Barbara Murphy, MB, BAO, BCh, FRCPI, is the Murray M. Rosenberg Professor of Medicine, Chair, Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine, Mount Sinai Health System, Dean, Clinical Integration and Population Management, and Director of The Transplant Genomics Research Laboratory.
Dr. Murphy received her M.B. B.A.O. B.Ch. from The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and did an internship at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, where she also completed a residency rotation and a fellowship in Clinical Nephrology. Dr. Murphy did a postdoctoral training with a fellowship in Nephrology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, where she trained in transplant immunology at the Laboratory of Immunogenetics and Transplantation, Renal Division, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Among her many honors, Dr. Murphy was awarded the Young Investigator Award in Basic Science by the American Society of Transplantation in 2003. In 2005, Dr. Murphy was awarded the Irene and Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg Professor of Medicine at The Mount Sinai Hospital. Then, in 2011, she was named Nephrologist of the Year by the American Kidney Fund. In 2014, she received the prestigious Jacobi Medallion.
Li Li, MD, MS, Genetics and Genomics Sciences, is an Assistant Professor and has over 10 years experience in clinical research and translational bioinformatics involving genetic and clinical risk factor identification, diagnostic assay development, and new therapeutic targets discovery. Her expertise is in translational research by integrating high-throughput genomics, genetics, various molecular measurements, and electronic medical records data with over 50 peer-reviewed publications including Science Translational Medicine, PNAS, Nature Methods, Nature Biotechnology, and JASN. Her studies on identifying risk factors through genetic architecture and EMR was recently highlighted by NIH director http://directorsblog.nih.gov/2014/05/06/mining-the-big-data-mountain/. Her previous studies on developing novel diagnostic biomarker for tolerance, rejection post-transplantation cross-organ and steroid-avoidance treatment clinical studies have been awarded The Young Investigator Award in 2008, 2009, and 2010 in American Society of Transplantation, the distinguished research fellow in 2009, and The Transplantation Society (TTS) Astellas Young Investigators Award in 2010.
Luz Liriano-Ward, MD
Madhav Menon, MD, joined Nephrology/ Kidney Transplantation at Mount Sinai as junior faculty after pursuing an academic/research track fellowship in Nephrology with 2-full post-doctoral years in the lab. Dr. Menon always aspired to a career in academic nephrology, engaging in both clinical practice and research. He completed his clinical training from India and subsequently from the United states. He has received numerous honors during his clinical training in both countries, including a Medal of the First Order from His Excellency the Vice President of India. He is currently an Assistant professor in Medicine and works between the Division of Nephrology and the Recanati-Miller Transplantation Institute. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and Nephrology.
Dr. Menon’s research interests extending from his mentored research (Mentors: Barbara Murphy, MD & Cijiang He MD, PhD) have been related to the application of genomics on chronic kidney allograft failure and specifically kidney fibrosis. We have identified Shroom3 as a gene whose expression precedes and correlates with allograft fibrosis. Our lab is currently funded aiming to study the mechanism of fibrosis downstream of Shroom3. Our lab also has ongoing translational projects to identify genomic markers for subsequent allograft fibrosis, allograft failure and acute rejection in kidney allografts. Dr. Menon has won “Young Investigator” travel awards on two consecutive years at the American Transplant Congress, as well as the World Transplant Congress. Dr. Menon was awarded a “Ben J Lipps Fellowship Award” by the American Society of Nephrology in 2012. He is currently funded by the American Heart Association. madhav.menon@mssm.edu
Chengguo Wei, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow in the Murphy Lab. He received his BS in bioengineering in Hebei University and went on to get his PhD in microbiology from Jilin University, China in 2013. During his PhD study, he did some research in pathogenicity and molecular evolution on measles and enterovirus. In his last year of PhD, he was selected as a visiting student supervised by Dr. Weijia Zhang at Mount Sinai, where he receiving training on bioinformatic analysis of microarray and next generation sequencing data analysis and integration of high throughput data. He then joined the Murphy Lab in October 2013 focusing research in bioinformatics and kidney fibrosis in chronic allograft injury.
Weijia Zhang, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Bioinformatics and Director of Bioinformatics in Department of Medicine of Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He has been trained in both cell biology and computer science and has extensive experience in genomic analysis. His current research focuses on development and implementation of bioinformatics tools/pipeline in high throughput genomic analysis of research and clinical specimen in kidney transplant and human complex diseases including chronic kidney diseases, HIV-associated diseases and human cancers. His research in kidney transplant involves development of diagnostic/prognostic markers for clinical outcomes in transplant patients and understanding the molecular mechanism underlying kidney acute rejection and fibrosis through systematic analysis of high throughput genetic/genomic profiles . He has also developed very useful bioinformatics tools for analysis of high throughput genomic data from microarrays and deep-sequencing sequencers and applied these tools to many collaborative NIH-funded research projects, leading to successful grant funding, over 60 publications in prestigious journals (eg. Nature Genetics, Nature Immunology and Journal of Clinical Investigation) and presentations on international conferences. Dr. Zhang graduated from Fudan University in 1992 and completed his graduate study in cellular immunology in Dr. Stanley G. Nathenson’s lab of Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a computer science Master program from City University of New York in 2000. He was Associated Director of Bioinformatics of Harvard Medical School and Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics from 2001 until he worked in Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 2004.