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Saving Lives, One Mask at a Time

May 19, 2020 | COVID-19, Diversity and Inclusion, Featured, School

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai student Tyler McChane (MS3) delivered mask kits to the New York Common Pantry in East Harlem.

Aishwarya Raja, a rising fourth-year medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, looked at the East Harlem community that surrounds Mount Sinai and knew she had to help her neighbors as the COVID-19 pandemic surged in New York City. She understood they often lacked the most basic health care necessities, and with a sizable number of them considered essential workers and unable to stay at home, she wanted them to remain safe. She was unsure they would even have access to one fundamental item needed to confront the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19—protective masks.

Then, she had an idea and founded Mask Transit, an initiative dedicated to delivering masks and educational materials to vulnerable neighbors, an effort to help slow the spread of COVID-19. She mobilized 50 medical students across 15 institutions in mid-April, and they began sourcing and delivering masks and creating educational materials.

The project was launched under the guidance of Yasmin S. Meah, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, and Medical Education. Dr. Meah is the Program Director and Chief Medical Attending of the East Harlem Health Outreach Partnership (EHHOP), Mount Sinai’s student-run, physician-supervised clinic, which provides free primary, preventive, and mental health care to uninsured adults.

“These students have done an amazing job of serving the most vulnerable members in the community,” says Dr. Meah. “Many of them are essential workers, isolated from services, with low health literacy, so getting masks and information into their hands can be lifesaving.”

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai student Matthew Eveleth (SY) put together mask kits that were mailed and delivered to more than 250 EHHOP (East Harlem Health Outreach Partnership) households.

Reema Navalurkar (MS3), and Parth Trivedi (SY), education co-chairs, developed educational materials to explain why and how to wear a mask, and how to clean it, along with information about COVID-19. Materials are available in Spanish, French, Mandarin, and Arabic, in addition to English. Under the leadership of Tyler McChane (MS3), the team sourced face masks and fabric. They found local seamstresses willing to donate their time to sew masks, and they partnered with grass roots organizations to help distribute them. The team delivered mask kits, consisting of masks and information, to distribution points and to individuals. They created a website, raised funds for their initiative, and promoted the program throughout the community and through social media.

To date, Mask Transit has distributed more than 6,000 mask kits with a goal of distributing 100,000 by mid-June. In addition to partnering with EHHOP, they also work with New York Common Pantry and Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Services, an organization that helps families meet basic needs, and they recently broadened their reach to West Bronx. Mask Transit has also established branches in Boston, where they are partnering with Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program, and in New Haven, where they are partnering with the HAVEN clinic, Yale School of Medicine’s student-run free clinic. Their new goal is to branch out to all five boroughs in New York City and to other cities across the United States.

Aishwarya Raja, a rising fourth-year medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, oversees the Mask Transit initiative that she founded in April 2020.

“What has been most rewarding is that we have been able to harness the power of individuals to make a difference,” says Ms. Raja. “Everyone—students, businesses, seamstresses, and community organizations—has stepped up. They are great examples of how kind, generous, and resilient our community members can be in the city’s time of need.”

Anyone interested in donating masks or mask materials can click here. To find out more information about the organization, visit masktransit.org or contact them at contact@masktransit.org.

Learn more about Mask Transit

Mount Sinai Student Named a 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros New Americans Fellow

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, School

Sherman Leung with his parents, Chris and Joanne, after getting his white coat and a stethoscope as a first-year medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai student Sherman Leung is among 30 recipients—out of 2,211 applicants—to be named a 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros New Americans Fellow. The program recognizes outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants pursuing graduate studies in the United States who have the potential to make significant contributions to the nation through their work. Each Fellow will receive up to $90,000 in funding over two years. Sherman, whose family came to the United States from Hong Kong, is a rising second-year medical student. The award will support his medical education.

The selection team specifically emphasized creativity, originality, initiative, and sustained accomplishment—all of which are found in abundance in Sherman’s early career.

