Meet The Team
LAUREN S. CHERNICK
MD
MSc
is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons with a secondary appointment as an Associate Professor in the Department of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. She is a practicing pediatric emergency medicine physician and has dedicated her career to both the clinical care of children and the study of how to improve the health of adolescents and young adults. She has been the Principal Investigator (PI), Co-Investigator, and site PI on multiple grants and was funded through a K23 Career Mentored Development Grant from the National Institute of Child and Health Development (NICHD) as well as is the PI of a R21 from the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) and a co-PI on a R21 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). She was also the past Chair of the PECARN (Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Network) Adolescent Sexual Health Working Group and currently teaches two graduate level courses focusing on child and adolescent development and adolescent sexual health. Her specific research focuses on improving adolescent sexual health through designing, testing, and implementing innovative and engaging digital health platforms that fit into ED workflow. As an investigator, Dr. Chernick has extensive experience with qualitative and quantitative data analysis, user-centered design, digital health, and ED-based trials. She was recently appointed the Associate Director of Qualitative Research and Implementation Science of the Department of Emergency Medicine.
STEPHANIE LOVINSKY-DESIR, MD, MS
is a Herbert Irving Associate Professor of Pediatrics in Environmental Health Sciences and Chief of the Pediatric Pulmonary Division at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York Presbyterian. Her research is focused on understanding how environmental factors impact children with asthma, particularly in urban and minoritized communities. She recently served on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Air Act Scientific Advisory Committee as a member of the Particulate Matter Panel in 2021 and currently is serving on the EPA’s Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee. Dr. Lovinsky-Desir is an elected member of the Society for Pediatric Research and is very active in the American Thoracic Society (ATS) as a member of several committees within the Pediatric Assembly and as the Vice Chair of the ATS Health Equity and Diversity Committee. She is also a spokesperson for the American Lung Association.
TERESA LEE, MD MS
is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Division of Pediatric Cardiology at Columbia University. Renowned for her expertise in the intersection of pediatric cardiology, heart failure, and clinical genetics, Dr. Lee is board-certified in Pediatrics, Pediatric Cardiology, and Medical Genetics and Genomics.
As a prominent physician-scientist, Dr. Lee's research is dedicated to uncovering the genetic causes of pediatric cardiomyopathy, with a particular focus on identifying common pathways of disease pathogenesis that may yield novel therapeutic targets. With nearly 20 years of experience in translational human genetic research, she employs advanced next-generation sequencing technologies, including exome sequencing and RNA-Seq, to drive her innovative studies.
Dr. Lee's pivotal research, supported by prestigious grants such as the CTSA/Irving Institute TRANSFORM KL2 Award and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute K23 Award, centers on discovering novel genetic causes of infantile cardiomyopathy. Furthermore, she has played a crucial role in the Pediatric Cardiomyopathy Registry, a collaborative, NIH-funded international initiative that integrates longitudinal outcomes, precise clinical phenotyping, and genomic data. This transformative work seeks to enhance the understanding of genotype-phenotype correlations, effectively translating precision medicine principles into more tailored patient management and treatment strategies.
MARISA SPANN, PHD, MPH
is the Herbert Irving Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC). She is clinical neuropsychologist with additional training in developmental neuroimaging and perinatal epidemiology. She obtained her PhD in clinical psychology at George Washington University and went on to pursue a MPH at Yale School of Public Health and a NIH-funded T32 research postdoctoral fellowship in Translational Child Psychiatry at CUIMC. The overarching goal of her research is to identify early immune, brain, and neuropsychological antecedents of childhood psychiatric risk to reduce the time to intervention for young children. She accomplishes this through two complementary lines of study involving national and international birth cohorts, and clinical cohorts of pregnant women-fetal dyads in New York. Her laboratory has made significant contributions in understanding associations between several types of prenatal exposures related to maternal inflammation (e.g., maternal infection and BMI) with offspring psychiatric risk, and the role of infant brain function and structure in mediating this risk. Among a portfolio of NIH early career K awards and R01 awards, Dr. Spann was awarded a NIMH Midcareer Investigator Award (K24) in Patient-Oriented Research to provide research training to young investigators in the area of perinatal-developmental neuroscience. In addition to her research, she is actively involved in service related to equity, inclusion, and diversity efforts at the university and national levels. She is Acting Director of the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia and the Associate Director for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study (HBCD) funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Spann also co-founded and is the Founding President of the Fetal, Infant, Toddler Neuroimaging Group (FIT’NG), an interdisciplinary academic society facilitating advances in data quality and image processing tools for and scientific discoveries related to the young brain.
