Meet The Team
LAUREN S. CHERNICK
MD
MSc
is a pediatric emergency medicine physician board certified in Pediatrics and Pediatrics Emergency Medicine with a Masters of Biostatistics (MSc) from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She has dedicated her career to both the clinical care of children and the study of how to improve the health of adolescents who present for care to the emergency department (ED). She has been the PI, Co-Investigator, and site PI on multiple grants and is currently funded through the National Institute of Child and Health Development (NICHD) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR). She is also the Chair of the PECARN (Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network; funded by HRSA) Adolescent Sexual Health Working Group. Her specific research focus is improving adolescent health through designing, testing, and implementing innovative and engaging digital health platforms that fit into ED workflow. As an investigator, she has extensive experience with qualitative and quantitative data analysis, user-centered design, digital health, and ED-based trials.
STEPHANIE LOVINSKY-DESIR, MD, MS
is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pulmonary Medicine. Her research is focused on understanding and addressing factors in the urban environment that contribute to pediatric asthma. Her current work, funded by the National Institute of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, seeks to understand how to keep urban children physically active while avoiding potentially harmful pollutant exposures. Specific studies include assessments of physical activity patterns in urban children, identifying locations of physical activity throughout the urban landscape, measurement of inhaled doses of pollution during physical activity, and evaluating physical activity and pollution in New York City schools.
TERESA LEE, MD MS
is an Assistant Professor in Pediatric Cardiology at Columbia University. She is board certified in pediatrics, pediatric cardiology (with advanced training in heart failure/transplantation), and clinical genetics. As a physician-scientist her research is focused on identifying novel genetic causes of cardiomyopathies in children. Her current research focus under the CTSA/Irving Institute TRANSFORM K12 Award and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute K23 Award has been the identification of novel genetic causes of infantile cardiomyopathy. She is currently studying the downstream effects of a novel cardiomyopathy gene to better understand the molecular changes that result in heart failure using induced pluripotent stem cell and mouse models of cardiomyopathy. She is also a part of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute–funded Pediatric Cardiomyopathy Registry, and is actively involved in its research efforts to understand the genetic causes of cardiomyopathy in the pediatric age group.
MARISA SPANN, PHD, MPH
is an Associate Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Dr. Spann is a clinical neuropsychologist with specialty training in developmental neuroimaging and perinatal epidemiology. She obtained her PhD in clinical psychology at George Washington University. She went on to pursue a clinical neuropsychology postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine, an MPH at Yale School of Public Health, and a NIH-funded T32 research postdoctoral fellowship in Translational Child Psychiatry at CUIMC.
The overarching goal of Dr. Spann’s research is to identify early immune, brain, and neuropsychological antecedents of childhood psychiatric risk to reduce the time to intervention for young children. She accomplishes this through two complementary lines of study involving national and international birth cohorts, and clinical samples of pregnant women at CUIMC. Dr. Spann’s lab is the N3 early Neuroimaging, Neuroimmune and Neuropsychology Lab.
BRETT ANDERSON, MD MBA MS
is a pediatric cardiologist, an NIH-funded health services researcher (R01 HL150044, K23 HL133454), Director of Outcomes and Quality for the Pediatric Heart Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and a founding member of ASPIRE!. Dr. Anderson’s research focuses on the linkage and integration of large datasets and the application of econometric modeling for the purposes of identifying modifiable drivers of outcomes, value, and health inequities associated with the management of pediatric heart disease. She has examined the effects of provider characteristics, surgical timing, and social determinants of health. She is the founder and director of the New York State Congenital Heart Surgery Collaborative for Longitudinal Outcomes and Utilization of Resources (CHS-COLOUR), an interdisciplinary collaborative that brings together leadership and data from all congenital heart centers in New York State, health services researchers, and the Department of Health, to examine etiologies of health inequities and plan for programmatic interventions. Dr. Anderson received her undergraduate degree Magna Cum Laude from Yale University. She then completed her medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, a Master’s in Business Administration from The Wharton School, and a Master’s in Patient Oriented Research/Biostatistics from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She completed her general pediatrics residency at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a fellowship in pediatric cardiology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital, Columbia University Medical Center. She is an invited member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons Congenital Heart Surgery Database Task Force and the Task Force on Funded Research.
GISSETTE REYES-SOFFER, MD
is an NIH funded clinical translational researcher. She is the Herbert Irving Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. She was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. After Medical School, she completed post-doctoral work at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, working with the NOMASS and ACCORD study cohorts. Her early faculty training focused on studies examining the effect of diets and novel lipid lowering therapies on lipid and lipoprotein metabolism and development of novel methods to study lipid metabolic pathways using stable isotopes and mass spectrometry. Despite her unconventional path to become a clinical-translational researcher, she has been able to develop and demonstrate expertise and leadership in the execution of clinical research projects. The purpose of her lab is to design and execute research studies that define and/or discover novel pathways of lipid and lipoprotein metabolism. These pathways are essential in development of cardiovascular and liver disease. Her work has been published in Circulation, Journal of Lipid Research and Science and Translational Medicine. She was a member of the NHLBI work group on Lipoprotein(a) (recommendations published in The Journal American College of Cardiology). She is a current Associate Editor of the Journal of Atherosclerosis and Junior Assistant Editor of the Journal of Lipid Research. She is a member of the American Heart Association, European Atherosclerosis Society and American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Reyes-Soffer is highly committed to engaging and supporting the success of diverse students, trainees, faculty and scientific teams. As a member of the American Heart Association, Atherosclerosis Thrombosis and Vascular Biology Council she chairs the Diversity Committee and is part of the AHA Scientific Sessions Programming Committee. She has been invited to participate in the AHA Leaders Academy and Diversity Task Force.
JENNIFER WOO BAIDAL, MD MPH
is Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, the inaugural Director of the Department of Pediatrics Obesity Initiative, and Director of Pediatric Weight Management in the Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Dr. Woo Baidal is a pediatric weight management provider and health services researcher. Her research program translates clinical, community, and epidemiologic findings into population-level interventions during pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood to prevent childhood obesity and chronic diseases. Her current research projects funded through NIH, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation target prevention of early life social, environmental, and behavioral risk factors for obesity in vulnerable populations.