Sherman was born in Maryland after his parents emigrated from Hong Kong during the handover of Hong Kong. His parents re-started their college educations and careers once in the United States; his father is a biochemist-turned-software engineer, and his mother, a literature major-turned-program analyst. “They taught me the importance of interdisciplinary thinking from an early age,” says Sherman. In high school, he conducted research that applied music theory to organic chemistry, and computational approaches to vaccine design.

Sherman’s diverse interests led him to Stanford University where he completed premedical requirements, initially planning to be a doctor. As he learned more about artificial intelligence, he shifted his focus to technology, conducting machine learning and social gamification research. While at Stanford, he started SHIFT, an interdisciplinary student group promoting and cultivating health care innovation initiatives.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, and a master’s degree Management Science and Engineering, Sherman moved to Boston, where he was an early product manager at PatientPing, a startup connecting providers across organizations and facilities to coordinate care and improve patient outcomes. For his work launching a national care coordination platform at PatientPing, Sherman was named to MedTech Boston’s “40 under 40 Healthcare Innovators” list in 2018.

“During my time working with health care startups and volunteering with immigrant and indigent patient populations, I was so inspired by many intimate patient-provider encounters to more directly serve patients as a physician,” he says. “I looked carefully for institutions that were eager to integrate new and underrepresented perspectives, and support extracurricular interests in addition to clinical medicine.” He found this at the Icahn School of Medicine, saying, “Dean Muller’s support of my diverse interests across entrepreneurship, health care technology, and clinical medicine, and the opportunity to work with Mount Sinai’s Diversity Innovation Hub, have been especially affirming in my first year as a medical student.” David Muller, MD, is Dean for Medical Education, and Professor and Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Chair in Medical Education.

Today, while pursuing his medical degree, Sherman continues to invest in and launch health care companies at AlleyCorp, a venture studio and early-stage investment fund based in New York City. “I care deeply about leveraging technology to support underserved patient populations and increasing the efficiency and efficacy of health care delivery,” he says.

He additionally supports student COVID-19 efforts at the Icahn School of Medicine, and is a New York City leader for Off Their Plate, a national initiative started by a 2019 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow that simultaneously supports restaurant and health care workers during this time of public health and economic upheaval. The organization raises funds that go directly to pay the wages of restaurant workers, who in turn prepare nutritious meals for front-line health care workers.

When asked for a famous quote that has inspired him, he chose this African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” The word “together” is one that has long shaped him. “As the proud son of immigrants from Hong Kong, I am the product of parents who chose to prioritize democratic freedom over their own professional careers,” he says. “I believe that I am where I am today because of their sacrifice in choosing the more difficult path. To me, being the child of immigrants means that you never forget where you come from—they are the roots I will always acknowledge as I hope to continue my family’s heritage in both service and entrepreneurship.”

Students, Postdoctoral Fellows, and Faculty Team Up to Advance Immunology Research on COVID-19

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, Research, School

Members of the Sinai Immunology Review Project. From left to right: Matthew Spindler; Louise Malle; Berengere Salome, PharmD, PhD ; Miriam Merad, MD, PhD ; Luisanna Paulino; Verena van der Heide, PhD; and Nicolas Vabret, PhD. Via Zoom, left to right, top row to bottom: Alvaro Moreira, MD; Robert Samstein, MD, PhD; Rachel Levantovsky; Matthew Park, Conor Gruber; and Emma Risson.

The unprecedented generation of non-peer-reviewed scientific information about COVID-19 in just a few months helped galvanize more than 50 members of the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai into forming a group to parse through the data.

The effort, called the Sinai Immunology Review Project, is composed of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. By sharing their knowledge and expertise, project members evaluate the quality of the research being posted to the bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint servers and help advance the most significant findings that are related to their field. Peer review is quality control provided by a panel of experts who evaluate whether a study has used proper research methods and is scientifically valid.

