• Creation of a dissertation Committee to provide a well-rounded approach to dissertation aims
• Participation in national stem cell workshops
• Responsible Conduct of Research coursework
• Advanced presentation skills training
• Research implementation and statistical support through courses such as Stem Cell Biology, Molecules to Molecular Therapeutics, and Biostatistics with Computing.
• CReM seminars by top national and international scientists
• Seminars and workshops on the importance of understanding diversity in the context of translational studies and data outcome
• Creation of Individual Development Plans to maps out career paths

In addition to eligible postdoctoral fellows, the RMTP TL1 is open to the top PhD students in the Biomedical Sciences at BU’s Medical Campus and those in Biomedical Engineering, Biology and Chemistry at BU Charles River Campus. Students must apply in their second year of graduate school.

TL1 Leadership:

Darrell Kotton, MD will continue as the PI and Program Leader of the RMTP TL1, having led the program for the past 4 years. Dr. Kotton joined BU’s faculty in 2004 and is the David C. Seldin Professor of Medicine, Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and is the founding Director of the Centerfor Regenerative Medicine (CReM) of BostonUniversity and Boston Medical Center. Dr. Kotton continues to see patients as a pulmonary and critical care medicine physician (20% clinical effort) while leading an NIH-funded basic science research program developing pluripotent stem cell approaches to understand and treat a variety of genetic lung diseases. As an educator, Dr. Kotton has won accolades, such as the BU GMS 2018 Educator of the Year Award and the BU Department of Medicine’s 2014 Robert Dawes Evans Senior Mentoring Award. He has personally trained 25 graduate students and postdoctoral PhD fellows in his laboratory and has participated in the training of 50 additional medical students and pulmonary fellows. He has won the Pulmonary Center’s teaching excellence award and has chaired or served on 10 PhD dissertation committees to date. Graduates of his laboratory have gone on to become faculty members in academic medicine (1 Associate Professor, 6 Assistant Professors, 1 Research Assistant Professor, 1 Instructor), laboratory leading PI’s (Drs. Wilson, Ikonomou, Hawkins, Jamal, and Hurley), and industry scientists. As an ambassador of the TL1 program nationally, Dr. Kotton also leads our efforts to share the program, its iPS cell and organoid bank, and our training modules across all CTSI sites, as exemplified by our NCATS U01 (PI, Dr. Kotton) supporting national sharing of the iPSC network. As a physician-scientist Dr. Kotton serves as the founding Co-Director of Boston Medical Center’s Alpha-1 Center, a clinical Center dedicated to the care of patients and their families suffering from the inherited disease, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigators, and his research has been recognized with numerous awards from the American Thoracic Society and the Alpha-1 Foundation.

Chris Chen, MD, PhD will be an Associate Leader of the TL1 whose role is integration of the School of Engineering within the RMTP. Dr. Chen is Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has served as a TL1 mentor on our RMTP for several years, and has been an instrumental figure in the development of engineered cellular microenvironments to understand how cells build tissues. His group pioneered the use of micro- and nanofabrication technologies to identify the underlying mechanisms by which cells interact with materials and each other to build organized tissues, and to apply this knowledge in the biology of stem cells and tissue vascularization. He has also served in numerous leadership roles to foster the interface between engineering, biology, and medicine. In addition to serving as a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at BU he also has an appointment at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. He served at the University of Pennsylvania as the Skirkanich Professor of Innovation and founding director of the Center for Engineering Cells and Regeneration prior to his current appointment. Henow serves as founding Director of the Killachand Center for Biological Design at BU, a newly launched state of the art physical space for research and training in regenerative medicine related research. He currently works closely with Dr. Kotton to integrate shared trainees and resources across both medical and Charles River campuses of BU providing an unparalleled environment for trainees to experience the full breadth of translational regenerative medicine research and tissue engineering.

Elke Muhlberger, PhD will be an Associate Leader of the TL1 whose role is to ensure integration of the RMTP with our National Emerging Infections Diseases Laboratory (NEIDL), BU’s unique BL4 facility focused on injury and repair associated with emerging infectious diseases. Dr. Muhlberger is a veteran mentor of our TL1 program. She has co-mentored trainees studying the biology of pathogens responsible for hemorrhagic fevers and their associated multi-organ responses to injury. Together with our Center for Regenerative Medicine, she has mentored TL1 graduate students who have developed iPSC-derived human, primate, and bat hepatocytes that serve as potential reservoirs for Ebola viral infections. Most recently Dr. Muhlberger has worked with Drs. Kotton, Mostoslavsky, and Chen to integrate regenerative medicine research approaches between BU’s NEIDL, CReM, and Biomedical Engineering Programs. She currently is Associate Professor of Microbiology, Director of BUs Biomolecule Production Core, and an expert in filoviruses that cause hemorrhagic fever and associated host-pathogen interactions.

Matt Jones, PhD will be a Trainee Advisor of the TL1 whose role is to interact with our valuation group and lead the predoctoral training component of the RMTP. Dr. Jones became faculty at BU School of Medicine in 2008 and is now an Associate Professor of Medicine. In his role as educator and a leader in graduate student education at BU, Dr. Jones serves as the Director of the Graduate Program in Molecular and Translational Medicine (GPMTM), the largest PhD training program on our medical campus with approximately 30 PhD and MD/PhD students, and the largest component of our umbrella graduate student program. In his capacity as Director of the GPMTM, Dr. Jones for the past 4 years has focused on recruiting, mentoring, and retaining students in the TL1 program (22 to date) who are interested in regenerative medicine related aspects of translational research. In addition to mentoring PhD, MD/PhD, and pulmonary fellows conducting research, Dr.Jones is an experienced, R01-funded Principal Investigator whose focus is on the mechanisms governing thepost-transcriptional regulation of cytokine expression during infection.

TL1 Trainees

Post-Doctoral
Trainee	Appointment Start Date	Appointment End Date
Ian Kinstlinger	3/31/2021	3/30/2023
Stephen Moore	3/31/2021	3/30/2023
Gwen Beacham	6/21/2022	6/20/2024
Michael McLellan	2/1/2024	1/31/2025

Pre-Doctoral
Trainee	Appointment Start Date	Appointment End Date
Elissa Everton	4/15/2020	4/14/2021
Christine Odom	6/1/2020	5/31/2021
Taylor Michael Matte	4/15/2020	3/31/2022
Anna Smith	7/1/2020	6/30/2022
Keshia Pitt	4/15/2020	1/31/2021
Alexandra Ysasi	4/15/2020	3/31/2022
Isabella Claure	9/1/2021	8/31/2023
Carly Merritt	2/1/2022	1/31/2024
Liz Flores	1/1/2022	12/31/2023
Zewde Ingram	7/1/2022	6/30/2024
Sebastian Naranjo	6/1/2022	5/31/2024
Kiloni Quiles-Franco	7/1/2022	3/31/2023
Carly Golden	4/1/2023	3/31/2025
Erin Hennessey	7/1/2023	6/30/2024
Delaney Gray	7/1/2023	6/30/2024
Rose Zhao	4/1/2023	3/31/2025

Apply to the TL1 Postdoctoral Fellowship, click here