JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

The Foundation has awarded a $250,000 grant over a five year period to the Johns Hopkins University to support the work of young scholars working with the Johns Hopkins Center for Women’s Health, Sex and Gender Research headed by Doctors Wendy L. Bennett and Sabra Klein. We made this award to match a National Institutes of Health Specialized Center of Research (SCOR) Grant (SADll to the Hopkins Center). In 2020, the Foundation also awarded two additional grants to support scholars in researching the gender-specific effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Kamaria Cherise Cayton Vaught, M.D.

2023 Johns Hopkins SCORE Pilot Grant Awardee

Kamaria C. Cayton Vaught, M.D. is a reproductive endocrinology and infertility specialist in the Baltimore area who specializes in managing disorders related to infertility and the endocrinopathy of female reproductive stages. She has undergone training in the management and evaluation of reproductive disorders such as male and female infertility, PCOS, endometriosis, premature ovarian insufficiency, recurrent pregnancy loss, and advanced surgical techniques in hysteroscopy and laparoscopy. In addition, her unique training also includes genetic counseling, genetic data analysis and interpretation, and preimplantation genetic testing.

Dr. Cayton Vaught completed her combined undergraduate and medical doctor degree at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. She then completed her residency at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, followed by postdoctoral fellowships in reproductive sciences and reproductive endocrinology, infertility, medical genetics, and genomics (REI/MGG) at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Cayton Vaught is the first fellow to complete the combined REI/MGG program at Johns Hopkins and one of only a handful of fellowship-trained REI geneticists in the United States.

Dr. James Gordy, Ph.D

2022 Winner of Pilot Grant Award

Dr. James Gordy  is a Research Associate in the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (MMI)
department in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. James received his bachelor’s and
master’s degrees from the University of Georgia studying microbiology and infectious disease biology
respectively, performing research to understand the characteristics of hyper-thermophilic bacteria and to
understand the dynamics of influenza virus prevalence in natural reservoir species. James then completed
his Ph.D. from the MMI department in 2016 in Dr. Richard Markham’s lab studying a therapeutic cancer
vaccine. James continued in that lab for a Postdoctoral Fellowship, studying the combination of immune-stimulating drugs with the cancer vaccine. During this work, James developed a keen interest in the
complexities of the interplay between vaccines and the immune system.

Dr. Kathryn Fitzgerald

2019 Winner of SADII-SCORE Pilot Grant Program Award

Nisha Aggarwal Gilotra, M.D.

2021 Winner of Secunda Family Foundation Award

Dr. Nisha A. Gilotra is a cardiologist in the Johns Hopkins Medicine Division of Cardiology with expertise in advanced heart failure, including the care of heart transplant and ventricular assist device patients. She is also an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Dr. Gilotra received her medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, PA. She completed her medical residency, general cardiology fellowship and advanced heart failure fellowship at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Between fellowships, she served as an Assistant Chief of Service for the Department of Medicine. Dr. Gilotra’s research interests include heart failure, heart transplant, heart assist devices, myocarditis and heart failure quality improvement.

Dr. Mark J. Kohr

2017 Winner of SADII-SCORE Award

Dr. Mark J. Kohr, Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, is analyzing the mechanisms that the heart uses to defend itself when the circulation to the myocardium is interrupted and then restored in the "ischemia/reperfusion syndrome." Women mount a relatively more robust defense to this particular insult compared with men.

Dr. Kendall Moseley

2012 Winner Dr. Joanthan

Dr. Kendall Moseley, Assistant Professor of Medicine, has set out to demystify sex-specific differences in bone quality in men and women with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Despite high bone mineral density (BMD), persons with T2DM are at increased risk for hip fracture compared to those without diabetes. Hip geometry is one measure of bone quality that has not been evaluated in men and women with T2DM. Insufficient hip geometry, or how bones withstand outside bending and crushing forces, could cause men or women to be at higher risk for fracture. Dr. Moseley and her team suspect that with worsening glucose control, hip geometry measurements of bone quality decline despite good bone density. Moreover, they suspect there are important gender differences in the hip geometry of men and women with T2DM that could make one group at greater fracture risk as blood glucose soars out of control. Read More

Dr. Noel Mueller

2017 Winner of SADII-SCORE Award

Dr. Noel Mueller, Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, is researching the importance of the intestinal flora in newborn babies, which the baby acquires during normal delivery from the mother's vagina. This population of "microbes" is important in the defense against infection and in the regulation of metabolism.