“Reviewing the preprinted studies benefits the authors and the scientific community, provides the public with access to what is being discussed, and helps reinforce scientific credibility,” says one of the project leaders, Nicolas Vabret, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology) and a member of the Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine. “To help pick the best treatments for COVID-19 you need to have a strong understanding of the pathology of the disease and we are able to help with this.” Many of the researchers who are working from home during this pandemic welcome the collaborative opportunity to contribute to the field.

Since mid-March, the project’s participants have ranked more than 2,000 studies according to their immunological relevance and written 130 reviews that are then posted alongside the corresponding study on the preprint servers. To ensure that the best science is elevated, each summary is written by a fellow or student specializing in a specific area of the immune system and then reviewed by a faculty member. A website built by Nicolas Fernandez, PhD, a computational scientist at Mount Sinai’s Human Immune Monitoring Center, hosts all of the reviews.

Recognition of this work recently led the editors of Nature Reviews Immunology to reach out to Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Mount Sinai Professor of Immunology and Director of the Precision Immunology Institute, to form a unique collaboration. Mount Sinai is now publishing three short commentaries in the publication each week on the most promising immunological findings on COVID-19. Within a few days of launching the collaboration with Nature Reviews Immunology, Mount Sinai’s work was viewed more than 10,000 times.

Project co-leader Robert Samstein, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology, and a member of the Precision Immunology Institute, says, “This has been a massive effort. It’s been a great opportunity for Mount Sinai’s trainees to integrate all of their knowledge and provide a summary for the scientific community,” so quickly and efficiently. “The huge flurry of output on COVID-19 by the scientific community is unprecedented and this effort is responding to that.”

While speed and the open sharing of information are vital to enhancing further understanding of the COVID-19 health emergency, the peer-review process is an essential part of scientific advancement and the preprint servers that are now publishing all of this new information were never meant as a replacement. In the absence of the peer-review process, members of the Immunology Project are stepping in to provide their expertise in the best way they can, says Dr. Samstein.

“By doing this we can really help make it easier for policy makers, physicians, and scientists to see what the best information is as it evolves and have a direct impact on treatments,” adds Dr. Vabret.

As time goes on, the medical and scientific community is learning more about the disease and calling into question some of its earliest hypotheses about possible treatments. This makes the need to highlight quality science to inform decision-making a continued priority, according to Dr. Vabret.

Mount Sinai Medical Students Graduate Early, Some To Join a Special Medical Corps

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, School

Katleen Lozada, MD, one of the first Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai students to sign up for early graduation.

Seventy-seven Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai students earned their medical degrees early on Wednesday, April 15, at a time when Mount Sinai Health System hospitals are experiencing extraordinary and unprecedented demands brought on by the COVID-19 public health crisis. Among them are 19 graduates who matched at Mount Sinai for residency and volunteered to join the Mount Sinai Medical Corps, helping to relieve a strained medical system while answering the call by New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo for “all hands on deck” to assist in any way.

On that day, a number of the early graduates participated in an informal ceremony—from the safety of their homes and conducted on Zoom—reciting the modern Hippocratic Oath and marking this milestone with faculty, staff, and friends and family, all in virtual attendance. Led by Staci Leisman, MD, FASN, Associate Professor of Medicine (Nephrology), and Medical Education, each graduate made a commitment to “respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk,” to “respect the privacy of my patients,” to “tread with care in matters of life and death,” and to “prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to a cure.”

Staci Leisman, MD, FASN, Associate Professor of Medicine (Nephrology), and Medical Education, led students and faculty in reciting the modern Hippocratic Oath during a virtual ceremony.

The opportunity to graduate from the Icahn School of Medicine a month early—as well as the decision to begin clinical work in the Health System through the Mount Sinai Medical Corps—was strictly voluntary. The Medical Corps is a newly formed training program that gives these newest MDs an opportunity to provide vitally needed support services to an overburdened staff—entering orders, for example, scribing, relaying updates to patient families, and facilitating discharge planning. Also joining Mount Sinai graduates in these efforts are 12 graduates from other medical schools who have matched at Mount Sinai for residency.

