The 2025 ACR Awards of Distinction

Her work has been recognized with the ACR Distinguished Fellow Award in 2008, the Spondylitis Association of America Jane Bruckel Young Investigator Award in 2014 and the ACR Henry Kunkel Young Investigator Award in 2020. She was elected to the Spondyloarthritis Research and Treatment Network Board and appointed to the Spondylitis Association of America Medical and Scientific Board in 2018. She also served as vice-chair and chair of the Juvenile Arthritis Research Committee for the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA, 2013–2019) and was elected to the advisory council of the Pediatric Rheumatology Collaborative Study Group in 2019, supporting academic engagement in pharmaceutical trials.

“Being recognized by the ACR and my colleagues with the Excellence in Investigative Mentoring Award is a tremendous honor,” says Dr. Weiss. “Mentorship has been one of the most meaningful and rewarding aspects of my career, and I feel privileged to have worked alongside so many talented and inspiring mentees. To know that they nominated me for this recognition is both humbling and deeply gratifying, as it reflects the mutual growth and shared achievements that mentoring makes possible.”

Henry Kunkel Early Career Investigator Award

The Henry Kunkel Early Career Investigator Award is given to physician-scientists who are within 12 years of post-rheumatology certifying examination eligibility and who have made outstanding and promising independent contributions to basic, translational or clinical research in the field of rheumatology. This year’s recipient is Deepak Rao, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), Boston, where he holds the Jonathan S. Coblyn and Michael B. Brenner Endowed Chair in Rheumatology and Immunology.

Dr. Rao completed his MD and PhD at Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn., with a PhD in immunobiology, and then completed his internal medicine residency and rheumatology fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He has run an independent laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital since 2018, and he co-directs the BWH Center for Cellular Profiling.

Dr. Rao has made seminal contributions to understanding the nature of pathologic T cell responses in patients with RA and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). He led a study that discovered a population of T peripheral helper (Tph) cells in RA; these cells have now been implicated in numerous autoimmune diseases. He has supervised multiple studies dissecting the development, regulation and function of Tph cells in RA and SLE, which have nominated strategies to disrupt the functions of these cells therapeutically. In addition, he has used broad immune profiling approaches to highlight specific features of immune dysregulation in patients with lupus, inflammatory arthritis following immune checkpoint blockade therapies, and systemic sclerosis, and in patients with rare inflammatory diseases evaluated in the Undiagnosed Diseases Network.