We are pleased to announce Marie-France Hivert, MD, MMSc, Gordon Moore, MD, MPH, Darren Toh, ScD, and Anita Wagner, PharmD, MPH, DrPH as the recipients of the first annual Career Development awards from the Robert H. Ebert Fund for Innovation in Ambulatory Care and Prevention at Harvard Medical School.

The awards support the work of faculty at the Harvard Medical School Department of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute to develop leading-edge programs in teaching, research and to pursue scientific and professional activities that will improve health care delivery and population health.  The award will be given annually in memory of Robert H. Ebert, MD, DPhil, the first chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Foundation, founder of Harvard Community Health Plan and former dean of Harvard Medical School.  The awards for the inaugural year total $200,000.

Awardees include:

Marie-France Hivert, MD, MMSc
Role of epigenetics in developmental origin of health and diseases
Dr. Hivert will study the role of epigenetics, believed to impact the developmental origins of health and disease, in chronic diseases.  Her potential research topics include: the impact of maternal hyperglycemia on the risk of obesity and diabetes in offspring later in life, childhood obesity and metabolic exposures and outcomes, and asthma and environmental exposures. 

Gordon Moore, MD, MPH
A 21st century re-design of primary care medicine training as a partnership between HCA and DPM
Dr. Moore will develop a proposal to create critically-needed training programs that will attract and train more residents for family and internal medicine.  He will develop a national model along with Hospital Corporation of America.

Darren Toh, ScD
To challenge and change the definition of ‘minimum necessary standard’ in multi-center research
Dr. Toh will be a visiting scholar at an outside research group that offers synergies with his interest in comparative safety and effectiveness of medical products.   He will perform pilot studies to develop a more robust approach to quantifying the risk of re-identifying individuals in electronic health record research, developing better privacy protections, and addressing missing data for regression analysis.

Anita Wagner, PharmD, MPH, DrPH
Building a portfolio of system-focused research on cancer therapeutics
Dr. Wagner will focus on expanding a portfolio of health systems research on cancer therapeutics, expanding available networks of stakeholders, and developing bioethics expertise to develop future cancer therapeutics research projects. 

“We are pleased to recognize these four faculty members for the exceptional promise they have demonstrated in their careers thus far,” said Richard Platt, MD, MS, professor and chair of the Harvard Medical School Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute.  “We look forward to the contributions they will continue to make to ambulatory care, primary care and preventive medicine as the result of these development awards.”