Ellen M. Gravallese, MD, Now an APLAR Master

As the Asia-Pacific League of Associations for Rheumatology (APLAR) convened its 26th annual congress in Singapore this August, Ellen M. Gravallese, MD, was honored as an APLAR Master.

Dr. Gravallese is currently the Theodore Bevier Bayles Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, chief of the Division of Rheumatology, Inflammation and Immunity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Boston, and was the 2019–20 ACR president. In early 2024, as is common with international partner organizations, APLAR sought nominations from the ACR for potential Master designation awardees. According to Eric Matteson, MD, MPH, chair of the ACR Global Engagement Committee, and ACR President Deborah Dyett Desir, MD, the ACR considered many candidates and nominated Dr. Gravallese in an April 2024 letter.

“Dr. Gravallese is internationally known for her work in elucidating mechanisms of inflammatory arthritis and bone remodeling,” says Dr. Matteson. “She has made important discoveries that have provided insight into the pathogenesis of diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, and led to advances in management of these diseases, and so APLAR is bestowing this high honor to her.”

The APLAR honor is one of many outgrowths of connections fostered during her ACR presidency in 2019–2020, Dr. Gravallese believes. During the shutdown imposed at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she notes, “I was able to meet several members of APLAR virtually in my position as ACR president, and I also gave a virtual lecture at their annual meeting during that time. I feel very connected to the people at APLAR as a result of those opportunities, and I am incredibly honored by this award.”

Multiple Roles

Dr. Gravallese

Dr. Gravallese’s productive career has spanned four decades, blossoming from an early research foundation to multiple academic roles as mentor, laboratory research director, clinician and administrator. Her current post as rheumatology division chief at BWH, where she has now been for five years, is a “large administrative job, with 60 faculty members in the division,” she says. Importantly, she is still able to continue her research. “It’s wonderful to both oversee this research-oriented division and to move my own laboratory investigations forward in collaboration with the people who are here in the division.”

Even before obtaining her medical degree from Columbia University, Dr. Gravallese had immersed herself in research as a Harvard College undergraduate in the laboratory of the late Guido Guidotti, PhD, Higgins professor of biochemistry. After an internship in internal medicine in 1981 at BWH, she embarked upon a five-year joint residency in pathology and internal medicine, and then joined the Harvard Medical School faculty. After her seminal 1998 work identifying osteoclasts as responsible for articular bone erosion in rheumatoid arthritis, Dr. Gravallese continued to focus on mechanisms of bone erosion and inhibition of bone repair in inflammatory arthritis while at the Harvard Institutes of Medicine. She was recruited to the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 2006 and was named a tenured professor and the Myles J. McDonough Chair in Rheumatology in 2013. Then, in 2019, she returned to BWH, coming full circle from her days as an intern there.