New Faculty - September 2019
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Tawnie Joy Braaten, MD Dr. Braaten recently joined the University of Utah Division of Rheumatology as an Assistant Professor. She grew up in rural northeastern Montana and decided to pursue medicine during college. She completed her medical school training at the University of Washington School of Medicine and from there pursued internal medicine residency training and rheumatology fellowship at the University of Utah. During this time she developed a special interest in immune related adverse events secondary to immunotherapy. This interest lead her to pursuing a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins to develop her knowledge and skill set in caring for those with rheumatic immune related adverse events. During this post-doctoral fellowship she actively cared for patients with rheumatologic immune related adverse events and worked on expanding their established cohort to better understand these novel conditions. She plans to continue to care for these individuals in her current practice here at the University of Utah and develop a cohort to continue to study these disease processes and appropriate treatment approaches that can be difficult in these complex patients. |
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Namita Chittoria, MD |
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Molly Doose, MD Dr. Doose will be practicing primary care for both adult and pediatrics at the Sugar House Health Center in Salt Lake City. Dr. Doose (pronounced like a "dose" of medicine) is originally from the Midwest and moved to New Orleans to pursue her undergraduate degree at Tulane University. She then earned her medical degree from Louisiana State University in 2012 and went on to complete her combined Internal Medicine-Pediatrics residency from Tulane University in 2016. After residency, Dr. Doose stayed on as faculty with Tulane, providing primary care in an outpatient clinic. She also worked in the Wellbaby Nursery and supervised Tulane residents in their Internal Medicine-Pediatrics clinic. |
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Chris Hanrahan, MD, PhD |
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Hannah Imlay, MD, MS Dr. Imlay is originally from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois. She attended medical school at Northwestern University, completed her internal medicine residency at the University of Michigan, and completed her infectious diseases fellowship at the University of Washington. |
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Kevin Shah, MD, FACC Dr. Shah is originally from Southern California and moved to Salt Lake City after completing his training in June 2019. He was born and raised in Diamond Bar, California and went to medical school at the University of California, Irvine. Following this, he completed his Internal Medicine training at the University of California, San Diego and fellowship in Cardiovascular Disease in University of California, Los Angeles. He then pursued and completed additional training in Advanced Heart Failure & Transplant Cardiology at Cedars Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, CA. His professional interests include Heart Failure, South Asians and Cardiovascular Disease, and the Cardiorenal syndrome. |
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Jennifer A. Sinnott, PhD Dr. Sinnott grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and moved to Boston, Massachusetts, when she was 18. She spent much of the following 15 years in Boston, mostly in school. She obtained her PhD at Harvard in Biostatistics, and then did postdoctoral work in Biostatistics and Epidemiology, also at Harvard. For the last four years, she was an Assistant Professor in the Statistics Department at The Ohio State University. Dr. Sinnott's doctoral research focused on developing methods to use biological pathways to improve cancer risk prediction with gene expression data, as well as methods to integrate genetic data from different platforms. Her postdoctoral statistical research has focused on other aspects of building survival models using high-dimensional data and methods for genetic association studies using electronic health record data. In addition to this, Dr. Sinnott has worked a lot in prostate cancer research, focusing in particular on identifying tumor biomarkers and molecular signatures for better prediction and mechanistic understanding of prostate cancer prognosis. |
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Meg Skibitsky, MD |
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Chris Vaklavas, MD |
New Staff - September 2019
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Anushka Udara Abeysekara, PhD Dr. Abeysekara recently joins the Division of Epidemiology and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Informatics and Computing Infrastructure (VINCI) Health Services Research and Development resource center as a Data Scientist. |
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Angellene Catausan |
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Alec Chapman, MS Alec grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned his undergraduate in piano performance at Duquesne University. He moved to Salt Lake City to study Biomedical Informatics at the University of Utah. While a student he became interest in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing using clinical data. Before starting his current position at the University of Utah, he worked as a graduate assistant for several teams at the VA/University and in industry working on NLP and data science. He is very exciting to be joining the BASIC team working on infectious disease control. When not working, Alec enjoys cycling around Salt Lake and playing piano. |
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Adam Christiansen, MPAS, PA-C Adam grew up in Northern Utah and served 8-years in the Army after graduating high school. He returned to Utah to complete his education first as a Medical Laboratory Scientist at Weber State University and then as a Physician Assistant at the University of Utah. He spends his time with his wife Kennedy and his 1-year-old son, Greyson. |
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Adia Clark |
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Andrea Conway |
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Gintare Dailey |
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Genevieve Ellis |
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Rudineia Fernandes |
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Madison Gastelo |
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Joe Goldstein Joe is originally from Albany, New York. He moved to Salt Lake in 2017 after graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in Biology and a minor in Neuroscience from SUNY Albany. He got his start in clinical research working at the local clinic of an international CRO specializing in Early-Phase pharmaceutical research. After two years, Joe decided he wanted a change of scenery, and took a job here at the U. In his free time, he enjoys rock climbing, skiing, hiking and mountain biking with my dog. |
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Justin Gray |
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Grace Harrison Grace recently moved from Maine to attend the University of Utah and is currently a student in the Master of Healthcare Administration program. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Vermont, with a focus in veterinary medicine and biology. After college, Grace was commissioned into the Army Reserve as a Medical Operations Officer. When she is not in class or at work, you can find her fly fishing, skiing, or hiking with her dog. She is very excited to have joined the Cardiovascular Research Team and look forward to working with all of her coworkers! |
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James Hemp |
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Amy Henion, MPH Amy grew up in Rochester, NY and attended college at the University of Rochester. She earned a Masters of Public Health from Emory University in Atlanta. She has conducted research for the CDC, American Cancer Society and NIH. In her new position in the University of Utah’s Division of Epidemiology, she feels fortunate to join the dynamic TORCH (Trajectories of Resilience, Community and Health) Lab that examines the long-term outcomes of military experiences. The TORCH team is motivated to help improve the lives of veterans. |
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Sreekanth Kamineni Sreekanth started his career as a programmer analyst in 2011 at the Cognizant Technology Solutions company and in 2014 moved to the USA to pursue an MS degree in computer science. In June 2015, Sreekanth completed his MS degree in computer science and graduated from Texas A&M Commerce University. He then joined the analytics team at Valley Behavioral Health as an intern in 2016. Upon his supervisor recommendation, he immediately was promoted to full-time SQL Developer. Sreekanth made significant contributions to Valley Analytics infrastructure. He is currently pursuing his career as a database analyst at the University of Utah Department of Epidemiology. His skills and experiences are in database design and development, data analysis, SQL and ETL development, and scripting programming. |
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Laisa Leroy |
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Sally McDonald |
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Yuriko Martinez Hernandez |
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Lindsay Meyer |
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Jennifer Miller |
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Kimberly Quintana |
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Denise Stone |
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Deborah Taylor |
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Samantha Vranes |
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Nancy West, PhD Dr. West completed a doctorate in Epidemiology from the University of Michigan and a master of science degree in Statistics from Utah State University. Before joining the Internal Medicine department, Dr. West was an Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. For the past 25 years she has provided analytic and epidemiologic research support for several large observational studies with data collection sites across the country. Her research interests include the epidemiology of substance use, particularly among older adults. She is a Utah native and is delighted to return to her homeland. |