Five University of Michigan professors have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the highest honorary society in the country for researchers in the fields of health and medicine.
The faculty members were recognized for their contributions to a broad range of topics, including cardiovascular disease, epidemiology, hepatology, health inequities, and anesthesiology informatics and clinical research.
Katherine A. Gallagher, Michele Heisler, Sachin Kheterpal, Anna Suk-Fong Lok and Bhramar Mukherjee are now a part of a select group of U-M researchers who belong to the NAM.
Katherine A. Gallagher
Gallagher, the John R. Pfeifer Professor of Surgery, professor of surgery, and of microbiology and immunology in the Medical School, has been elected to the NAM for her innovative translational research on epigenetic regulation of immune cells during normal and pathologic tissue repair and other cardiovascular disease processes.
Gallagher is also the vice chair of basic and translational science and a well-funded researcher supported by multiple R01s and other foundational grants, including the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Wylie Scholars, among others. Her high-impact work has appeared in prominent journals such asImmunity, Journal of Experimental Medicine and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
She is an expert in the molecular pathogenesis of wound repair and has contributed substantially to the understanding of epigenetics in immune cells associated with tissue repair, cardiovascular diseases, sepsis and most recently, COVID-19.
She is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, American Surgical Association, Society of Clinical Surgery, a James IV International Scholar, a Distinguished Fellow of the Society of Vascular Surgery and a Taubman Scholar.
Gallagher received a Bachelor of Science degree in physiology and neurobiology from the University of Maryland in 1998, and was a Howard Hughes Fellow at the NIH studying embryonic hair cell regeneration. She graduated from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 2002.
She completed her general surgery residency at the University of Maryland from 2002-09, and pursued a Vascular Biology Post-Doctoral T32 Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Gallagher completed her Vascular Surgery Fellowship at Weill Cornell Medical Center/Columbia University Medical Center in 2011.
Michele Heisler
A drive to understand and address inequity in medical care and health outcomes, both within the United States and in low- and middle-income countries, has powered Heisler’s career as a physician, researcher and global health and human rights advocate.
She is a professor of internal medicine at the Medical School, and of health behavior and health education at the School of Public Health; a research investigator with the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System; and medical director of the nonprofit health and human rights organization Physicians for Human Rights.
Heisler’s innovative clinical trials and implementation studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of diverse peer support models — in which fellow patients, community members, and family members are trained to support patients — to achieve sustained improvements in health and social well-being.
For more than a decade, she served as co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program and its successor, the National Clinician Scholars Program, at the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.
Upon graduation from Amherst College, after a year in Brazil on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, she pursued a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.
Before starting medical school at Harvard University she worked as a field investigator to assist the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador. She completed residency and health services research training as a RWJF Clinical Scholar at U-M.
She has authored more than 275 peer-reviewed studies in medical and public health journals and is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians.
Sachin Kheterpal
Kheterpal, the Kevin K. Tremper Research Professor and professor of anesthesiology in the Medical School, was elected to the NAM in recognition of his vision for and international leadership in anesthesiology informatics and clinical research.
Kheterpal’s career has focused on the use of novel information technology and electronic health records for patient care, quality improvement and research.
Using innovative techniques to integrate administrative, EHR and registry data across institutions, he established the Multicenter Perioperative Outcomes Group in 2008 and serves as its principal investigator. Most recently, he is the principal investigator in a $30 million pragmatic large comparative effectiveness trial.
In addition, his team’s recent work has focused on clarifying the role of mobile health and wearable technology in enabling more patient-centered research.
His research and quality improvement efforts have been funded through various industry sponsors, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, the National Institutes of Health, and the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
In 2017, Kheterpal was appointed as the associate dean for research information technology at the Medical School and is also the associate chair of strategy and technology and executive director of outcomes research within the Department of Anesthesiology.
Kheterpal has served as a member of the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative Advisory Panel, the NIH Council of Councils, and co-chairs NIH’s Novel and Exceptional Technology and Research Advisory Committee working group on Data Science. In 2013, he received the American Society of Anesthesiologists Presidential Scholar Award.
Kheterpal received his Bachelor of Science, Master of Business Administration and medical degrees from U-M. He also completed an anesthesiology residency and transplant anesthesia fellowship at U-M.
Anna Suk-Fong Lok
Lok conducted the first systematic study on hepatitis B reactivation among patients receiving chemotherapy, and was a key investigator in interferon and nucleos/tide analogue trials leading to their approval for hepatitis B. She led the first study demonstrating that hepatitis C can be cured by orally administered direct-acting antiviral drugs.
Lok is the Dame Sheila Sherlock Distinguished University Professor of Hepatology and Internal Medicine, Alice Lohrman Andrews Research Professor of Hepatology, professor of internal medicine, director of the hepatology program and assistant dean for clinical research at the Medical School.
Lok received the American Gastroenterological Association William Beaumont Prize in Gastroenterology in 2016 for her work in clinical hepatology. She is considered an outstanding clinical investigator in the study of hepatitis B and has also made crucial contributions to hepatitis C research.
Lok’s dedication to mentoring was honored by a MICHR Distinguished Mentor Award in 2012 and the AGA Distinguished Mentor Award in 2022. She received the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and became AASLD president in 2017.
Lok served as senior associate editor of Gastroenterology from 2011-13 and as associate editor of Hepatology from 2001-06. She has published more than 600 peer-reviewed articles, co-authored every iteration of the AASLD guidelines on hepatitis B.
Lok completed her medical education at the University of Hong Kong. She started her work in viral hepatitis as a hepatology fellow under the late Dame Sheila Sherlock in London in the early 1980s, then served on the University of Hong Kong faculty until moving to the United States in 1992.
Bhramar Mukherjee
Mukherjee is the John D. Kalbfleisch Collegiate Professor and chair of the Department of Biostatistics, and professor of biostatistics, of epidemiology, and of global public health at the School of Public Health.
Mukherjee’s research focuses on the development and application of statistical methods in epidemiology, environmental health, cancer research and disease risk assessment. She has authored more than 340 publications in statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology and medical journals, and has led grants as a principal investigator from the National Science Foundation and the NIH.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mukherjee and her team have been modeling the SARS-CoV-2 virus trajectory in India and their work has been covered widely by national and international media.
Mukherjee is a research professor and core faculty member for the Michigan Institute of Data Science, is associate director for quantitative data sciences at the Rogel Cancer Center, and was associate director of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at Rogel from 2015-18. She also has had a longstanding collaboration with U-M’s Precision Health Initiative.
Mukherjee has led an undergraduate summer program in big data since 2015 and has trained nearly 300 undergraduates.
She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Awards include the Janet Norwood Award and the Sarah Goddard Power Award in 2021.
Mukherjee earned a bachelor’s degree in statistics from Presidency College in Kolkata, India, and a master’s degree in applied statistics and data analysis from the Indian Statistical Institute. She also holds master’s and doctoral degrees in statistics from Purdue University.