Monica R Mugnier, PhD

2021 Winner of Pilot Grant Award

Monica Mugnier, PhD, studies how African trypanosomes, which cause African sleeping sickness, evade the immune system.
Research Interests
antigenic variation; T. brucei; kinetoplastid; host-pathogen interactions; bioinformatics; genomics

Dr. Rosanne Rouf

2016 Winner of SADII-SCORE Award

Doctor Rosanne Rouf , Assistant Professor of Medicine, is investigating not only the reason mitral valve prolapsed, but why the disorder is so much more common in women than in men. She has developed a mouse which has a mutation in a gene associated with the development of the mitral valve. Female mice with the mutation have a much more severe type of mitral valve prolapse than males with the same mutation. Dr. Rouf’s work is an interesting illustration of how complicated it is to try to link a single gene to illness: the same gene is often expressed differently in males and females. The sex chromosomes themselves, hormones, age and environment also impact gene expression and play a role, as in this case of the uneven impact of the mutation, which by itself does not explain its different consequences in males and females. Dr. Rouf is investigating the mechanism of sex disparity in the pathogenesis of myxomatous valvular disease by using a mouse model that harbors a gene mutation that causes severe mitral valve prolapse in female mice. Male mice that harbor the same mutation have mitral valve prolapsed but to a much milder degree. To examine this difference between the sexes, Dr. Rouf and collaborators have developed high resolution imaging techniques to quantify structural and functional mitral valve disease in mice. She will employ genetic and pharmacologic strategies to identify signaling pathways which are differentially regulated between the sexes. Given the concordant association of MVP with female sex in both this murine model and in people, she expects that this research program will also serve a long-range aim of identifying novel pathways in sex-dependent mechanisms of disease.

Dr. Catherine Simpson

2022 Winner of Pilot Grant Award

Dr. Catherine Simpson is an assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her areas of clinical expertise include internal medicine, pulmonary and critical care medicine, and pulmonary vascular diseases.  Dr. Simpson earned her M.D. from the Louisiana State University School of Medicine. She completed her residency at Johns Hopkins, where she also performed a fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine and earned her M.H.S. degree from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Fenna Sillé

2020 Winner of Pilot Grant Award

Assistant Professor of Environmental Health & Engineering at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Sillé’s motto is that a “healthy environment equals healthy people.” She is interested in studying the influence of environmental factors and biological sex on the human immune system and subsequent effects on chronic and infectious disease risk. Dr. Sillé hopes to identify potential targets for intervention to reduce the burden of disease in exposed communities. For her research, she combines her expertise in immunology, toxicology, microbiology, and functional genomics, with metabolomics and exposure epidemiology. Dr. Sillé received an MS in immunology and molecular virology from the University of Groningen in 2004. As a Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds PhD Fellow, she received her PhD in immunology in 2010 from the Utrecht University for her work performed at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Institute of Medicine. Prior to her position at JHU, Dr. Sillé completed a postdoctoral fellow position in functional genomics and one in immunotoxicology both at the University of California Berkeley.

Dr. Kristin Voegtline

2016 Winner of SADII-SCORE Award

We now have increasing evidence that hormones impact the formation of the embryonic and fetal brain; Doctor Voegtline is looking into the impact of the hormones that cross the placenta and target that brain while the baby is still in the uterus. She believes that testosterone may have a different impact on boy and girl fetuses. Dr. Kristin Voegtline, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, is a developmental psychobiologist studying the organizational effects of the prenatal period on development after birth. Among organizing signals of the intrauterine environment, she is particularly interested in maternal sex steroids which may cross the placenta and target the fetal brain. In prior work, she has shown prenatal maternal testosterone levels are related to altered growth and neural maturation in fetuses and infants, and that effects are most pronounced for males. Dr. Voegtline will now test the hypothesis that prenatal testosterone exposure leaves an epigenetic mark via alterations to DNA methylation, a measure of gene functional capacity, and that testosterone action at the genetic level may be different for males and females.

Dr. Marlene Williams

2012 Winner

Dr. Marlene Williams, Assistant Professor of Medicine, is investigating the gender differences in depression and heart disease. People with cardiovascular disease and depression are at higher risk for heart attacks and death. Since women are twice as likely to suffer from depression, the question remains whether depressed women with heart disease are also more likely than depressed men with heart disease to have more complications of heart disease. Dr. Williams thinks the answer lies with her research on the role of platelets in coronary artery disease. Depletion of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) can lead to decreased survival of brain cells found in depression. BDNF is a member of the nerve growth factor family. It encourages neural and synaptic growth and plays a critical role in the survival, differentiation, neuronal strength, and morphology of neurons. The vast majority of blood BDNF is stored in platelets. If successful, Dr. Williams’s research could have major clinical implications. Medications that normalize BDNF levels could treat both heart disease and depression.

