CRAJ Fall 2020

Fall 2020 (Volume 30, Number 3)

Awards, Appointments, and Accolades

Dr. May Choi - 2019 Gary S. Gilkeson Career Development Award

Dr. May Choi received the Lupus Foundation of America’s 2019 Gary S. Gilkeson Career Development Award, an award designed to support clinicians and fellows who are starting their lupus research career. With this award, Dr. Choi is obtaining a Master’s degree in the Epidemiology Program at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and is pursuing further lupus training at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital under the supervision and mentoring of Dr. Karen Costenbader, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and lupus expert. Dr. Choi’s research interests include identifying factors influencing anti-nuclear antibody (ANA) expression over time to inform systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) classification and novel biomarkers to improve our ability to predict disease activity and outcomes.

Dr. Gillian Hawker - OARSI Clinical Research Award

Dr. Gillian Hawker is the Sir John and Lady Eaton Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto and a Senior Scientist at the Women’s College Research Institute. She is the recipient of the 2020 International Osteoarthritis Research Society (OARSI) Clinical Research Award.

Dr. Hawker states: “As a health services researcher, my focus has largely been on investigating the determinants and outcomes of osteoarthritis (OA) care, or lack thereof, with an emphasis on joint replacement surgery and more recently on people with other common comorbid conditions, like diabetes. Those of us who are rheumatologists with a focus on osteoarthritis have always felt a little apart from our rheumatology peers. OARSI brings together researchers in all fields relevant to OA; the OARSI community has been invaluable to me as a researcher – challenging me to think differently and to think big. OARSI brings together the "who’s who’" of OA research. So, to be honoured by my OARSI peers through receipt of the 2020 Clinical Research Award is, well, really nice! I am very grateful.”