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Current KL2 Scholars

Barrett, Paddy, M.D. MRPCI

STSI KL2 Clinician Scholar
Cardiology Fellow
Member Royal College of Physicians of Ireland

Paddy Barrett, MD MRCPI is the winner of the A. Menarini/Irish Cardiac Society Travelling Research Scholarship, the McArdle Prize in surgery for outstanding academic performance and is a member of the prestigious Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

His research interests lie mainly in the fields of personalized medicine and wireless health technologies with particular focus on the molecular and genomic characterization of circulating endothelial cells released during myocardial infarction. He firmly believes that this and other ground breaking research being carried out at the Scripps Translational Science Institute will revolutionize how we will tailor the diagnostics and therapeutics of today and the future.

After graduating from University College Dublin, Ireland he went on to do residency training in major tertiary centres in both Sydney, Australia and Dublin, Ireland. In 2009 he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland and was accepted on to the Irish Cardiology Fellowship training programme.

Dr. Barrett has published previously on topics ranging from the echocardiographic strain patterns in cardiotoxic chemotherapeutics to the mortality trends in the end stage kidney disease population with peripheral artery disease.

Hwang, Chung, M.D. MRPCI

Dr. Hwang completed her premed program in 1989, and graduated with an M.D. degree in 1995, both from Ewha Women’s Univeristy Medical School in Seoul, Korea. She completed internship at Ewha Medical Center in 1996, and internal medicine residency at the Samsung Cheil Hospital in 2001, respectively. After completing residency, she worked at an outpatient clinic in Paju, Korea for one year. Her family moved to the U.S. and she stayed home to raise her son while completing the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). She has been volunteering at a neuroscience lab in the Dorris Neuroscience Center (DNC) since 2010. She is fascinated by the way the current science explains neurophysiology of human brain, and her PI and colleagues in the lab had encouraged her to apply for the master’s program at the STSI. She wants to build a solid foundation of knowledge of genomics and neurobiology with combining the education from the master’s program and research experiment at the DNC. In the long term, she wants to study the mechanisms of neurodegerative motor disorders and work on how to detect early neurobiological changes in the patient’s brain. She thanks her mentors and patients for the guidance to seek the very best path to become a good clinical scientist.

Komatireddy, Ravi, M.D.

Ravi Komatireddy is an Internal Medicine physician and KL2 scholar in wireless health. Finishing his internship in Internal Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock medical center and residency in Internal Medicine at the University of California San Diego, he is passionate about applying a multi-disciplinary approach to healthcare innovation. Working jointly with the West Wireless Health Institute Dr. Komatireddy is involved with the design of novel technology and systems designed to tackle the medical problems associated with high value disease states while lowering the cost of care. Dr. Komatireddy is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, volunteer faculty in General Internal Medicine at the University of California San Diego and also holds a position with a Bay Area organization working on novel algorithms to aid in clinical decision support and diagnostics. Additionally, he’s currently involved in research applying novel wireless physiologic sensor technology to Space Passengers involved with commercial space exploration. Dr. Komatireddy actively practices as an Internal Medicine Hospitalist and is on staff at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, CA.

Modena, Brian, MD

As a scholar in the Scripps Translational Science Institute KL2 Master’s Degree, Brian Modena hopes to begin a career as a Physician-Scientist with a focus in the field of Allergy and Immunology. Prior to medical school he graduated Summa cum Laude in the field of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech University and spent two years working for the Department of Defense as a computer programmer. But his career went in quite a different direction when he returned to his home state of West Virginia to attend the West Virginia School of Medicine. He had high hopes of fulfilling his lifelong dream to become an Allergist. As lifelong sufferer from allergic diseases and asthma, he had gotten to know and admire many Allergists as a child.

Following medical school he moved far from home to start his medical residency training in Internal Medicine at the prestigious Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, CA. After residency he worked two years as an Assistant Professor at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) giving lectures and instructing Internal Medicine residents and medical students in hospital medical care. In his words, “During this time it was my ambition to be a knowledgeable and compassionate physician, one best suited to instruct residents and medical students.” While this experience had been tremendously rewarding, he felt called to do more as a physician; specifically, to put himself to the task of research and to the advancement of medical science.

He was very fortunate to find the KL2 scholar’s program at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), as it provided the perfect opportunity. He states, “I see the KL2 Master’s Degree in Clinical Investigation as a truly exciting opportunity—a chance to learn and to continue to grow as a clinician, researcher, and person.” His major interests are in the fields of Immunology and Genomics—two exciting and emerging fields. At TSRI he is fortunate to be working in the lab of Dan Salomon, MD, a prominent researcher in the field Transplant Immunology with a focus in genomics.

Brian’s journey does not end there but will continue on when he returns close to home in West Virginia to fulfill his lifelong dream and begin a fellowship training in the field of Allergy and Immunology at the prestigious University of Pittsburgh in 2012. The training he receives at TSRI will be invaluable as he embarks on a career as a Physician-Scientist in the Field of Allergy and Immunology.

Uribe-Bruce, Liliana, M.D.

Liliana Uribe-Bruce, M.D., was a medical student in Colombia when she first witnessed the power of community based participatory research. “I understood then that even the best scientific and medical knowledge would not have been able to impact individual or group health without the ability to reach into and engage the community,” she said.

As a KL2 Scholar, Lilliana is again reaching into and engaging the community, specifically the Hispanic population served by Project Dulce™, which provides culturally tailored diabetes care, self-management and prevention education to low-income and uninsured individuals in San Diego County. Working with the Scripps Whittier Diabetes Institute, which sponsors Project Dulce™, she hopes to establish a gene bank that will enable scientists to identify the DNA variations that predispose individuals with Hispanic ancestry to diabetes and that influence their response to diabetes therapies.

Although they are at high risk for diabetes, Hispanics, who constitute almost 30% of San Diego’s population, have not yet been adequately included in most genomic studies to date, she said. The Scripps San Diego Diabetes Genebank will expedite genomics research focusing on Hispanics in such areas as the physiopathology of diabetes and disorders of glucose metabolism, diabetes risk classification, pharmacogenomics, personal risk for diabetes complications, and variation of genetic risk for disease by ethnicity.

Lilliana, a volunteer at Project Dulce™ for several years, will involve the Hispanic community in a dialogue about the potential value of such a database, because she recognizes the importance of engaging the community throughout the entire research process, from the initial formulation of the research to the dissemination of the findings.

After receiving the M.D. degree, she completed residency programs at Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia, where she was born, and Jackson Memorial Hospital at the University of Miami, Florida, and then an endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism clinical and research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.