2024 Mentor of the Year

The Mentor of the Year Award is presented each year to faculty on the Columbia University Irving Medical Center campus in recognition of their outstanding guidance and support provided to students, fellows, and colleagues.

Billy A. Caceres, PhD, RN, FAHA, FAAN
Assistant Professor of Nursing
2024 Junior Mentor of the Year

Dr. Caceres is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University School of Nursing. His program of research uses biobehavioral approaches to identify and intervene on risk factors for cardiovascular disease in marginalized populations across the lifespan. He currently leads several studies to understand social and structural determinants of cardiovascular health among marginalized adults. Dr. Caceres is the principal investigator of an intensive longitudinal study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute that examines the influence of intersectional discrimination on home blood pressure in a diverse sample of adults. He is a fellow of the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Nursing.

 

Jordan Gabriela Nestor, MD, MS, FASN
Assistant Professor of Medicine
2024 Junior Mentor of the Year

Dr. Jordan Nestor is an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Nephrology at Columbia University, specializing in the diagnosis and management of hereditary kidney diseases. Her research focuses on advancing precision nephrology by expanding access to genomic testing and enabling nephrologists with limited genomic expertise to use real-time data for personalized care. Dr. Nestor’s work aims to promote equitable access to precision care and address health disparities, particularly the higher burden of kidney disease in underserved populations. She is dedicated to developing clinical pathways and digital tools to support non-expert clinicians in utilizing genomic data effectively.

Dr. Nestor earned her MD from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 2012, followed by an internal medicine residency at Weill Cornell/New York-Presbyterian in 2015, and a nephrology fellowship at Columbia University in 2017. She then completed three years of post-doctoral training in Precision Medicine and Kidney Genomics under Dr. Ali G. Gharavi as the Division of Nephrology’s inaugural T32 recipient. She was later funded by TL1 (2018) and KL2 (2020) awards through Columbia University’s Irving Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. In 2024, she earned a Master of Science in Patient-Oriented Research from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Her awards include the Edward Weinstein Award for Outstanding Scholarship (2012) from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the National Kidney Foundation’s Joseph M. Krainin, MD Memorial Young Investigator Award (2020), and the American Society for Clinical Investigation’s Emerging Generation Award (2023).

In 2024, Dr. Nestor received the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program Award from the American Society of Nephrology/KidneyCure, and the NIH’s K08 Mentored Clinical Scientist Development Award (NIDDK) to develop digital tools for genomic decision-making in precision nephrology.
 

Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Pediatrics (in Psychiatry)
2024 Senior Mentor of the Year

Dani Dumitriu is a pediatrician, neuroscientist, pediatric environmental health scientist, and Associate Professor of Pediatrics in Psychiatry at CUIMC. The mission of Dr. Dumitriu's combined research and clinical programs is to understand the developmental origins of human health, wellbeing, resilience, and social connectedness. Dr. Dumitriu spends most of her time conducting research in her roles as Principal Investigator of the DOOR lab (Developmental Origins of Resilience), Chair of the COMBO Initiative (COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcomes), and Director of the Nurture Science Program. Her research spans, among other topics, the neural circuits of stress resilience in rodents, the effects of prenatal and early postnatal stressors on offspring across species, and longitudinal observational and interventional studies of the contribution of early relational health to various child outcomes.  She also spends 20% of her time as a newborn hospitalist in Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital's Newborn Medicine Section. Since joining Columbia in 2018, her work has primarily focused on spearheading the COMBO Initiative,  which has generated foundational publications on the effects of the pandemic on 'the COVID-19 generation' and been covered widely in Nature, Science, The New York Times, PBS, NBC News, and other major media outlets.

Outside of her research and clinical duties, Dr. Dumitriu is passionate about mentorship and fixing the leaky pipeline for women in academia. She is one of the co-founders and co-chairs of WiSE (Women in Sciences Empowerment), a faculty Initiative in the Department of Psychiatry. In her own research program, Dr. Dumitriu currently hosts ~50 mentees ranging from undergraduate researchers to junior faculty. As she wrote in a recent editorial (Dumitriu & Morrison 2023 J Neurosci), her goal as a mentor is to “inspire” and “challenge” rather than “teach, preach, or lecture”, and to give each mentee’s “scientific curiosity free reigns”.
 

Chunhua Weng, PhD, FACMI, FIAHSI
Professor of Biomedical Informatics
2024 Senior Mentor of the Year

Dr. Chunhua Weng is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and an elected fellow of both the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and the International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI). She also serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Weng is passionate about enabling efficient and generalizable clinical research through informatics. She has been developing novel open-source informatics and data science methods to address stakeholder needs throughout the life cycle of clinical evidence—from evidence generation to retrieval, appraisal, synthesis, and dissemination.

An active researcher in the field of Clinical Research Informatics since 2000, Dr. Weng has published extensively on optimizing clinical trial participant selection, deep phenotyping for genetic disorders, and text knowledge engineering using electronic health record (EHR) narratives, PubMed abstracts, and clinical trial summaries.