Late Summer 2022’s Awards, Appointments & Announcements in Rheumatology

“Burnout is a really big issue right now,” she says. Thus, as a leader she tries to model behaviors to prevent it. She often initiates conversations about wellness, talking about exercise, taking time for oneself and relaxing, and making sure that clinicians arrange for enough coverage when off duty so they can totally relax. “It’s essential to provide services and backup so that resilience is encouraged,” she adds.

Cecilia Chung, MD, MPH, Recipient of ASCPT Early Investigator Award

Dr. Chung

Last fall, Cecilia P. Chung, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), Nashville, Tenn., received the Leon I. Goldberg Early Investigator Award from the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, in recognition of her contributions to clinical pharmacology.

Dr. Chung began her medical training in Peru and Canada, and earned a master’s in public health from Vanderbilt University. She completed her internship, medical residency and the clinical portion of her rheumatology fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. She then returned to Vanderbilt to complete the research portion of her fellowship, and joined the VUMC faculty as an assistant professor of medicine in 2012.

Dr. Chung’s current research, supported by R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health and a Merit Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs, is focused on the pharmacogenomics of immunosuppressants and the comparative safety of non-opioid analgesics. She is also involved in clinical research, studying cardiovascular disease and other long-term outcomes in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis.

“I’ve always been puzzled by variability in drug response, and how we can explain that at the population and personal levels,” she notes. Collaboration is a mainstay of her approach to these questions, a direction she attributes to mentorship from C. Michael Stein, MBChB, the Dan May Professor and professor of medicine in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at VUMC. It was Dr. Stein, she says, “who showed me the value of interdisciplinary research.” She considers multiple collaborations alongside colleagues in the departments of biostatistics, epidemiology, genetics, nephrology and cardiology among the most enjoyable part of her work.

Dr. Chung serves as associate editor for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics and is a former member of the editorial boards of Arthritis Care & Research and Clinical Rheumatology. Dr. Chung now also serves as diversity liaison for the Division of Rheumatology at VUMC, a role that is “quite personal” for her, she says. Both at the university level and in her lab, Dr. Chung sees this role as an opportunity to “face hard questions and get some traction for the changes we need.”