“We are extremely proud of the dedication and altruism of our students and their passion for helping our patients and communities at this historic time,” said David Muller, MD, Dean for Medical Education, and Professor and Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Chair in Medical Education at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Katleen Lozada was one of the first Icahn School of Medicine students to sign up for early graduation. “This is definitely not how I envisioned my graduation, but I just really want to help alleviate the intense pressure on clinical staff working on the front lines. What lies ahead is somewhat unknown, but most of all I am looking forward to helping in whatever capacity is needed,” said Dr. Lozada, who matched in the Emergency Medicine residency. The program has training sites at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Beth Israel—and at Elmhurst Hospital, which is part of a New York City integrated system of health care facilities that has been particularly hard-hit with COVID-19 cases.

“I would much rather be working and helping during this crisis than sitting at home and watching other able-bodied medical professionals take the brunt of the disaster,” added Dr. Lozada, whose mother is a pediatrician.

Olamide Omidele, MD

Also among the early graduates was Olamide Omidele—now Olamide Omidele, MD—a native of Nigeria who was matched to Mount Sinai as a urology resident. “The health care system is currently strained, and I am hoping that I can provide relief in whatever way is needed,” said Dr. Omidele. “I draw my strength, optimism, and comfort about joining the workforce from my parents, who are the main reason I chose to go into medicine.”

For Dr. Lozada, who is a first-generation New Yorker raised in the Bronx, the opportunity to assist the city she loves was also a motivating factor. “What’s even more exciting is that I’ll have the honor of serving the New York City community I grew up with and am awed by every day,” she said. “I can’t wait to get started!”

Students, faculty, staff, family, and friends participated in the virtual ceremony.

A Snapshot of the Extraordinary Contributions of Mount Sinai Students in COVID-19 Efforts

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | COVID-19, Featured, School

From left: Shravani Pathak (MS3), Samuel Paci (MS3), and PhD candidates Mark Roberto and Sindhura Gopinath, members of the PPE Task Force, inventoried PPE stock, coordinated with different floors, and distributed PPE across Mount Sinai West based on need.

In an extraordinary effort across the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and its Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in New York City, 200 students and postdoctoral fellows have volunteered more than 6,100 hours during a three-week period and continue to assist the Mount Sinai Health System during the staggering challenges of the COVID-19 crisis. As members of the Sinai Student Workforce, they have made an impact in a wide range of areas, from sourcing, acquiring and assembling personal protective equipment (PPE), to supporting clinical trials. An additional 450 student volunteers have since joined the effort.

Students are organized into task force teams working in the following areas: PPE, pharmacy, telehealth, administrative, operations, labs, and morale. The six-member COVID-19 Student Volunteer Leadership Team—Alexandra Agathis (MS3), Ben Asriel (MS4), Rohini Bahethi (MS3), James Blum (Scholarly Year), Zina Huxley-Reicher (MS4), and Shravani Pathak (MS3)—meets regularly with administration leadership to receive, triage, and coordinate requests from throughout the Health System. “Our students have become an essential part of the support system Mount Sinai needs to save lives and care for the communities it serves,” says David Muller, MD, Dean for Medical Education, and Professor and Marietta and Charles C. Morchand Chair in Medical Education.

“We know we’re making a huge difference because we can see it.” — Christopher Park (MS3), Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Following is a snapshot of what they have accomplished.

The PPE Task Force, led by Annie Arrighi-Allisan (MS3) and Stephen Russell (MS3), sourced and acquired nearly 3,000 N95 masks, nearly 9,000 surgical masks, and 400 gowns. They assembled more than 1,500 durable, reusable face shields from 3M and distributed them to front-line health care providers, fitted staff with protective masks, and played an instrumental role in the distribution of 750,000 single-use face shields. Students worked in around-the-clock shifts to assemble more than 200 PPE go-bags for residents working at Elmhurst Hospital—which is part of a New York City integrated system of health care facilities that has been particularly hard-hit with COVID-19 cases, and with which Mount Sinai has an affiliation. In addition, the group trained more than 50 students to help fit clinical staff with new models of N95 respirators.

