2 Center Members Elected to National Academy of Medicine

The National Academy of Medicine (NAM) this month announced the election of 90 regular members and 10 international members during its annual meeting. Election to the academy is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

Five University of Michigan professors—including 2 Center members—were among those selected, recognized for their contributions to a broad range of topics including cardiovascular disease, epidemiology, hepatology, health inequities, anesthesiology informatics, and clinical research.

Katherine A. Gallagher, Michele Heisler, Sachin Kheterpal, Anna Suk-Fong Lok, and Bhramar Mukherjee are now a part of a select group of U-M researchers who belong to the NAM. Heisler and Mukherjee are faculty members of the Center for Global Health Equity.

Michele Heisler

A drive to understand and address inequity in medical care and health outcomes, both within the United States and in low- and middle-income countries, has powered Heisler’s career as a physician, researcher, and global health and human rights advocate.

She is professor of Internal Medicine at the Medical School and professor of Health Behavior and Health Education in the School of Public Health. Heisler is also a research investigator with the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and medical director of the nonprofit health and human rights organization Physicians for Human Rights.

Heisler’s innovative clinical trials and implementation studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of diverse peer support models—in which fellow patients, community members, and family members are trained to support patients—to achieve sustained improvements in health and social well-being.

For more than a decade, Heisler served as co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program and its successor—the National Clinician Scholars Program—at the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.

Upon graduation from Amherst College, after a year in Brazil on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, she pursued a master’s degree in public affairs from Princeton University.

Before starting medical school at Harvard University she worked as a field investigator to assist the United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador. She completed residency and health services research training as a RWJF Clinical Scholar at U-M.

Heisler has authored more than 275 peer-reviewed studies in medical and public health journals and is an elected member of the Association of American Physicians.

Bhramar Mukherjee

Mukherjee is John D. Kalbfleisch Collegiate Professor and Chair of Biostatistics and professor of Epidemiology and of Global Public Health at the School of Public Health.

Mukherjee’s research focuses on the development and application of statistical methods in epidemiology, environmental health, cancer research, and disease risk assessment. She has authored more than 340 publications in statistics, biostatistics, epidemiology, and medical journals and has led grants as a principal investigator from the National Science Foundation and the NIH.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mukherjee and her team have been modeling the SARS-CoV-2 virus trajectory in India, and their work has been covered widely by national and international media.

Mukherjee is a research professor and core faculty member for the Michigan Institute of Data Science, is associate director for quantitative data sciences at the Rogel Cancer Center, and was associate director of Cancer Control and Population Sciences at Rogel from 2015-18. She also has had a longstanding collaboration with the University of Michigan's precision health initiative. 

Mukherjee has led an undergraduate summer program in big data since 2015 and has trained nearly 300 undergraduates. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Awards include the Janet Norwood Award and the Sarah Goddard Power Award in 2021.

Mukherjee earned a bachelor’s degree in statistics from Presidency College in Kolkata, India, and a master’s degree in applied statistics and data analysis from the Indian Statistical Institute. She also holds master’s and doctoral degrees in statistics from Purdue University.