Dr. Shannon Wood

2020 Winner of SARS- CoV-2 Award

Dr. Shannon N. Wood is an Assistant Scientist within the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she also obtained her PhD. She further holds a Masters of Science in Reproductive and Sexual Health Research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Dr. Wood’s research focuses on the intersection between social determinants of women’s health, most notably gender-based violence, and adverse reproductive and sexual health outcomes. As a Senior Technical Advisor for Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) and PMA-Ethiopia, Dr. Wood leads research surrounding reproductive coercion, intimate partner violence, and partner dynamics, and works with in-country partners to increase PMA’s data utilization. Her research aims to enhance safety and improve reproductive and sexual health for vulnerable populations in low-resource settings.

Dr. Kristina Montemayor

2020 Winner of Pilot Grant Award

Kristina Montemayor is an Instructor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Montemayor graduated from the University of Texas Health Science at San Antonio with a degree in nursing prior to graduating medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. She pursued her Internal Medicine Residency at Johns Hopkins and completed her Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship from Johns Hopkins in 2020. Dr. Montemayor’s clinical interests are investigating sex and gender differences in cystic fibrosis. While researchers have shown that females with CF have worse morbidity and mortality compared to males, Dr. Montemayor’s research is focused on understanding the association of sex hormones on respiratory outcomes in women with CF with the goal to identify potential therapeutic strategies to tailor individualized care and improve outcomes in women with CF.

Dr. Jennifer Mammen

2012 Winner

Dr. Jennifer Mammen, Instructor in Endocrinology, is studying the ways in which gender affects autoimmune disorders, or conditions that occur when the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys healthy body tissue. These disorders affect women more frequently than men, but the specific effects of gender are not clear. Dr. Mammen and her team focus their research on thyroid disease, which shows an overwhelming female bias. Biphasic thyroiditis, for example, frequently appears in women after pregnancy. Characterized by lymphocytic gland infiltration, this postpartum thyroid disease usually occurs in women with anti-thyroid peroxidase (anti-TPO) antibodies. Dr. Mammen’s team has found that interferon (IFNa) causes high rates of biphasic thyroiditis in women more often than men at a ratio of 8:1. This suggests the direct role of interferon in causing or spreading thyroid autoimmunity. Dr. Mammen’s team is using both in vitro and in vivo techniques to study the effects of inflammatory activation (mediated by interferons) on the autoimmune target itself. The study looks at gender-specific variability in the expression of thyroid genes such as those regulated by IFNa and/or estradiol.

Dr. Joohyung Lee

2021 Winner of the M. Iréne Ferrer Scholar Award In Gender Specific Medicine

Monash Universtiy, Australia

Dr Lee received his PhD from The University of Melbourne and the Florey Neuroscience Institutes, in the area of neuroscience and pharmacology. He then worked as a Parkinson’s Society Canada Research Fellow at the Toronto Western Hospital in Canada, to investigate the role of abnormal synaptic plasticity in Parkinson’s disease. He returned to the Florey Neurosciences Institute to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying Parkinson’s disease and drug addiction, before joining the Hudson Institute in 2008. Dr Lee’s research focuses on sex differences in brain function in normal and diseased states. In particular the research laboratory is focusing on the potential role of the male sex-determining gene SRY in the sex differences in neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) and autism. He has a strong interest in understanding the role of the Y-chromosome gene SRY and the male brain and how abnormal regulation of SRY may increase the susceptibility of males to neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and ADHD.

Dr. Andrea Cignerella

2021 Winner of the M. Iréne Ferrer Scholar Award In Gender Specific Medicine

University of Padova, Italy

Dr. Andrea Cignarella obtained his master degree in Medicinal Chemistry and Technology from the University of Milan in 1990 studying the role of the urokinase system in tumor cell invasion. He then joined the Department of Pharmacological Sciences at the University of Milan, where he received his PhD in Pharmacology of natural compounds in 1994. Dr. Cignarella went on to train as a Postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor G. Assmann at the University of Münster, Germany until 1998. He next returned to the Department of Pharmacological Sciences as a research associate and was appointed as an Assistant professor of Pharmacology at the University of Padova in 2004, where he joined the Department of Pharmacology and Anesthesiology. In 2010 he was appointed Associate professor at the same institution. In 2010 he spent 6 months at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle as a Fulbright Research Scholar.

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