Dr. Sarah Lieber's clinical practice emphasizes patient-centered care for individuals with advanced liver disease who are in need of liver transplantation. Her research interests are focused on liver transplantation outcomes, aiming to understand why some patients flourish after transplant while others struggle profoundly. She hopes to implement interventions to ensure that all patients thrive after receiving their gift of life.

As the Associate Program Director for Pediatric ECMO, Dr. Sanford regularly leads clinical teams in caring for the sickest children in our community. He works with multidisciplinary groups to determine best practices and continuously evaluate how we may better serve children at their greatest time of need. Additionally, Dr. Sanford serves as a member of the pediatric liver transplant and craniofacial anesthesia group where he regularly cares for children undergoing high risk surgeries.

Anezi Uzendu, M.D., F.A.C.C., specializes in interventional cardiology and cardiac arrest care and is passionate about improving outcomes after cardiac arrest. Dr. Uzendu has partnered with the American Heart Association on multiple projects to advocate for heart health and CPR awareness, and he also created virtual CPR training for Boston minority youth during the pandemic. He is bringing this expertise to a partnership with Dallas Independent School District to transform cardiac arrest and CPR education in schools, empowering students to save lives.

Christina Herrera, M.D., has dedicated her academic career to clinical and translational research, using ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging along with genomic techniques to study the normal and abnormal development, structure, and function of the human placenta. Her work applying cutting edge technologies to placental research will elucidate these key issues. She is poised to evaluate the role of interventions and therapies to improve outcomes. Her pioneering work has already demonstrated the feasibility of recruiting patients, obtaining imaging, and correlating with clinical outcomes and has the potential to markedly advance the field and provide her with the necessary data for the first of many NIH research grants.

Dr. Herrera joined Southwestern Medical Foundation's podcast, Learning From Leaders, in 2024. Watch her episode here, and learn more about her research project, leadership in medicine, and the importance of mentorship.

Katie Hoge, M.D., specializes in neonatal-perinatal medicine and developmental-behavioral pediatric medicine. She developed a novel approach to investigating how parental mental health influences the neurodevelopmental outcomes of newborns, a relationship that can lead to a state known as the vulnerable child syndrome (VCS). VCS is a parent-infant phenomenon in which a parent develops lasting mental health symptoms and trauma from a child’s health care experience and has a heightened perception that their child is at higher risk for medical, behavioral, or developmental problems. VCS results in unhealthy parenting styles that can impair a child’s neurodevelopmental outcomes. There is currently no accessible, standardized therapy to address VCS in neonatal intensive care (NICU) populations to improve parent-infant long-term outcomes.

Avanthi Tayi Shah, M.D., is a leader in translational genomics, which aims to improve human health by building on discoveries made through genetics research and applying them in the clinical setting. Her career goal is to improve outcomes for pediatric oncology patients by utilizing genomic techniques, and she is studying the effectiveness of the use of liquid biopsy in assessing thyroid nodules.

Proshad Efune, M.D., works to predict which children will be at risk for severe breathing complications following tonsil-removal surgery in order to better monitor those children in the hospital, while giving children who are not at-risk the opportunity to recover at home.

Robin T. Higashi, Ph.D., is working to improve delivery of telehealth care to cancer patients among underserved populations in the Dallas-Redbird. Dr. Higashi’s work will uncover the unique challenges of those patients that can hinder their access to care and develop strategies to address those challenges.

Dominic Moon, M.D., aims his research to tailor head and neck cancer treatment regimens to each specific patient. He utilized his research grant to develop a blood test to help physicians predict how an individual’s cancer will respond to different treatment options. He also spent a year conducting translational research at the National Institutes of Health through the prestigious Medical Research Scholars Program during his time in medical school.

Emily Adhikari, M.D., cares for pregnant women at Parkland Hospital and teaches physicians in training. She also conducts research aimed at fighting infectious diseases in pregnancy, reducing the primary cesarean delivery rate, and understanding opioid-use disorder among pregnant women.

Owoicho Adogwa, M.D., M.P.H., is one of only a few surgeons in the world who is cross trained in both orthopedic spine surgery and neurosurgery, which gave him unique qualifications to treat patients with complex spinal conditions at UTSW’s Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute Spine Center. Dr. Adogwa has now opened a private practice and serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at University of Cincinnati Medical Center.

