Wednesday, December 10, 10:00 – 11:00 am
Featured Speaker: Stephen G. Kaler, MD MPH
Clinical Director, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development,
National Institutes of Health
Topic: Translational Medicine: Effects on Drug Development, Research, and Health-System Pharmacy
Stephen Kaler was born in Boston and obtained his undergraduate degree from Boston College and his MD from the University of Rochester. After training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and in pediatrics at Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, he joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as clinical associate in medical genetics in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). As a postdoctoral fellow there, he spearheaded studies on genetic disorders of copper transport, including Menkes disease, a lethal infantile neurogenetic condition. In work published in Nature Genetics, Kaler identified and characterized point mutations in the Menkes disease gene and provided insight about normal RNA processing in mammalian cells.
After fellowship, Dr. Kaler was appointed director of biochemical and molecular genetics at Children’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., a post he held for nearly five years during which he rose to the rank of Associate Professor and received investigator-initiated research grants from NIH and the International Copper Association.
He obtained his Masters in Public Health from George Washington University in 1998 and returned to NIH as Deputy Associate Director for Disease Prevention in 2000. In 2001, he became Clinical Director of the NICHD intramural research program and head of the Unit on Pediatric Genetics in the NICHD Program in Molecular Medicine in 2002. His lab studies problems where a patient-oriented approach can provide a springboard to advancing understanding in a broader area, and where novel treatments are needed. The Unit’s overarching goal is to improve the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of inherited pediatric diseases. This past February, his group recently published an original article in the New England Journal of Medicine on their long-term translational research effort in Menkes disease.
In addition to these focused pursuits, Dr. Kaler has maintained interest in public health and he recently edited a book entitled Reducing the Impact of Poverty on and Health and Human Development: Scientific Approaches, published this past June.
Join your fellow colleagues in this session where Dr. Kaler explores the role and future of translational medicine in healthcare, and how drug development and research may be impacted.