Mellon Scholars

The Mellon Scholars program is the foundation of the Richard King Mellon Institute for Pediatric Research at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

Scholars are comprised of all assistant professors in the tenure stream at UPMC Children’s Hospital, across all divisions.

Our goal is to:

• foster career development
• create a stronger community of investigators
• retain talented scientists and physician-scientists

Our Mellon Scholars and their Research Focus

• Taylor Abel, MD – Brain surgery for epilepsy
• Sameer “Sam” Agnihotri, PhD – Personalized treatment for brain cancer
• Rannar Airik, PhD – New strategies to treat kidney failure
• Kelly M. Bailey, MD, PhD – The Ewing sarcoma microenvironment and immune responses to pediatric sarcomas
• Corina O. Bondi, PhD – Therapeutic strategies after experimental traumatic brain injury
• Thiago Bruder do Nascimento, MSc, PhD – Vascular biology and metabolic diseases 
• Brian Campfield, MD – Fending off foreign attacks on the lung
• Joseph Thomas Church, MD – Prenatal therapies for congenital diaphragmatic hernia
• Will DePas, PhD – Biogeography of bacterial infections
• Catherine Forster, MD – Urobiome in UTIs
• Lina Ghaloul Gonzalez, MD – Plain people (Amish/Mennonites) translational medicine
• Tom Hooven, MD – Mechanisms and prevention of perinatal infections
• Baoli Hu, PhD – Brain tumor cell behavior
• Melissa Kane, PhD – Viruses and the immune system
• Dwi U. Kemaladewi, PhD – Interventional genomics in rare diseases
• Gary Kohanbash, PhD – Brain tumor vaccines 
• Marcus Malek, MD – Precision-guided surgery to find cancers
• Anita McElroy, MD, PhD – Virus effects throughout the body 
• Amanda Poholek, PhD – Transcriptional and epigenetic regulation of immune cell function
• Franziska Rosser, MD, MPH, FAAP – Epidemiological effects of outdoor air pollution on children with asthma
• Anita Pradeep Saraf, MD, PhD – Developing a better understanding the role of genetic mutations, chronic inflammation and mechanical strain on cardiomyocytes
• Laurie Silva, PhD – Viral and host determinants of virus replication and pathogenesis 
• Amery Treble-Barna, PhD – Neurologic function after brain injury
• Xiangwei Xiao, MD, PhD – Insulin cell function and preservation