2020 Faculty Speakers

Brian Jensen, MD is a physician-scientist with a clinical and investigative focus on heart failure. He has clinical certification in Advanced Heart Failure/Transplantation and spends three months of the year as an attending physician on the UNC Heart Failure/Transplant/LVAD inpatient service. He also staffs the UNC Cardio-oncology clinic and has a particular interest in optimizing cardiovascular health in patients with cancer. His laboratory uses mouse and cell culture models to study cardiac hypertrophy, heart failure, and the molecular response to myocardial injury. Dr. Jensen’s research interests include heart failure, cardiac hypertrophy myocardial biology, adrenergic receptor biology, and chemotherapeutic cardiotoxicity. His clinical interests include advanced heart failure, transplant, and LVAD.

Fellowship: Cardiology, University of California, San Francisco

Residency: Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Medical School: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Undergraduate: Pomona College

Deepa Kirk, MD is an endocrinologist whose practice includes consultative general endocrinology and diabetes, with a clinical focus on thyroid disease. She is active in undergraduate and graduate medical education, having served as the director of the endocrine block in the pre-clinical curriculum at the UNC School of Medicine, the director of the fourth year medical student clinical elective in adult endocrinology, and preceptor for residents, endocrine fellows, other medical health professionals in the outpatient setting. Since assuming the role of Medical Director for the UNC Diabetes and Endocrine Clinic in 2014, she has developed an interest in clinical administration. She has a specific interest in improving clinic and ancillary work flow, physician and provider support, and the overall patient experience.

Fellowship: Endocrinology and Diabetes, University of Pennsylvania

Residency: University of Pennsylvania

Medical School: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Marisa Domino, PhD is deeply interested in vulnerable populations and she has created a research agenda throughout her career which examines the efficiency of health care policies in low income and disabled populations. She has substantial expertise in applied econometric analyses and has worked extensively on large administrative databases from a variety of health insurance programs. She has considerable experience extracting measures of medication use and adherence, quality of care, utilization and costs from a large variety of data sources. Dr. Domino’s work has focused on the effects of Medicaid program design on a variety of populations and outcomes, especially related to behavioral health and chronic illness. She has received funding from the NIDA, NIMH, AHRQ, RWJF, and NARSAD,  to examine the effect of policy changes on the use of mental health and medical services, prescription medications and other measures of health services use, quality, and costs.

Post-doctorate fellowship: Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School.

Graduate school: Johns Hopkins University

Peyton Thompson, MD, MSCR is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of North Carolina. Her passion is to improve access to life-saving vaccinations in resource-limited settings through global health research. Her research primarily focuses on the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo through identification and treatment of hepatitis B-infected pregnant women and provision of birth dose vaccine to their infants. She has funding through the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund to evaluate the immunogenicity of a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine in Congolese infants. She is beginning to take these hepatitis B related research efforts into Uganda and Malawi as well. She is also invested in medical education as well as mentorship of trainees who are interested in global health research.

Fellowship: Infectious Disease, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Residency: Pediatrics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Medical School: Virginia Commonwealth University

Undergraduate: Princeton University

Ian Davis, MD, PhD is the G. Denman Hammond Professor of Childhood Cancer and Associate Director of Basic Research for the Children’s Research Institute. Dr. Davis is a pediatric hematologist and oncologist, with expertise in sarcoma and solid tumors. Research in the Davis lab uses in vitro human and animal models in order to study transcription factor targeting as well as gene regulation in the progression of cancer versus normal development through genomic and proteomic approaches. His lab also works to develop new therapies and diagnostics for childhood cancer by focusing on chromatin maintenance, transcription and organization in cancer progression, such as functional consequences of aberrant chromatin and its role in oncogenesis, and understand how certain genes activate and deactivate in Ewing’s sarcoma and renal carcinoma.

Fellowship: Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital

Residency & Chief Residency: Pediatrics, Boston Children’s Hospital

Medical School: Northwestern University

Doctorate: University of Illinois at Chicago