Mentoring Translational Scientists in Clinical Trial Immune Monitoring

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.