BRETT ANDERSON, MD MBA MS
is a pediatric cardiologist, Director of the Center for Child Health Services Research in Mindich Child Health and Development Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, and Population Health Science and Policy, and a founding member of ASPIRE!. She is an NIH-funded health services researcher who blends her medical, business, and statistical backgrounds to bring together interdisciplinary investigators and data for the purposes of identifying modifiable drivers of outcomes, value, and health inequities, with a particular focus on children with cardiac disease. She has examined the effects of provider characteristics, surgical timing, social determinants of health, and various measures of health care access. She is the founder and Director of the Congenital Heart Surgery Collaborative for Longitudinal Outcomes and Utilization of Resources (CHS-COLOUR), an interdisciplinary collaborative that brings together leadership and data from all congenital heart surgical centers across four states, health services researchers, and the departments of health, to examine etiologies of health inequities and to plan for programmatic interventions. Dr. Anderson received her undergraduate degree Magna Cum Laude from Yale University. She then completed her medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a Master’s in Business Administration from The Wharton School, and a Master’s in Patient Oriented Research/Biostatistics from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She completed her general pediatrics residency at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a fellowship in pediatric cardiology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center.
GISSETTE REYES-SOFFER, MD
is an NIH and AHA funded clinical translational researcher. She is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and a member of the Division of Preventive Medicine and Nutrition. She was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. After Medical School, she completed NIH T32 post-doctoral work at CUIMC, working with the NOMASS and ACCORD study cohorts and studying the effects of a nutritional intervention using a modified DAG oil and Leucine supplementation. Early faculty training focused on studies using stable isotopes that describe the metabolism of apolipoprotein B100 before and after novel therapies in development. She has expertise and leadership in the execution of clinical research projects and use of stable isotopes/mass spectrometry. The goal of her laboratory are to design and execute research studies that define and/or discover novel pathways of lipid and lipoprotein metabolism that are linked to development of cardiovascular and liver disease. Her work has been published in Circulation, Journal of Lipid Research and Science and Translational Medicine. She has participated in NHLBI sponsored work group on Lipoprotein(a) (recommendations published in The Journal American College of Cardiology). She is a current Associate Editor of the Journal of Atherosclerosis and on the board of the Journal of Lipid Research. She is a member of the American Heart Association, European Atherosclerosis Society and American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Reyes-Soffer is highly committed to engaging and supporting the success of diverse students, trainees, faculty and scientific teams. As a member of the American Heart Association, Atherosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology Council she has serve on various leadership roles, mentoring and educational activities. She has also been named to various Industry sponsored advisory boards of phase 3 lipid lowering therapies.
She is a standing member of the NIH NHLBI-MPOR study section and serves on the scientific board of the Family Heart Foundation and, the Lp(a) forum, the TG forum and PCSK9 forum.
JENNIFER WOO BAIDAL, MD MPH
is Associate Professor, with tenure, and Associate Chair for Clinical Research in Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Woo Baidal is a pediatric weight management provider and health services researcher in the Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition. Her research program translates clinical, community, and epidemiologic findings into population-level interventions during pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood to prevent childhood obesity and chronic diseases. Her research projects funded through NIH, PCORI, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation target prevention of early life social, environmental, and behavioral risk factors for obesity in vulnerable populations.