Recognizing Mount Sinai’s Administrative Fellows

Updated on Jul 26, 2024 | Diversity and Inclusion, Featured

Five accomplished and motivated young professionals recently graduated from the Mount Sinai Health System’s Administrative Fellowship Program.

Tyler Nichols, MPH

The Administrative Fellowship program is an innovative two-year program managed by the Office for Diversity and Inclusion, with strong support and guidance from Human Resources and executive and senior leadership. It is designed to provide hands-on and experiential learning opportunities to advance masters-prepared individuals of historically underrepresented groups in health care leadership into managerial and leadership roles within the Health System.

Ashley Pierre, MHA

The five Fellows who completed the program this year are Hina Akmal, MHA; Aria Kumar; MHA; Estefania Lanza Rodriguez, MPH; Cordell Downes, MHSA; and Ashley Sealy, MHA. “The program is a testament to how we are creating unique talent pathways for young professionals in health care,” says Shana Dacon-Pereira, MPH, MBA, CPXP, Assistant Vice President, Office for Diversity and Inclusion. “The experience Fellows obtain throughout the program provides a foundation for their careers in health care administration.”

Michelle Yue, MPA

In July 2024, one new Fellow, Tyler Nichols, MPH, started the program with a rotation in Budget and Patient Transport. Three current Fellows moved into their second year of the program: Gabrielle De La Rosa, MHA; Ashley Pierre, MHA; and Michelle Yue, MPA. “I am looking forward to utilizing the leadership and communication skills that I obtained over the last year into my new rotations and projects,” says Ms. Yue, who worked at Mount Sinai Beth Israel and is now engaged in a rotation with ambulatory care leadership at Mount Sinai-Union Square. “I am excited that I will have the opportunity to continue to foster old and new connections with both clinical and administrative employees.”

Gabrielle De La Rosa, MHA

Ms. De La Rosa, who is completing her fellowship at Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West, remarked, “I am excited to leverage the leadership, operational, and strategic skills I developed during my first year to take on more complex projects and roles and to begin my post-fellowship career planning.” Ms. Pierre, who, like Ms. De La Rosa, moved to New York and joined the fellowship at The Mount Sinai Hospital, shared, “I plan to make more connections throughout the health care industry and learn more about new trends and technologies within the delivery of health care.”

To learn more about the Administrative Fellowship Program, contact the Office for Diversity and Inclusion at diversity@mountsinai.org. Additionally, follow the Office for Diversity and Inclusion’s social media channels on Instagram and LinkedIn to explore other programs and initiatives.

Mount Sinai Administrative Fellowship Graduates Share Their Next Steps

The graduating Fellows reminisced about their fellowship experiences and shared the roles they have moved into after the program.

Hina Akmal, MHA, Data Analytics Literacy and Change Management Specialist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles

Hina Akmal, MHA

Ms. Akmal completed her fellowship at Mount Sinai Morningside and was instrumental in managing crucial projects and initiatives, including working closely with the Ambulatory team to open the new Mount Sinai-Harlem Health Center. Her interest in data analytics and project management influenced her final fellowship rotation, working with Mount Sinai’s  Social Determinants of Health team. Ms. Akmal’s professional interests and endeavors have led her to accept a position as the Data Analytics Literacy and Change Management Specialist at Chidren’s Hospital Los Angeles, where she will be responsible for developing and implementing programs to enhance data literacy across the organization and manage change effectively.

Aria Kumar, MHA, Administrative Manager for Mount Sinai International

Aria Kumar, MHA

Under the tutelage of senior and executive leadership at Mount Sinai West, Ms. Kumar managed a variety of projects, including the hospital’s Short Term Capital Expense Reduction Program, aiding and improving the Operating Room Turnover process, and leading Workforce Management Implementation. She also served as the Interim Associate Director of Outpatient Departments at Mount Sinai West. During her final fellowship rotation, Ms. Kumar worked with the Mount Sinai International team to consult the Georgetown Public Hospital in Guyana, where she supported the team’s Ambulatory Operations work. Having completed her fellowship, Ms. Kumar will continue working in Mount Sinai International as an Administrative Manager, where she will continue to advance international strategic partnerships and business development efforts on behalf of the Health System.

