Justin Jeffers, MD

Dr. Thomas R. Aversano is an associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He is also the associate chief of cardiology at Johns Hopkins Cardiology at GBMC and the director of the Atlantic Cardiovascular Patient Outcomes Research Team (C-PORT). His research interests focus on health services research - public policy, cardiovascular disease treatment, coronary intervention, and patient outcomes research in cardiovascular disease.Dr. Aversano received an undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester and a medical degree from the University of Oklahoma. He was a resident of internal medicine as well as a research fellow in cardiology at S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo before joining Johns Hopkins University as a cardiology fellow in 1982. Dr. Aversano has contributed to Johns Hopkins InHealth, specifically the development of a cardiology program (inCar) within the InHealth initiative focused on creation of a real-time decision-support, communication, and documentation tool for interventional cardiology.He also created and leads the Atlantic Cardiovascular Patient Outcomes Research Team (C-PORT) whose projects have involved 87 hospitals in 11 States and recruited more than 30,000 patients in randomized trials and registries. C-PORT worked with Departments of Health in 13 States to perform these studies. These projects were instrumental in changing both national heart association guidelines and State health care policy regarding performance of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).

Dr. Nina Nami is an instructor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her area of clinical expertise is pediatric anesthesia and critical care medicine.She earned her M.D. from SUNY Upstate Medical University. She completed her residency at University of Rochester Medical Center and performed a fellowship in pediatric anesthesiology at Riley Children’s Health.

An expert in foodborne and intestinal infections, Cynthia Sears is a professor of medicine and oncology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as a professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is the microbiome program leader of the Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Johns Hopkins and is director of the Johns Hopkins Germ-free Murine Facility.She is an infectious diseases expert who has focused on gut infections including diarrhea, foodborne illnesses Clostridium difficile (C. diff) and Helicobacter pylori during her career. In the laboratory and in clinical settings, she has studied the pathogenesis of enterotoxigenic Bacteroides fragilis (ETBF) over the past 25 years. The current focus of the Sears laboratory is to determine how the microbiota and specific bacteria contribute to colon carcinogenesis. The Sears laboratory integrates studies in humans and mouse models, employing microbiology, bioinformatics and immunologic methods. Dr. Sears has worked abroad in Thailand, Brazil, Haiti, Bangladesh and Malaysia.Dr. Sears served as associate editor of Clinical Infectious Diseases from 2000 to 2016. She has been an active member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) for more than 20 years, serving the society in numerous capacities, and is currently president of the organization. Dr. Sears received her medical degree from Thomas Jefferson Medical College followed by training in internal medicine at The New York Hospital (Cornell Medical School) in New York City. She trained in infectious diseases at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute and the University of Virginia. Dr. Sears joined the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1988.