by NIH to develop better outcome measures for clinical trials and new and existing therapeutics to improve outcomes in children.
Nationally, Dr. Davis is Chair of the Neonatal Advisory Committee in the Office of the Commissioner at FDA, the Director of the International Neonatal Consortium (FDA, EMA), and a member of Public Policy Council representing the American Pediatric Society. He has served on over 35 scientific review panels. At Tufts, he has been an integral member of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and has held a position as Chair of the CTSA Consortium Child Health Oversight Committee which has focused on the need for developing more therapeutic agents for children.
Please join us in congratulating these faculty members for their contributions to science and to Tufts School of Medicine.