Estefania Lanza Rodriguez, MPH

 

Estefania Lanza Rodriguez, MPH, Project Manager, Cardiac Services at Mount Sinai Morningside

Ms. Rodriguez has assumed the role of Project Manager at Cardiac Services at Mount Sinai Morningside, where she also completed her fellowship. Throughout her fellowship, she worked with leadership to improve throughput via interdepartmental collaboration projects, from discharge to home and space optimization management. Prior to the fellowship program, Ms. Rodriguez worked as a medical scribe, certified nurse, and epidemiologist.

Cordell Downes, MHSA, Administrative Manager, Ambulatory Operations at The Mount Sinai Hospital

Cordell Downes, MHSA

Throughout his fellowship at The Mount Sinai Hospital, Mr. Downes played a notable role in the creation and oversight of the hospital’s Discharge Lounge and the development of the Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital Babies and Children’s Ambulance. His experience in rotations across various divisions, including Inpatient and Ambulatory Operations, Oncology, Strategic Planning, Admitting and Throughput, Human Resources, and Support Services, have prepared him for his current role as an Administrative Manager in Ambulatory Care Services. Beyond the fellowship, he remains an active member of The Mount Sinai Hospital Diversity Council and the New York chapters of both the American College of Healthcare Executives and the National Association of Health Services Executives.

 

Ashley Sealy, MHA


Ashley Sealy, MHA, Senior Manager, Ambulatory Operations at Mount Sinai Doctors Medical Group

Ms. Sealy began her professional journey at Mount Sinai back in 2019 as a Supply Chain intern as part of the Office for Diversity and Inclusion’s Administrative Internship Program. Since returning to the Health System as a Fellow in 2022, Ms. Sealy served as Project Manager for Workplace Violence at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, developed revenue cycle dashboards via Tableau for the Mount Sinai Doctors Medical Group, coordinated Mount Sinai-Union Square’s Waste Reduction Strategy, and managed the standardization of Q-Reviews benchmarks for more than 70 ambulatory practices throughout the Health System. Her journey now continues as a Senior Manager at Mount Sinai Doctors Medical Group. Having found her niche in health care analytics, strategy, and project management, she is also pursuing a Master of Science in Business Analytics degree at SUNY University at Buffalo

 

Read more About Diversity at Mount Sinai

A New Program to Screen for Lung Cancer Shows Success at Mount Sinai Morningside

Updated on Jul 24, 2024 | Featured, Mount Sinai Morningside

Javier Zulueta, MD

A new program at Mount Sinai Morningside represents a valuable tool to catch lung cancer—the  cancer responsible for the most deaths in both men and women—at its earliest stages when it is most treatable.

Harnessing the power of leading-edge technology, the Incidental Lung Nodule Program employs artificial intelligence to sift through radiology reports ordered for patients for various conditions, looking for incidental lung nodules. These innocuous-seeming spots, often discovered during routine tests for unrelated issues, can be silent harbingers of a potentially life-threatening condition.

The program is marking its first anniversary. In just one year, it has identified more than 3,000 patients, including smokers, former smokers, and non-smokers, who may be at risk. Of these, more than 1,500 people are being actively monitored for any changes in their lung nodules, enabling early detection and intervention.

Early detection is critical, according to Javier Zulueta, MD, Chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at Mount Sinai Morningside.

“Our goal is to engage physicians, smokers, former smokers, and the public in early detection,” he says. “Through screening programs like ours, we can catch cancers early and significantly improve health outcomes.”

