Early Fall 2022’s Awards, Appointments & Announcements in Rheumatology

Dr. Caricchio obtained his medical degree from the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome, and moved to the U.S. in 1996 to pursue a research fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A research faculty appointment at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and a residency and additional fellowship at Temple University followed.

His wife and collaborator, immunologist Stefania Gallucci, MD, joins him at UMass, with an appointment as professor in the Division of Innate Immunity, directed by Katherine A. Fitzgerald, PhD.

N.J. Rheumatologist Rita Komboz, MD, Adds Fiction Authorship to Her Credits

Dr. Komboz

Rita Fares Komboz, MD, FACR, who has been in private practice as a rheumatologist in Belleville, N.J., for 23 years, found that she had a little more time on her hands when the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated the nationwide shutdown in spring 2020. She began a personal project that developed into the publication of a fanciful children’s book, Corky the Cat.

Dr. Komboz drew her inspiration about the book’s character from her own rescue cat. She made Corky a fashion designer. The book’s narrative follows the plucky cat from her rise as a fashion designer at Vogue, through a coronavirus-caused career derailment and ultimate triumph over difficult circumstances. To accompany the text, Dr. Komboz composed color-saturated illustrations on her iPhone 7. She had originally thought to self-publish, but instead contacted Page Publishing, which printed the book in the U.S. The book is now available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other bookstores.

Coming of age in Lebanon during that country’s civil war, Dr. Komboz recalls that she was drawn to medicine because she “wanted to make a difference.” She obtained her medical degree from Université Saint-Joseph Faculté de Médecine, Beirut, in 1991.

She and her husband, a cardiologist, later emigrated to the U.S., where she finished an internship in Newark, N.J., and then a rheumatology fellowship in Philadelphia in 1999 at Allegheny Health Network. She recalls her fellowship coincided with the release of TNF inhibitors, such as etanercept, which was a game-changer in the treatment armamentarium for patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Dr. Komboz is a rheumatologist with Arthritis and Osteoporosis Associates, Belleville, N.J., and is also affiliated with Clara Maass Medical Center, also in Belleville.

She has plans for a Corky the Cat sequel, and the protagonist may find herself a rheumatologist in her second life.