Leadership & Staff

Julian Solway, MD, is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the NIH grant that operates the ITM.

Solway launched the ITM in 2007, and under his leadership it has grown and been renewed by the NIH.

Solway, the UChicago Medicine & BSD Dean for Translational Medicine and Walter L. Palmer Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics, is also an authority on asthma and has a robust research program that has been funded by the NIH and other organizations for more than 28 years.

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Susan Cohn, MD, is the Co-Principal Investigator (PI) of the NIH grant that operates the ITM.

Cohn is the UChicago Medicine & BSD Dean of Clinical research as well as a pediatric oncologist and authority on neuroblastoma, a cancer of nerve cells in children. She also leads the UChicago Office of Clinical Research (OCR) and is the co-leader of the ITM’s Clinical Trails Cluster. Cohn has been funded by the NIH and other organizations, publishing more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Cohn is working to build a YouChicago Biobank network in which blood and tissue samples that would otherwise be thrown away are collected with patients’ consent and made accessible to researchers.

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Gerald Moose Stacy is the Administrative Director of the ITM, where he executes its projects and manages its staff.

Prior to joining the ITM, he managed the third largest Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) in the country at Johns Hopkins University’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Research (ICTR). Gerry helped build the ICTR into a $17 million per year grant in less than a decade, and what started out as a team of three evolved into a staff of nearly 30 and a community of more than 300 faculty members who received salary support.

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Arlene Chapman, MD, is the Associate Director of the ITM and the Director of its Clinical Research Center (CRC) that offers specialized services and skilled research nurses for investigators’ clinical trials.

Chapman is also the Chief of Nephrology at UChicago Medicine and a member of several National Institutes of Health (NIH) committees. Her research has been continuously funded by the NIH for almost two decades, and she has published nearly 170 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.

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Samuel Volchenboum, MD, PhD, is the Associate Director of the ITM and the Co-Leader of its Bioinformatics Cluster that offers investigators a variety of resources to do complex data analysis and build custom platforms for clinical trials.

Sam is also the Director of the Center for Research Informatics (CRI) at the UChicago Medicine and Biological Sciences Division, where he oversees its operations and strategic planning. He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, where he is an authority on neuroblastoma.

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Sonja Johnson-Hall is the Associate Administrative Director of the ITM, where she oversees fiscal reporting.

Sonja joined the ITM almost a decade ago, and has worked with investigators, its Clinical Research Center (CRC), and several other sectors to grow the program over the years.

Michael Quinn, PhD, is the Evaluations Manager of the ITM, where he collects data, conducts analysis, and measures the programs’ impacts.

Mike is a senior research professional in UChicago’s Department of Medicine and has conducted more than a dozen studies over the years as a co-investigator or principal investigator. He is also active in a evaluating a variety of large-scale UChicago projects that began at the ITM.

Sara Serritella is the Communications Manager of the ITM, where she orchestrates its marketing and strategic storytelling, across its communications platforms.

Serritella has reported at news organizations across the country, with her work appearing in publications like The Wall Street Journal, TIME, The Miami Herald, the Associated Press and The Times of Northwest Indiana. She contributed to the Pulitzer Prize-winning team reporting at the Detroit Free Press, and most recently served as the managing editor of Chicago Ideas Week, the Midwest’s largest innovation platform. In her journalism days, she covered everything from health care to federal courts and was among the pioneers of multimedia reporting on those beats. Serritella is a proud alumna of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications

Cluster Co-Leaders: Robert Grossman and Samuel Volchenboum

Have a huge data set that you need analyzed? Not sure if a study is statistically feasible? Need a custom digital platform built to accelerate your research?

The ITM’s Biomedical Informatics Core can help. Fueled by the University of Chicago Center for Research Informatics (CRI), this core can help you sift through and harness the power of big data.

Whether you need a one-on-one consultation, funding to support analysis, or free training on how to operate the systems on your own, this core can make it happen.

Cluster Co-Leaders: Arlene Chapman and David Ehrmann

The ITM’s Clinical Resources Cluster houses the Clinical Research Center (CRC) that provides exclusive facilities and staff with decades of specialized research skills to help investigators conduct trails.

The CRC offers weighted meals calculated down to the calorie, a sleep study room, specimen analysis, and much more at competitive rates.

It also runs the Core Laboratory, which processes blood, urine, saliva, and stool samples.

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Cluster Co-Leader: Susan Cohn and Walter Stadler

The ITM’s Clinical Trials Cluster works closely with the University of Chicago Office of Clinical Research to offer a range of services to researchers whose studies involve people.

It connects these investigators with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and human subject protection experts, study design consultants, and other resources to help make the process of launching a clinical trial and easy and fast as possible.

Cluster Co-Leaders: Deborah Burnet, Karen Kim, and Doriane Miller

The ITM’s Community Cluster forges relationships between researchers and community members to improve people’s health and help frame the best way to conduct research  in local neighborhoods.

Through this cluster community members learn about the latest medical knowledge that can help their neighborhoods, researchers get vital feedback on how to design their trials, and both investigators and community members receive training on how best to support each other and accomplish their goals.

And as part of a joint initiative between the ITM and Urban Health Institute (UHI) through the University of Chicago Medicine Community Benefit Program, this cluster also helps provide funding to community nonprofits collaborating with UChicago faculty to tackle adult diabetes and pediatric asthma and obesity on the South Side.

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Cluster Co-Leaders: Eric Beyer, David Meltzer, and Olufunmilayo (Funmi) Olopade

The Education Cluster  facilitates the NIH Career Development (KL2) Program that gives junior investigators protected time, mentoring, and funding for their research. The ITM also works with the Center for Health and Social Services (CHeSS) to run the Committee on Clinical and Translational Sciences (CCTS), a freestanding academic unit that creates multidisciplinary curricula targeting clinical and translational sciences.

Cluster Co-Leaders: Diane Lauderdale and Lainie Ross

The Population Science Cluster provides study design support and education, free biostatistics consulting, research ethics, and other expert services.

During Fall, Winter, and Spring Quarters this cluster also holds the Essentials of Patient-Oriented Research (EPOR) course.

Cluster Co-Leaders: Graeme I. Bell, John Cunningham, Maryellen Giger, and Raphael Lee

The ITM’s T1 Research and Technology Cluster provides training and access to a variety of technologies to accelerate research.

Click here to learn more about the Human Imaging Research Office (HIRO), part of the T1 Research and Technology Cluster.