The program operates automatically, with computed tomography (CT) scans ordered for various conditions systematically scrutinized by computerized algorithms. For example, patients who may undergo scans for other cancers, heart disease, or following surgeries may be candidates for this program. Upon detection of a lung nodule, a multidisciplinary team, including specialized pulmonologists, steps in. Patients are quickly contacted, and a comprehensive follow-up plan is set in motion, ensuring monitoring, timely diagnosis, and treatment.

“The Incidental Lung Nodule Program shows our commitment to medical excellence and our dedication to serving the West Harlem community, which has elevated rates of lung cancer,” says Dr. Zulueta. “We offer not just treatment but empowerment through knowledge and early detection.”

Mount Sinai Health System has been a pioneer in the effort to diagnose lung cancers.  The International Early Lung Cancer Action Project, whose goal is to ensure smokers and former smokers receive low-dose CT, was started at The Mount Sinai Hospital and has expanded around the world.  Likewise, the Incidental Lung Nodule Program will be expanding across the Mount Sinai Health System.

According to the American Cancer Society, lung cancer is the second most common cancer in both men and women, not including skin cancer. Prostate cancer is more common in men and breast cancer is more common among women. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths, according to the society. Most people diagnosed with lung cancer are 65 or older.

AI Spotlight: Leveraging Generative AI to Predict ER Admissions

Updated on Jul 17, 2024 | Featured, Research

Eyal Klang, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Generative AI Research Program within the Division of Data-Driven and Digital Medicine (D3M), at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help radiologists analyze images or doctors make diagnoses with a high degree of accuracy even with traditional machine learning techniques, but they tend to require large amounts of training data to accomplish this.

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai are exploring using the latest technique in generative AI—specifically large language models (LLMs)—to see if it can achieve accurate predictions with less training data. Generative AI is rooted in the concept of generating new content typically by understanding data distribution.

Using a specially prepared, secure version of GPT-4—a product from OpenAI, the company that runs the popular generative AI platform ChatGPT—the team applied the model to predict admissions in the Emergency Department, based on objective data collected from patients and triage notes.

“One of the advantages of LLMs over traditional methods is that you can use just a few examples to train the model for any use case,” says Eyal Klang, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Generative AI Research Program within the Division of Data-Driven and Digital Medicine (D3M), at Icahn Mount Sinai. “You don’t need to retrain models again and again for each use case, which is very hard when that can take millions of data points.”

“Another advantage of LLMs is its ability to explain to the user how it arrived at its answer,” says Dr. Klang. The model’s ability to explain its reasoning provides confidence for a physician to use it in assisting in making medical decisions.

Here’s an animated explainer on how Dr. Klang and his team tested GPT-4 against traditional machine learning methods for predicting whether patients who go to the ER need to be admitted.

The study used patient visit data from seven hospitals within the Mount Sinai Health System. More than 864,000 emergency room visits were included in the data cohort. The ensemble model comprising traditional machine learning techniques achieved an AUC score of 0.878 in predicting admissions, with an accuracy of 82.9 percent. (An AUC score measures the ability to make correct positive and negative guesses, with an 0.5 score meaning the model performed no better than a random guess.)

The GPT-4 model was given the same task of predicting ER admissions, but under a few different conditions: “off the shelf” (not given any examples of patients, also known as “zero-shot”); given some probabilities of how machine learning models would perform; given 10 examples of patients with triage notes (“few-shot”); given 10 contextually similar cases (retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG); and various combinations of these conditions. In the setting with the most information provided (few-shot with RAG and machine learning probabilities), GPT-4 had an AUC score of 0.874, and an accuracy of 83.1 percent—results statistically similar to the ensemble model.

The findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association on Tuesday, May 21.

In this Q&A, Dr. Klang discusses the team’s research.

What was the motivation for your study?

Our study was motivated by the need to test if generative AI, like the GPT-4 model, can improve prediction of admission—and thus clinical decision-making—in a high-volume setting like the Emergency Department. We compared it against older machine learning methods, as well as evaluated its performance in combination with older machine learning methods.