The Operations Task Force, led by Alexandra Capellini (MS2) and Christopher Park (MS3), delivered vital equipment, a task that requires unloading deliveries and assembling IV poles. One team assisted in rapidly engineering a method to transform 200 ResMed VPAP ST machines as a donation from Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Inc., as patient ventilators. They additionally helped write the assembly guide and operation instructions and assemble hundreds of units. Other teams provided support on clinical trials and promoted blood donations among their eligible classmates and peers.

From left: Jeremy Nussbaum (MS3), Marc Casale (MS3), Meygan Lackey (MS4), and Rebecca Rinehart (MS3) took inventory of COVID-19 medications, alerted staff of shortages, and distributed critical medications to hospital floors at Mount Sinai Beth Israel.

“This has been an intense, eye-opening experience and, for the first time, I’ve felt I was doing my small part to help with the response to the pandemic,” says postdoctoral fellow Dan Filipescu, PhD. “Prior to this, I had no idea how the day-to-day operations of a clinical trial worked, or the amount of effort that goes into caring for COVID-19 patients.”

Approximately 300 student volunteers from the Telehealth Task Force provided and obtained patient information—calling them with test results, calling hospitalized COVID-19 patients to gather information regarding emergency contacts, and triaging the palliative care hotline. Students were trained to know when to answer questions and when to refer them to their superiors. Using an online chat platform, they triaged patients with potential COVID-19 symptoms—providing them with additional information about the virus and how to self-isolate, and arranging virtual appointments with physicians, or sending them to the emergency room if necessary. To date, students have had more than 2,320 triage chats and test result updates with patients. “As future physicians, we entered this profession in order to help people,” says Harinee Maiyuran (MS4) who, with Sidra Ibad (MS1) leads the Telehealth Task Force. “Though we are unable to engage in direct clinical care, coordinating Telehealth has allowed me to not only participate but feel useful in these weeks of uncertainty and fear, and it has allowed me to give back to the New York City community that has become my home.”

Pharmacy was the first task force to send volunteers throughout the Mount Sinai Health System. Led by Benjamin Liu (MS3), the team has been troubleshooting Pyxis loading to help resolve medication supply shortfalls. When students at Mount Sinai Beth Israel made pharmacy leadership aware of a dwindling supply of Azithromycin, pharmacists were able to recommend a different medication for some patients to conserve their supply. Volunteers in the leadership suite assisted the Health System pharmacy director in researching treatment guidelines and protocols, and in reviewing charts to understand the impacts of the COVID-19 protocols.

Members of the Administrative Task Force, led by Christopher Ferrer (MS3) and Phillip Groden (MS3), handled remote medical scribe work and assisted outpatient practices with transitioning patients to Telehealth appointments. Working with the Department of Clinical Innovation, they reprogrammed tablets in every room and unit to allow for teleconferencing between patients, families, and staff. They have also been fielding offers of vital supplies and PPE and acquiring them for the frontlines. A group of student volunteers working with Materials Management leadership developed a system of creating inventories of crucial PPE supplies, leading to improvements in efficiency.

More than 40 student volunteers on the Labs Task Force, led by Michael Fernando (PhD2) and Maddie O’Brien (PhD2), have triaged more than 500 incoming requests for serum antibody testing. Working with the departments of Microbiology and Pathology, they have contacted approximately 200 donors with their results, and scheduled approximately 300 new participants prioritized for potential plasma donation. Their most recent initiative has 50 volunteers screening COVID-19 patients to assist the Operations team to prioritize candidates for plasma treatment.

Melissa Hill (MS3), left, and Sarah MacLean (MS3), learned that “it is impossible to breathe when wearing N95s correctly—and staff have to do it all day long.” They were members of a team that brought N95s and other PPE to Mount Sinai West.

