Eric Oermann, MD, a pioneering Neurosurgery second-year resident at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has been named to the fourth annual Forbes “30 Under 30” list as one of the nation’s top Health Care innovators for 2015. According to Forbes, the honorees “reflect the best and the brightest in health care and science.”
Dr. Oermann, 29, leads multidisciplinary studies—driven by mathematics and data science—to develop algorithms to better predict individual survival rates among patients with advanced Stage IV cancers, which would also help physicians to determine personalized, more effective treatments for these patients.
“The question, ‘How long do I have to live,’ is a very profound one, yet it is one of the questions that doctors are the worst at answering,” says Dr. Oermann, who earned his MD and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Georgetown University. He also spent a year at the University of North Carolina studying “machine learning,” the cutting-edge subset of data science that forms the basis of predictive analytics. “This was a pivotal moment: becoming ‘fluent’ in both mathematics and medicine has been key to my success in research,” he says.
“Dr. Oermann is incredibly bright and highly motivated to solve neurosurgery’s fundamental problems,” says Joshua B. Bederson, MD, Professor and Chair of Neurosurgery, Mount Sinai Health System. “It’s astonishing how far Dr. Oermann has been able to advance his research mission while deftly handling the heavy clinical load of our bustling neurosurgery service.”
This is the second Mount Sinai innovator to be recognized by Forbes. In 2013, Jillian Shapiro, a third-year student at Mount Sinai’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, was named in its “30 Under 30” list for her significant discovery of a new molecular pathway. Dr. Shapiro received her PhD in microbiology from Mount Sinai in 2013 and is currently attending Fordham University School of Law. She intends to practice patent law upon graduation from Fordham.