What are the implications?

It suggests that AI, specifically large language models, could soon be used to support doctors in emergency rooms by making quick, informed predictions about whether a patient should be admitted or not.

What are the limitations of the study?

The study relied on data from a single urban health system, which may not represent conditions in other medical settings. Additionally, our study also didn’t prospectively assess the impact of integrating this AI technology into the daily workflow of emergency departments, which could influence its practical effectiveness.

How might these findings be put to use?

These findings could be used to develop AI tools, such as those that integrate GPT-4, that support making accurate clinical decisions. This could promote a model of AI-assisted care that is data-driven and streamlined, using only very few examples to train the platform. It also sets the stage for further research into the integration of AI in health care, potentially leading to more sophisticated AI applications that are capable of reasoning and learning from limited data in real-time clinical settings.

What is your plan for following up on this study?

Our group is actively working on the practical application of LLMs in real-world settings. We are exploring the most effective ways to combine traditional machine learning with LLMs to address complex problems in these environments.

Learn more about how Mount Sinai researchers and clinicians are leveraging machine learning to improve patient lives

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Why a Master’s Degree? Mount Sinai Graduate Students Share Their Experiences and Aspirations

Updated on Jul 12, 2024 | Featured, School

Six recent master’s graduates at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences discuss what they accomplished and how they are using their degrees to explore new paths and careers.

How ‘Incredible’ Research Opportunities in the Master of Science in Biomedical Science Program Helped Student Kate Jankowski Excel

“Fundamentally, I can’t forget the incredible research exposure this program provides, which is the reason I came here. The vast number of labs, the varying types of experiences, the great emphasis on science, and the ability to share ideas with others is paramount here.”

Read the Q&A

Hands-On Research in New York City’s Most Diverse Communities Deepens Kelsey Chandran’s Passion for Patient Education and Engagement as She Earns a Master of Public Health Degree

“I think Mount Sinai does a great job of cultivating community. The diverse group of students within a class, combined with the emphasized focus on collaboration, allows for a range of thoughts, perspectives, and vulnerable discussions that really touch on the main pillars of public health to enact change.”

Read the Q&A

How One Student Vastly Expanded Her Knowledge and Skills in Biology and Technology While Studying Biomedical Data Science at Mount Sinai

“The chance to learn from professors at the forefront of biomedical research made [Mount Sinai] the ideal place for me to expand my knowledge and skills,” says Angie V. Ramirez Jimenez.

Read the Q&A

Barriers to Equitable Access to Vaccines During the COVID-19 Epidemic Motivated Allenie Andrea Arnedo to Enroll in the Master of Public Health Program at Mount Sinai

“When I was initially searching for public health programs, I felt drawn to the world-class researchers, personalized mentorship, and welcoming students. The variety of tracks offered for my program was valuable for me because I was just embarking on my career path in public health.”

Read the Q&A

Kiran Nagdeo, BDS, Highlights How a Master of Public Health Degree Put Her on a Career Path to Improve Maternal and Child Oral Health on a Global Scale

“I had many milestones [at Mount Sinai], which include authoring two full-text publications. I also attended six conferences, where I gave more than a dozen presentations, and participated in a global health summer research program offered by Mount Sinai, which involved shadowing both dental and medical complex care services teams at Rikers Island.”

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How a Master of Health Administration (MHA) Degree and Mentorship From Top Mount Sinai Scientists Are Helping Daniel Caughey Advance His Career

“I was looking for a program that would offer the skills needed to succeed as a leader in the health care field, and that is exactly what I found in this program. The MHA offers a diverse curriculum with courses such as Strategic Planning, Finance, Marketing, and Population Health, to name a few.”

