NextGen Features Overview

Tamia A. Harris-Tryon, MD, PhD

Dr. Harris-Tryon is a physician-scientist.  She earned her combined medical and doctoral degree in cellular and molecular medicine at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and completed a residency in dermatology at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.  Certified by the American Board of Dermatology, she joined the UT Southwestern faculty in 2014.  She completed her postdoctoral training at UT Southwestern in the lab of Lora Hooper, Ph.D. Dr. Harris-Tryon’s research focuses on the organisms that reside on the surface of the skin – collectively termed the “microbiota” – and how they impact the skin’s immune system. Her work is supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and UT Southwestern.  She is the recipient of the 2019 American Academy of Dermatology Young Investigators Award. 

DeAnna Baker Frost, MD, PhD

Dr. DeAnna Baker Frost is an adult rheumatologist and physician-scientist. A native of Baltimore, MD, she completed a combined M.D. and Ph.D. degree program at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in 2012 and an Internal Medicine residency at Duke University in 2014. Upon completion of her residency, she became a certified American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) physician and returned to MUSC as an adult rheumatology fellow in the ABIM physician-scientist research pathway. She worked in Dr. Carol Feghali-Bostwick’s laboratory as a post-doctoral research scholar from 2015-2018. Dr. Baker Frost was chosen as the Chief Rheumatology Fellow in 2017 and an American College of Rheumatology Distinguished Fellow in 2018. She then joined faculty at MUSC as an Assistant Professor in 2018 and became an ABIM-certified adult rheumatologist.  She is passionate about both patient care and research and seeks to understand the cause of fibrosis in scleroderma and its relationship to estrogen. Her work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, Doris Duke Foundation, and the MUSC Margaret Gage Endowment.

Rafael Bejar, MD, PhD

Dr. Rafael Bejar is a physician-scientist at the University of California, San Diego and Assistant Director of the UCSD Medical Scientist Training Program; he is currently on leave serving as the Chief Medical Officer of Aptose Biosciences.

Dr. Bejar earned his MD and PhD degrees in neurosciences from UCSD. He completed an internship in internal medicine at the University of Chicago and residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, later serving as a Chief Medical Resident. As a fellow in Hematology and Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/Mass General Hospital, he completed his postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. Benjamin Ebert. In 2012, he returned to UCSD to join the faculty in the Moores Cancer Center.

Dr. Bejar’s research has focused on the genetic and epigenetic basis of myelodysplastic syndromes, including how genomic biomarkers can used clinically to aid in diagnosis, prognostication, and predicting response to therapy. He is a prior American Society of Hematology Scholar.

Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, PhD

Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, PhD is a University Professor of Medical Humanities at the George Washington University. She is the first woman and first African American to hold this prestigious, endowed faculty position. She is also Professor of Medicine and Professor of Health Policy and American Studies. In addition, she is Adjunct Professor of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

Throughout her career Dr. Gamble has worked to promote equity and justice in American medicine and public health. A physician, scholar, and activist, she is an internationally recognized expert on the history of race and American medicine, racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care, and bioethics. She is the author of several widely acclaimed publications on the history of race and racism in American medicine and has been a member of several national boards and committees. She chaired the committee that took the lead role in the successful campaign to obtain an apology in 1997 from President Clinton for the infamous United States Public Health Syphilis Study at Tuskegee.

Damani A Piggott, MD, PhD

Damani Piggott, MD PhD is Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, with a joint appointment in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. He is a faculty member in the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health. Dr. Piggott graduated from Morehouse College with a degree in Biology and Spanish. He subsequently obtained both his PhD degree in Immunology and his medical degree from Yale University. He completed clinical residency training in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at Yale New Haven Hospital and fellowship training in Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Piggott has worked on clinical and research projects in urban and rural communities in the United States, the Caribbean, West Africa and South Africa. He is actively engaged in the clinical care of patients with HIV and other infectious disease conditions.

His research program centers on understanding the biological, behavioral, and social pathways necessary to improve survival and quality of life for persons aging with chronic infections such as HIV, with particular focus on those most severely affected by these conditions, namely socially marginalized, historically disadvantaged, vulnerable and resource-constrained communities.

Dr. Piggott is a founding member of the Inclusion, Diversity, Access and Equity Task Force of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He serves as Co-Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsored James A. Ferguson Emerging Infectious Diseases Fellowship program and he also serves as Assistant Dean for Graduate Biomedical Education and Graduate Student Diversity at Johns Hopkins.