Dean’s Eminent Investigators

The School of Medicine faculty includes a select group of high-impact basic scientists who achieved the rank of full professor with tenure years ago and continue to contribute at truly exemplary levels. These scholars embody the continuing fulfillment of our highest academic aspirations and are at the core of our drive from “excellence” to “eminence.” The “Dean’s Eminent Investigator” honorary titles were created to honor faculty based in the School of Medicine. These honorary titles are limited to up to 2% of SOM faculty and are available for conferral upon eminent senior basic scientists who have been full professors with tenure at Emory for at least five years and continue to contribute internationally at extraordinary levels. The criteria for selection include a high level of sustained extramural support expected to continue into the future, as well as a stellar record of high-impact publications and international recognition as a thought leader in their field. Basic scientists who hold endowed appointments are not eligible to receive or retain these titles. 

These titles will be granted for an initial 5-year term, subject to review and renewal every five years based upon continued exemplary performance at an international level. 

Each department chair may nominate one faculty member per year. Letters of nomination should be limited to three pages and accompanied by the candidate’s updated CV in the School of Medicine format.

Professor and chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics 

Tell me about your research and why it’s important to you.

Good health is fundamental. It improves happiness, sociability, tolerance, intelligence, and affluence. While we continue to discover new ways to improve it, costs keep rising, and the wealthiest benefit most. My aim is to improve health in under-resourced communities. Doing this at scale requires a combination of technologies and approaches: great clinical partners, committed field teams, experts in co-design and community building, and engineers skilled in areas like tiny ML and edge AI, which provide intelligent decision support in remote places with few skilled health care professionals.

Our greatest impact is where resources and infrastructure are most scarce. Scaling requires deciding which elements can be automated, which need a human in the loop, and which require expert input when data is unfamiliar to AI or humans. No one can master all these skills, so integrating them takes a talented, collaborative team. I’m constantly learning from colleagues and am surrounded by talented people with a shared ideal to transform health care, particularly for those most in need.

Why is basic research important?

Basic research builds the foundation for the future, takes risks on new ideas, and fosters communities that collaborate—and sometimes compete—to create new fields. It fuels intellectual growth, pushes boundaries, and prepares the next generation of thinkers who will transform society. Beyond research projects, we’re creating a talent pipeline, mentoring young minds, and shaping careers.

Its value is not always immediate; many projects take decades to yield products or solutions. With a long-term view, we can tackle critical problems that lack obvious commercial models but have vital societal importance. Industry often builds on our successes and failures to develop products that investors might otherwise never fund. Basic research is an investment in our future, an exploration of new frontiers, and a chance to be truly creative.

What challenges do you foresee in your field? 

We must address bias while maintaining algorithmic performance, possibly through localized models—yet these pose regulatory challenges. Determining when to use AI, humans, or both is contextual and tied to resource allocation. With limited trained staff, tests, equipment, and electricity, we need better ways to quantify the trade-offs—an area with surprisingly little research.

We also need to redesign optimization metrics to reflect real goals, like improved well-being per dollar, despite political and measurement challenges. Finally, we must quantify and justify health care’s environmental impact, including that of AI, and incorporate this into cost metrics.

Professor, Department of Medicine; Director of the Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory

You have had a long career that has allowed you to contribute at truly exemplary levels. What inspires you to do this work?

I find great pleasure in understanding the molecular logic of life. Every step, small or large, advances knowledge.

This award selects a faculty member who embodies the continuing fulfillment of our highest academic aspirations and helps drive the School of Medicine from excellence to eminence. What does this award mean to you?

I have often likened academic research to traveling into unknown territory without a map. There is, of course, satisfaction in finding one’s way home. An award like this is far greater, emphasizing the feeling of being welcomed home.

Can you describe your most impactful discovery?

I read the Journals of Lewis and Clark on my road trip west to start graduate studies, and then I read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species when I was writing my PhD dissertation. Both of these stories of discovery led me to recognize “discovery” not as a single finding, but rather as a body of work. My most impactful individual papers were in apoptosis and in methods to measure glutathione. My most impactful discovery to date was a series of papers re-defining oxidative stress and redox biology. I am optimistic that these will be eclipsed by my current research to sequence the human exposome.