Read the Q&A

Master’s Commencement: Celebrating Mount Sinai’s Outstanding Class of Graduating Master’s Students

Updated on Jul 12, 2024 | Featured

Amid loud cheers and applause, master’s students at Mount Sinai’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences celebrated their many accomplishments—and the promise they hold for advancing science, health, and medicine—at a Commencement ceremony on Friday, June 21.

There were 176 graduates in the Class of 2024 across nine programs: Master of Science in Biostatistics; Master of Science in Biomedical Science; Master of Health Administration; Master of Science in Health Care Delivery Leadership; Master of Science in Biomedical Data Science; Master of Science in Clinical Research; Master of Science in Genetic Counseling; Master of Science in Epidemiology; and Master of Public Health.

Student speaker Kiran Nagdeo, BDS, who had entered the Master of Public Health program two years earlier after having started her career in dentistry, addressed the graduates with optimism.

Student speaker Kiran Nagdeo, BDS

“Each of us chose Mount Sinai for different reasons, but we all shared a common goal: to advance human health and contribute to the well-being of society,” she said. “During our studies, we engaged with leading experts, participated in groundbreaking research, and immersed ourselves in hands-on experiences.

“As we move forward, let us carry with us the core values instilled by Mount Sinai: integrity, compassion, and a relentless pursuit of knowledge. Let us remain curious, continue to ask questions, and never settle for easy answers. The road ahead may be challenging, but we are well-prepared to face it with courage and determination.”

Presiding over the ceremony were Marta Filizola, PhD, Dean, Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, Dean for Academic Affairs, Icahn Mount Sinai, and Chief Scientific Officer, Mount Sinai Health System.

Marta Filizola, PhD

“With your advanced degrees, you are now prepared to play a role in creating the future,” Dr. Filizola said. “You will work to understand and prevent threats to public health. You will compile and analyze biomedical data to generate new insights that can improve human health. You will build research studies that can yield the clinical breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. You will help families understand genetic risks, and prepare them for what may be the greatest challenge of their lives. You will be called upon to counsel health care professionals confronting the most complex bioethical challenges. You will help manage hospitals, and, perhaps one day, run a hospital—or an entire health system. All of this is very noble work.  Your future is bright, very bright, because science and medicine need you.”

Dr. Filizola is also the Sharon & Frederick A. Klingenstein/Nathan G. Kase, MD Professor of Pharmacological Sciences, Professor of Neuroscience, and Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health.

Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD

In his speech, Dr. Nestler focused on Mount Sinai’s excellence in public health.

“Most of today’s graduates will be receiving their degrees in a field related to public health, and our nation needs your newly honed expertise more than ever,” he said. “This year marks a major milestone for Mount Sinai—this spring we created a new academic Department of Public Health and we recruited one of our own stars, Dr. Rosalind Wright, as the founding department chair,” he said as he introduced Rosalind Wright, MD, MPH, to the audience. “She will also serve as Mount Sinai’s first Dean for Public Health. These initiatives represent a major investment by Mount Sinai in public health, with a firm commitment to expand the scope and depth of our educational, research, and community outreach programs.” Learn more about Dr. Wright, a renowned physician, researcher, and educator, in this Q&A.

Dr. Nestler continued: “While our local and national communities represent a major focus of Mount Sinai’s work in public health, we must extend our efforts to international communities to advance global health.” He added, “And, a greater focus in public health is needed to identify and correct health disparities and the social and environmental factors that contribute to them. Mount Sinai’s Institute for Health Equity Research will be a crucial partner in our enhanced public health initiatives to achieve tangible progress in this important priority in health care.” Dr. Nestler is also Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience and Director of The Friedman Brain Institute.

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, MPH, Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, Boston University School of Public Health, was presented with an honorary Doctor of Science degree. Dr. Galea is a population health scientist and epidemiologist, author, physician, and one of the most widely cited scholars in the social sciences. He has dedicated his career to understanding the social causes of health, mental health, and the consequences of trauma and working to shape the field to disrupt them and to change the lives and trajectories of people around the world.

