The 2016 ACR Award Winners Discuss Their Contributions to Rheumatology Research, Education, Patient Care

Background: Dr. Raychaudhuri is part of the next generation of rheumatologists, one that melds technology and clinical care. Just look at his CV: He received two bachelor’s degrees, in mathematics and biophysics, from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1993. He received a doctorate in biomedical informatics in 2003 from Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and then, in 2004, his medical degree from Stanford.

Dr. Raychaudhuri completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is now an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, where he runs a computational genomics laboratory and serves as an attending physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also serves as an associate member of the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard; a professor in genetics at the University of Manchester (U.K.); and a foreign adjunct professor at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet.

Q: What does this award mean to you? 

A: It means a lot to me that the community is recognizing the value of all the work we’ve done over the last several years trying to understand the genetics of rheumatoid arthritis and rheumatic diseases. The work has been really important to me because I feel like genetics and genomics in rheumatic diseases really offer some very interesting and informative avenues that will ultimately lead to novel therapeutics and, hopefully, to better outcomes for our patients. … In the world of science, there’s always a little bit of pressure. Science is always competitive, and of course, it’s incredibly nice to be recognized and to get an award for your work, but ultimately the best part of science is doing science.

Q: What do you enjoy more, computational science or clinical care?

A: I like both of them for their own sakes. I think I could be very happy in my life as a computational scientist. I could also be very happy in my life as a clinician. Clinical medicine, the human aspect of patient interaction and the intuition that goes behind medical decision making, is what I really like. On the computational side, it’s the exactness and cleanness of the data, the ability to develop novel sophisticated analytical tools to interpret the data, that’s what appeals to me. I feel very fortunate that I happen to have a career where I can have both at the same time.

Distinguished Basic Investigator Award

John Mountz, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)