 

Professor, Department of Microbiology and Immunology; Co-Director Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center; Senior Research Career Scientist Atlanta VA 

Dr. Shafer is internationally recognized for his work on mechanisms of bacterial resistance to antimicrobials, including clinically-used antibiotics and host defense compounds. Infectious bacteria have evolved and have been selected to be resistant to a host of antibiotics. Multiple strains of bacteria are now resistant to the most common and previously effective antibiotics. Recognizing this critical medical need, Dr. Shafer has devoted his entire career to understanding the basic and fundamental mechanisms that lead to antibiotic resistance.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor of Human Genetics

With a background in biochemistry, molecular biology and genetics, Dr. Corces has been a pioneer in epigenetics, genomics and computational biology. His current research centers on the transgenerational transmission of obesity resulting from exposure to chemicals in the environment, with an emphasis on the role of the three-dimensional organization of the chromatin fiber in this process. Human Genetics Chair Peng Jin noted that his discoveries “have provided fundamental insights into chromatin architecture and led to major advances in our understanding of how chromatin can be packaged, regulated and inherited.”

What inspires you to do this work?

“I'm just a nerdy scientist who wakes up every morning thinking about how the nucleus of a cell works. I think about it in the shower instead of singing operas, and I go to bed thinking about it. I never remember my dreams in the morning, so I don't know if I dream about the nucleus or not. I've always been like this, obsessive about understanding how things work. When I was little, Christmas was the best time of the year for me, not because I got presents, but because I got to take apart all the ones from my brothers and sisters to try to figure out how they worked. Putting them together again so that they would still work was a different issue. The most exciting part of my work is being in the lab and finding out new results when they first come out, which is why I don't use my office and I use a desk in the lab instead.”

Do you have any advice for graduating scientists?

“Sometimes you don't know if you want to be a scientist or not until you are in the lab and feel the excitement of discovering something new. Students were not able to be in the lab for over one year now, so many may have missed the opportunity of experiencing this. Once they graduate, it may be difficult to have an opportunity to experience research in a lab. My advice would be not to give up and to try to find opportunities after graduation.”

Professor, Department of Pharmacology and Chemical Biology

Dr. Traynelis has made numerous seminal discoveries about the fundamental properties of glutamate receptors. Recently, he has developed multiple first-in-class series of subtype-selective NMDA receptor ligands that possess therapeutic potential for the treatment of ischemic brain injury, schizophrenia, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy and other disorders. Dr. Traynelis’s work to understand the functional consequences of genetic variation in glutamate receptor genes in healthy individuals and neurological patients have provided new insights into receptor function and genetic risk. These efforts led to the founding of a new Center at Emory that bridges the gap between genetic information on receptor variants and their functional and pharmacological consequences, laying the groundwork for precision medicine and the evaluation of novel treatment paradigms.

What inspires you to do this work?

“My goal in choosing a career path in graduate school was to use basic scientific discovery to drive development of new treatments for individuals suffering from neurological disease. Furthermore, through my training and early career I became convinced that fundamental, detailed mechanistic studies of important disease-related processes could yield insight into new approaches to the treatment of disease. This idea inspires me today to work hard to perform basic research into detailed mechanisms of biological processes and creatively think about how this might create new opportunities for treatment.”

Do you have any advice for graduating scientists?

“The future has never been brighter for applying insight from scientific discoveries to improve the well-being of your neighbors, worldwide. Retain your enthusiasm now for tackling hard problems throughout your life and continue the habit you have acquired here at Emory of always learning new things.”

What do you see as the most exciting opportunity that emerged as a result of the COVID pandemic?

“COVID has changed much about life, work and healthcare, and with every great challenge comes new opportunities. The intense work in the private sector and in industry has created new ways to treat all diseases faster than ever thought possible, and this success validated decades of fundamental scientific progress that laid the groundwork for development of the new vaccines. In addition, as we learn more about the biology of the COVID-19 virus, we will undoubtedly find ways to use this knowledge to create and improve future genetic treatment strategies.”