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH, MPH

In his Commencement address, he challenged each graduate to create a healthier world, guided by three pillars—epistemic humility, radical compassion, and reform through reason.

“Humility,” said Dr. Galea, “is the understanding that there are always limits to what we know. We can and should be in the business, always, of expanding these limits, but we will never reach a point when we can say we have learned it all. Humility recognizes this, allowing us to learn from what others can teach us. When we think we know it all, we are less likely to open our minds and our ears in our dealings with other people. Humility enables us to learn.”

Dr. Galea told the graduates there is a difference between empathy and compassion. “Like empathy, compassion helps us to see the world through the eyes of others…Empathy might allow us to feel what another feels. Compassion helps us go further, urging us to ask why they feel the way they do. When we do, we can see the political, social, and economic factors that underlie the health of many…Compassion calls on us to act, to make a better world. This is why it is radical.

“Reform through reason,“ he continued, “is ultimately about data and the incremental work we do every day to make the world better. Everything we do should rest on a foundation of consequential, rigorous, and inquisitive science. Guided by these principles, our science can help get us to the better, healthier future we all want. But it will not do so overnight. This is where it becomes necessary to embrace what I have called “radical incrementalism” in our work. [It] means working patiently, pragmatically toward the radical goal of a healthier world for all. And this goal is radical indeed—it means building a world that is optimized for health at every level.”

Click here to meet six graduates from Mount Sinai’s master’s programs and learn more about their experiences and passions.

Click below for a celebratory slideshow of graduates.

 

Mount Sinai Creates a New Department as it Reenvisions Public Health Education, Research, and Practice for the 21st Century

Updated on Jul 12, 2024 | Featured, School

Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH

Building on its long history of groundbreaking science and advocacy in public health, and its research strengths in exposomics, genomic sciences, genetics, and big data analysis, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has established a Department of Public Health to address the urgent and mounting medical and environmental challenges of the 21st century.

Renowned physician and researcher Rosalind J. Wright, MD, MPH, was named Chair of the department and inaugural Dean for Public Health. Dr. Wright is Horace W. Goldsmith Professor and, most recently, the former Dean of Translational Biomedical Sciences at Icahn Mount Sinai. She is a founding Co-Director of the Institute for Climate Change, Environmental Health, and Exposomics, the nucleus of Icahn Mount Sinai’s work on studying environmental exposures and their effects on development, health, and disease across the life course.

Dr. Wright, who has authored or coauthored more than 350 peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered more than 150 regional, national, and international presentations, has long been committed to mentoring the next generation of public health scientists, having trained nearly 100 predoctoral and doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows over her career.

Bolstering these efforts is Icahn Mount Sinai’s extraordinary research capabilities, which include being ranked No. 4  among U.S. medical schools in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for Public Health, and No. 2 for Genetics (Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research 2023 fiscal year), and No. 1 nationally in National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences funding.

In the following Q&A, Dr. Wright discusses the transformative steps that will further strengthen Icahn Mount Sinai’s leadership in public health education, research, and practice.

Mount Sinai has been on the front lines of public health for decades. Why a Department of Public Health now?

We’re already widely recognized for our strengths in exposomics, genomic sciences, genetics, and big data analysis. And our public health research and advocacy work has frequently raised our national profile through studies, symposia, and testimony we’ve given before congressional committees looking into public health reform. By carefully assessing that repertoire of strengths—which often is the envy of others in the field—and bridging them, we can create a public health ecosystem that would allow our teams to cohesively share new knowledge, skills, and technology.

How, specifically, do you envision this?

Imagine if we could seamlessly marry the work of our environmental scientists in exposomics and genomics with the work of our computational and computer scientists. We could bring those data streams together even more than we are already doing and factor in our artificial intelligence and machine learning expertise to make sense of data patterns and profiles involving thousands of variables. The result would be revelations and gains in the field of public health not possible in the past.