As staff and volunteers throughout the Mount Sinai Health System work long hours under increasingly stressful conditions, keeping up morale plays a key role in the fight against coronavirus. The Morale Task Force, led by Ms. Arrighi-Allisan, Ella Cohen (MS1), and Katie Donovan (MS3), is charged with boosting morale among student volunteers and the greater Mount Sinai community. They have coordinated meal deliveries three days a week to all students remaining in nearby apartments, with leftovers going to residents, nurses, and other staff at The Mount Sinai Hospital. They distributed health kits containing a thermometer, pulse oximeter, a mask, and acetaminophen to students who are ill. They also fostered a sense of community through social media and blogs that highlight the achievements of student volunteers and have created an initiative to write letters to residents of nursing homes and other skilled nursing facilities.

Collaboration among peers extends beyond the Mount Sinai community and includes medical students from around the country. Students from the University of California, San Francisco, tweeted a seven-minute video to health care workers in New York City, showing solidarity, thanking them for their heroic efforts, and offering words of encouragement. “I am in awe of the way everyone has come together to fight this pandemic and all the hard work my peers have put into volunteering,” says Ms. Pathak. “I love collaborating with students from other schools as they reach out to me about how they can develop structures like our workforce in preparation for when the pandemic affects their communities.”

Adds Mr. Park about his experience on the Operations Task Force, “I think a lot of us are learning about the real meaning of resilience and adaptability by living it. We know we’re making a huge difference because we can see it. I am both inspired but also unsurprised by the student response, because this is the standard I knew that our student body functioned at and would strive for.”

Convocation 2019 Celebrates a Year of Achievement

Nov 5, 2019 | Featured, School

Dennis S. Charney, MD, delivered the State of the School address.

A year of great achievement in science and medicine was celebrated at the 2019 Convocation Ceremony, which marked the beginning of the academic year at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and featured the annual State of the School Address by Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System. The event, held on Thursday, October 17, before a standing-room-only audience at Goldwurm Auditorium, also honored 10 renowned faculty members who have advanced the fields of neurosurgery, molecular pharmacology, oncology, bioinformatics, vaccinology, population health, cardiovascular clinical research, and gene and cell medicine.

In one of the School of Medicine’s chief accomplishments, Dr. Charney said, it received $393 million in National Institutes of Health funding in fiscal year 2019—a 13 percent increase over the prior year—ranking the school No. 12 in the nation. The Icahn School of Medicine also rose to No. 3 from No. 4 in research dollars per principal investigator, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

“We are by far the best-funded independent medical school and are competing very effectively with all the major universities,” Dr. Charney said. “But most important—our science is leading to breakthroughs that have the potential to help our patients.”

The matriculating class of medical students is a well-rounded and diverse group who came from some of the nation’s top universities and had a median grade point average of 3.82 (out of 4.0). “We have a great class of students, not only because of their metrics but because of their passion for social justice, for gender equity, and for science,” Dr. Charney said. “They want to do it all, and we are here to be their teachers and make sure that is possible.” To further support medical students, in April 2019 Mount Sinai announced the Enhanced Scholarship Initiative, which ensures that medical students with a demonstrated need will graduate with a maximum debt of $75,000. Mount Sinai remains the largest sponsor of graduate medical education in the nation, with 2,500 residents and clinical fellows. And it has added six accredited programs at Mount Sinai South Nassau, which joined the Health System in 2019.

The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences was granted accreditation for a new Master of Health Administration program, which will launch in 2020, and it has expanded training in data science and entrepreneurship in response to requests from students. The school has an “outstanding” matriculating class of 44 PhD students, Dr. Charney said. “And 70 percent of the class are women, which is very encouraging, given that we want more women going into science and medicine.”

Among other high points:

Mount Sinai Innovation Partners (MSIP), which translates research findings into health care products and services, generated 209 patent applications and 60 new licenses and options for the use of research. MSIP helped create several spin-out companies, including HiberCell, Inc., which develops therapeutics focused on preventing cancer relapse, and RenalytixAI, PLC, which advances tools to identify patients at risk for fast-progressing kidney disease.

The Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice had its most successful year, with annualized revenue of $1.1 billion in 2019, an increase of 7 percent over 2018. The practice is one of the largest in the nation, with 1.4 million ambulatory visits to The Mount Sinai Hospital campus in 2019. The number of phone calls to its Access Center rose to 4.4 million in 2019 from 3.65 million in 2018.

“The Best Employers for Diversity,” a list of 500 companies compiled by Forbes, ranked Mount Sinai No. 1 among health systems and hospitals in 2019, and No. 19 overall. In January 2019, Carol Horowitz, MD, MPH, was named Dean for Gender Equity in Science and Medicine—the first such dean in the nation. Dr. Horowitz is overseeing a range of initiatives in areas including compensation, recruitment and retention, gender bias, and mentorship. The School of Medicine in 2019 created the Change Now Initiative to promote health care and education that are free of racism and bias. And in October 2019, the Diversity Innovation Hub (DIH) was launched by a team led by Gary C. Butts, MD, Dean for Diversity Programs, Policy, and Community Affairs, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. DIH intends to create fellowships in technology and entrepreneurship for Mount Sinai medical and graduate students and to work with partners such as MSIP, local community leaders, and start-ups to seek innovative solutions to disparities in health and health care.

Looking ahead, Mount Sinai is continuing to carry out the wide-ranging strategic plan developed in 2017, Dr. Charney said. In 2019, it created new institutes focusing on digital health, biomedical engineering, and transformative clinical trials. Mount Sinai is also planning a new building at 98^th and Madison.

“We expect this to be an iconic building and a gateway to our campus,” Dr. Charney said. “It will allow an expansion of our faculty practice and enhance our initiatives in digital health, artificial intelligence, and biomedical engineering.” To fund this and other capital projects, Mount Sinai is working with the Boards of Trustees to raise $2 billion by 2024. Thirty-one percent of the goal has been achieved as of October 2019.

Mount Sinai’s “great track record of discovery” was saluted by James S. Tisch, who in spring 2019 became Co-Chairman of the Boards of Trustees with Richard A. Friedman. “Our recent achievements and research rankings are truly impressive, particularly for a standalone medical school that is not a part of a larger research university,” Mr. Tisch said.

Mount Sinai is a leading driver of innovation at a critical time, said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mount Sinai Health System, comparing the present day to the dawn of quantum physics in the early 20th century. Physicists of that time could never have predicted that their discoveries would lead to artificial intelligence and cellphones that can send a photo across the globe in milliseconds. “Today we are in the midst of another incredible revolution, but this time it is in biology. We are seeing changes at an exponential rate as our research is transforming modern medicine and our understanding of disease,” Dr. Davis said. “Our grandchildren may look back and wonder why people ever died of cancer or why they only lived to 80.” He urged leading physician-scientists—like Mount Sinai’s 10 newly endowed professors—to use their prestige and expertise to convince government policymakers of the opportunities that lie ahead.

Concluding his address, Dr. Charney said he was looking forward to working further with Mr. Tisch and Mr. Friedman, and he expressed sincere gratitude to Peter W. May, who stepped down as Chairman of the Mount Sinai Boards of Trustees in May 2019 after guiding the Health System through 17 years of enormous growth and change.

“Peter May enabled us to go from good to great—to be among the best medical schools and health systems in the world,” Dr. Charney said. “And we thank him for his inspirational leadership and wisdom.”

Front row, from left: Florian Krammer, PhD; Sundar Jagannath, MBBS; Fred R. Hirsch, MD, PhD; Lakshmi A. Devi, PhD; Joshua B. Bederson, MD; and Dennis S. Charney, MD. Back row, from left: James S. Tisch; Sarah E. Millar, PhD; Roxana Mehran, MD; Avi Ma’ayan, PhD; Daniel M. Labow, MD; and Nathalie Jette, MD, MSc.