Faculty
Erwin Bottinger, MD
The Irene and Dr. Arthur Fishberg Professor of Medicine
Professor of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics
Director, The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Dr. Böttinger is a native of Germany where he obtained his MD degree from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 1986. He trained in internal medicine and nephrology in the U.S., including a Clinical and Research Fellowship in Nephrology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. After additional research with the National Cancer Institute, Dr. Bottinger joined the faculty at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where he served as Director of the Albert Einstein Biotechnology Center, an NIH-funded national research resource center in genomics and biomedical informatics. In 2004, he transferred to the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City where he currently holds an endowed chair as Irene and Dr. Arthur Fishberg Professor in Medicine. He served as Vice Chairman for Biomedical Research in the Department of Medicine, before he was appointed in 2007 as inaugural Director of The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine at Mount Sinai, an interdisciplinary institute to advance personalized health and healthcare. Dr. Böttinger is the Principal Investigator of Mount Sinai’s BioMe hospital-based Biobank and several NIH-funded national research consortia, including the Chronic Kidney Disease Biomarker Consortium and the electronic medical records and genomics (eMERGE) network.
Omri Gottesman, MD
Assistant Professor of General Internal Medicine
The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Dr. Gottesman is a clinician-scientist from the UK. His work focuses on the translation and implementation of data-driven and genomic medicine in clinical practice, with a special emphasis on using the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) and clinical data as tools for improving research and enhancing clinical care.
Dr. Gottesman has led IPM’s efforts in electronic phenotyping – creating algorithms that leverage information from the EMR to assign phenotypic status for use in Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS), replication studies and implementation trials. He is currently Principal Investigator of CLIPMERGE (CLinical Implementation of Personalized Medicine through Electronic health Records and GEnomics), a pioneering Mount Sinai project that is incorporating information about pharmacogenomic and common disease risk into patient’s electronic health records with accompanying clinical decision support. He has a special interest in complex trait genomics and pharmacogenomics as they apply to the general medical patient.
Dr. Gottesman is a co-investigator of the NHGRI-funded U01 grant ‘Biorepositories for Genomic Medicine in Diverse Communities’ as part of the NHGRI’s ‘Electronic Medical Records and Genomics’ (eMERGE) II Network.
Research Interests:
- Genomic and data-driven medicine - translation of genomics, evidence and clinical data into enhanced clinical prediction and clinical care through electronic health records and clinical decision support
- Electronic phenotyping - clinical data capture and representation
- Complex trait genomics and associated pharmacogenomics
- Genomic medicine in heterogeneous populations
- Clinical care implementation and evaluation of personalized medicine projects
Eimear Kenny, PhD
Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences
Dr. Kenny has joined the IPM faculty with a start date of November 1, 2012. Dr. Kenny is an experimental and computational biologist interested in determining the genetic underpinnings of human diversity and disease susceptibility. She specializes in the genomics of highly structured or isolate populations. Her research combines population genetics, complex disease mapping, statistical modeling and experimentation to gain a deeper understanding of the landscape of genetic variation in global populations and its impact on function, fitness and survival.
Research Interests:
- Genomics of the people of the South Pacific
- Population structure in large-scale sequencing projects
- Statistical methods for complex trait mapping in structured populations
- Complex disease mapping in African-Americans, Hispanics and Ashkenazi Jews
- Sequential coverage genome sequencing and genotype-by-sequencing paradigms
Ruth J.F. Loos, PhD
Director, Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Traits Program
Professor, Department of Preventive Medicine
The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Child Health and Development Institute
Dr. Loos is Director of the Genetics of Obesity and Related Metabolic Traits Program, in The Charles Bronfman Institute of Personalized Medicine. Her primary research interests focus on the identification of genes and genetic loci contributing to the risk of obesity and related metabolic traits. She has been involved in gene-discovery since 2005, when ‘genome-wide association’ was introduced and has since actively contributed to many consortia that use this approach to identify genetic loci for a large number of metabolic traits. Increasingly, her gene-discovery work also focuses on the identification of low-frequency variants through the implementation exome-chip genotyping and sequencing projects, not only in individuals of white European descent, but also in those of African and Hispanic descent.
She is a member of steering committee of the GIANT (Genetic Investigation of ANTropometric Traits) consortium, led by Professor Joel Hirschhorn and is actively involved in the many working groups. She has set up GWAS consortia for body fat percentage, for leptin levels, and also for resting heart rate. Furthermore, she has been involved in the GWAS consortia for blood pressure (ICBP), lipids (GLGC), glucose and insulin (MAGIC), and type 2 diabetes (DIAGRAM), amongst others.
Besides gene-discovery, she uses epidemiological methods to follow-up on established loci with the aim to elucidate the pathways through which they increase risk of metabolic disease. Furthermore, her work also assesses the public health implications of the established loci by examining their predictive value and their interaction with lifestyle factors such as diet and physical activity.
Research Interests:
- Gene-discovery for obesity and related metabolic traits
- Role of low-frequency variants in metabolic traits
- Genetic contribution to obesity and related metabolic traits in individuals of African and Hispanic origin
- Gene-environment interaction to study the influence of lifestyle on the genetic susceptibility to obesity and related metabolic traits
- The value of genetic prediction for obesity and related metabolic disease
- Use of epidemiological methods to gain insights in the pathways that connect genetic loci to increased risk of disease
Quingbin Song, MD, MSc
Director, IT Core Lab
The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Assistant Professor of Medicine
Dr. Song is a scientist in computational biology. He has double degrees: medicine and computer science, and was well trained on Molecular Biology, Genetics and Computer Science. He has extensive experience in experimental biology and database management. He is advancing a robust information management system on clinical specimen repository for personalized medicine.
He serves as Director of IT Core Lab at IPM, developing and managing the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), integrating biomedical instruments into LIMS and automating the sample extraction and tracking pipeline.
Dr. Song is a Co-Investigator of the NIDDK-funded U01 grant ‘New York CKD Biomarker Program’.
Research Interests:
- Sample tracking and specimen repository management
- Next-generation sequencing data analysis
- Biomedical instruments integration into LIMS
Avelino Teixiera
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Division of Cardiology
The Charles Bronfman Institute for Personalized Medicine
Avelino Teixeira is a Biochemist-Protein Chemist. His focus is the separation, purification, identification and characterization of proteins involved in human disease. One of his current focuses is the quantification of specific proteins of the urine proteome related to specific kidney degenerative diseases.
Dr. Teixeira screens antibodies for reliable quantification of urine proteins that are biomarkers of kidney disease.
Research Interests:
- Quantification of proteins of the human urine proteome that can potentially be used as biomarkers of kidney diseases.
- Development of identification and quantification methodologies for proteins involved in essential cellular functions related to diseases.
- Development of electrophoretic, chromatographic and mass spectrometric protein separation and identification protocols.