How do you get there?

One of the ways we plan to set the stage for those breakthroughs is cross-training our students and workforce. Our goal is a transdisciplinary trained workforce so that MDs, PhDs, and other clinicians have the skills to understand climate science, for example, and to use data science methods, such as machine learning, to more precisely identify health-relevant environmental and genetic factors impacting all of our patients. Likewise, we want our data scientists to acquire the same basic skills in epidemiology and environmental health sciences to enable team science. Those ambitious goals will clearly require innovation and change around public health education at Mount Sinai.

We’ll be establishing doctoral programs in public health areas where our research and practice can lead the field, such as climate science and exposomics. But first, our plans are to expand our Master of Public Health programs to synergistically feed into planned doctoral programs. The public health programs were created in 2001 and are the oldest and largest graduate studies at Mount Sinai. We want our new department to be not just an academic home for investigators and public health practitioners, but an incubator for real curricula innovation.

We have what I see as a key advantage over other institutions in the field that will fortify our work: Mount Sinai Health System and Icahn Mount Sinai serve the greater New York City region, which includes East Harlem, an area of Manhattan that has one of the most diverse patient populations in the United States. It amounts to a laboratory rich in socioeconomic strata perfectly suited for research and clinical and public health practice. Just as importantly, we’ve advanced our science through programs like the BioMe®️ BioBank Program, with its tens of thousands of DNA samples driving genetic, genomic, and epidemiologic investigations, and through the Mount Sinai Million Health Discoveries Program, where we’ve woven genetics into real-world clinical care and have a goal to sequence 1 million Mount Sinai patients.

All of these approaches are essential if we are going to reinvent our response to the kinds of public health challenges we are seeing today—which are the same challenges we urgently need to address as a health system, too—climate change and environmental exposures of children within their communities, which we know can lead to asthma, obesity, learning disabilities, and much more. These will disproportionately impact communities that are already more burdened by these disorders. Nothing will focus us more as a department than gaining a more-informed understanding of the nature and impact of health-relevant environmental hazards that may contribute to health disparities in our communities.

You are building on a formidable legacy. What are the most impactful discoveries Mount Sinai researchers have made over the decades?

Uncovering the impact of asbestos on human health has been among the most consequential. Our work can be traced to Dr. Irving Selikoff, a pioneering researcher, who created in the 1960s the nation’s first hospital division of occupational medicine at Mount Sinai. His research on asbestos-related disease shaped public policy for working men and women around the world. It was also responsible for the landmark 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act.

More recently, we’ve actively studied per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), the class of synthetic chemicals ubiquitous in the environment and our bodies. Our investigators have developed novel metrics to gauge our cumulative exposure to PFAS and have shown how that exposure is linked to significant reductions in female fertility, as well as child health outcomes, such as asthma. We’re proud that our science is now informing regulatory change around PFAS, undertaken by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2023.

My own lab has done considerable work with air pollution exposure. We were among the first to link that exposure to asthma onset, as well as to cognitive dysfunction in children in early life, and to show that this starts in utero and weighs disproportionately on low income and ethnic minority populations. We were also among the first with research to show that psychological stress in pregnant women puts their babies at higher risk of developing conditions like asthma, given the impact of stress on the immune system.

What excites you most about your new role?

My passion throughout my career has been public health—from the time I started my fellowship in pulmonary medicine and felt the sudden need to get a Master in Public Health degree. I realized that this knowledge would help me to better understand the disparities I was seeing in my asthma patients—disparities I knew couldn’t be explained by heritability or genetics alone, which led me to studying broad environmental influences as well. In the same way, I feel I’m now in a position to do something really unique as the new Dean for Public Health—to translate the scientific capabilities that we can collectively bring together to improve the health of our communities. And there’s no better place to accomplish that than at Mount Sinai.

Watch a video to learn more about the vision for Public Health at Icahn Mount Sinai.

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