Samuel John, M.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at UTSW and Attending Physician in Pediatrics/Hematology-Oncology at Children’s Health Dallas and Parkland Memorial Hospital. He serves as the program leader for CAR-T cell therapy at UT Southwestern/Children’s Medical Center. His research interests include immunotherapy, cell therapy, and acute myeloid leukemia, and he is serving or has served as principal investigator in various grant-supported research projects and clinical trial activities.

Dr. Luis Sifuentes-Dominguez used his research grant to study the basic mechanisms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Using cutting-edge genomic approaches, he has helped identify novel genes that play a role in early-onset IBD and will continue studying the interaction of the environment with genes associated with IBD.

Dr. Nwachukwu focused her research on gynecologic cancer, women’s health, and global oncology initiatives, and her work will focus on identifying high-risk cervical cancer patients who could be candidates for more aggressive treatments. Chika Nwachukwu, M.D., Ph.D., is now an Assistant Professor in the Division of Radiation Oncology at UC San Diego Medical Center.

Dr. Olutoyosi “Toy” Ogunkua’s received his early-stage grant to research maternal bleeding and hemorrhage, aiming to limit the hemorrhaging women have after caesarian section by studying the use of tranexamic acid prophylactically in clinical trials. Olutoyosi Ogunkua, M.D., now works as a staff anesthesiologist for Providence Anesthesiology Associates in North Carolina.

David Greenberg, M.D., used his grant to address the global antibiotic resistance health crisis and develop a sophisticated computer algorithm to predict whether a strain of bacteria is resistant and discover new forms of resistance. Dr. Greenberg has a lab that uses peptide-conjugated phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers (PPMOs) to block mRNA and prevent translation of target genes.

Specialized in the treatment of breast cancer, Dr. Alluri used his research grant to address a primary obstacle all patients with metastatic breast cancer face—their tumors’ resistance to treatment. The goal of his project was to understand on a molecular level how tumors develop treatment resistance and to devise new targeted therapies to overcome resistance. To accomplish this, Dr. Alluri and his team analyzed the genetic sequence of treatment-resistant patient tumors to understand how resistance works and identified new potential drug targets specific to each patient. By working with breast cancer cell lines, they have already identified a promising drug that inhibits growth of these treatment-resistant cells, providing clues into cellular pathways that may overcome resistance.

Dr. Tandon’s work focused on infants diagnosed with congenital heart disease. For survival, these babies need three surgeries at ~1 week, at 4-6 months, and at ~2-5 years of age. Current monitoring techniques don’t provide doctors enough time to detect health deteriorations and better prevent infant deaths. To do so, Dr. Tandon and his team proposed that these infants wear special biosensors at home to continuously monitor data. The team used advanced machine learning techniques to analyze massive amounts of collected data and to recognize patterns that precede dangerous health events. These patterns can then be used to predict future events, prompting medical intervention hours or days before the infant’s health becomes critical. Animesh Tandon, M.D., M.S., is now the Director of Cardiovascular Innovation at Cleveland Clinic Children’s.

Jacques Lux, Ph.D., used his grant to develop a nanoparticle-based system to protect a body's enzymes from the inside and eliminate Immune response. This system can help to diagnose and treat disease, specifically acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most prevalent childhood cancer in the U.S.

Richard Wang, M.D., Ph.D., worked with glucose, one of the most fundamental biological molecules, and his lab specifically was interested in the glucose transporter, how its regulated, and how that process is abnormal in disease. His research lab focused on pathways central to both the development of normal skin and non-melanoma skin cancer tumorigenesis.

Sara G.M. Piccirillo, Ph.D., studied glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive brain tumor in adults. One of the cardinal features of glioblastoma is that it can migrate long distances from the initial tumor site and infiltrate the brain. This makes the tumor surgically curable, and it is characterized by very poor prognosis. Dr. Piccirillo used her grant to increase the understanding of glioblastoma cell movement and provide a new therapeutic approach to block cell migration. Sara G.M. Piccirillo, Ph.D., is now an Endowed Professor in Neuro-Oncology at University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center.