Congratulations to Associate Professors Ann Wu and Frank Wharam on receiving two newly created endowed Institute chairs.  Each endowment will support the academic work of the chair’s holder and may be used to jumpstart a new program, to extend a promising line of investigation, to support a trainee, or to enable a wide array of other activities.

Ann Chen Wu, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. She is the director of the Center for Healthcare Research in Pediatrics (CHeRP) and the PRecisiOn Medicine Translational Research (PROMoTeR) Center. Dr. Wu is a pediatrician and health services researcher. She leads the Age-Dependent Pharmacogenomics of Asthma Treatment (ADAPT) study; this research will link genetic variants to therapeutic responses with additional information from genomics and metabolomics to provide insight into the biologic pathways that may be activated in an age-dependent method. She also leads development of the Precision Medicine Treatment (PreEMT) Model, a sophisticated computer model capable of simulating short- and long-term clinical benefits and estimating the cost-effectiveness of integrating different genome screening strategies into clinical care for healthy or high-risk newborns for a wide variety of heritable conditions. Her research interests are in health disparities, asthma, and pharmacogenetics.

Frank Wharam, MB, BCh, BAO, MPH, is an Associate Professor of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute. He is the director of the Division of Health Policy and Insurance Research in the Department of Population Medicine (DPM) and site director of DPM's Harvard Medical School General Internal Medicine fellowship. Dr. Wharam is a general internist physician caring for patients in the Harvard Vanguard health system. He conducts health services research on the impact of health policies on health care quality and vulnerable populations. He has expertise in patient and physician incentives for efficient care, analysis of large databases, understanding nuances of health insurance benefit designs, and understanding how medical care can be accurately assessed using health insurance claims data.