Title: Mentoring Physician Scientists in Patient-Oriented Research ABSTRACT Dr. Maverakis is a physician-scientist trained in immunogenetics, glycobiology, and big data analytics. His research focuses on the use of state-of-the-art methodologies to study patients with autoimmunity and cancer patients receiving immunotherapy. His group constructs diagnostic classifiers, as well as predictive classifiers to identify patients who will: experience a progression in disease severity, respond to a particular therapy, or develop an associated disease. With this goal in mind, Dr. Maverakis and his collaborator, Carlito Lebrilla, have created a site-specific map of the human serum glycome for use in biomarker research and discovery. Dr. Maverakis is an award-winning mentor with a strong track-record of training clinical-investigators. He is the director of the UC Davis Immune Monitoring Shared Resource and in this capacity, is charged with mentoring young clinical-scientists, especially with regards to clinical trial ancillary study design. An NIH K24 Award will be integral to his future development as a successful mentor to young clinical-investigators. It will ensure that he has protected time to teach and mentor clinical- investigators from various backgrounds to help them obtain research independence. He presents a plan for improving the quality and quantity of his mentoring, including extending his mentoring activities to other academic institutions. In addition, Dr. Maverakis proposes to augment his current patient-oriented-research by designing and conducting early stage clinical studies to explore novel treatments and their biomechanisms.
This proposal will provide Dr. Maverakis support to continue to mentor young clinical investigators from various backgrounds in patient-oriented research, especially on projects involving ?omic? datasets. Dr. Maverakis' research is focused on using genetic and glycomic datasets to construct diagnostic and predictive classifiers to identify patients who will: experience a progression in disease severity, respond to a particular therapy, or develop an associated disease. In addition, Dr. Maverakis proposes to augment his current patient- oriented-research by designing and conducting early stage clinical studies to explore novel treatments and their biomechanisms.
