Guest Speakers

Dr. Delisa G. Brown

An Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). She earned her Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Howard University in 2018, followed by a clinical psychology internship and an NIAAA-funded postdoctoral fellowship at MUSC from 2017 to 2020. Dr. Brown joined the MUSC faculty in 2021.

Her research focuses on understanding, preventing, and addressing racial disparities in mental health and substance use among African American adults. She investigates racial differences in treatment outcomes and examines the effects of racial trauma and its impact on substance use, aiming to develop culturally tailored evidence-based treatments.

Dr. Brown is currently funded by an NIAAA Career Development Award (K23) to study how race-related stressors, such as racial discrimination and racial trauma, affect alcohol use disorder. Additionally, she holds a VA Diversity Supplement to examine the efficacy of evidence-based treatments in facilitating the initiation of psychosocial pain treatment among African American veterans using opioid analgesics for chronic pain management.

She also collaborates with interdisciplinary teams on projects including:

• Examining schools as sources of racial/ethnic disparities in youth mental health and behavior outcomes, as well as contexts for interventions to reduce these disparities.
• Investigating psychotherapeutic interventions and pharmacological treatments for comorbid alcohol use disorder and PTSD.

Dr. Brown's work is instrumental in advancing understanding of the intersections between race, mental health, and substance use, contributing to the development of more effective and culturally sensitive interventions

Dr. Eleanor Valenzi

An Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her undergraduate education at the University of Pennsylvania followed by medical school at the UAB School of Medicine. She completed residency in internal medicine at the University of Chicago, followed by pulmonary /critical care fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh. She currently serves as the Associate Director for the Simmons Center for Interstitial Lung Disease and is also a member of the Scleroderma Center, with a dual appointment in the Division of Rheumatology. Her translational research program focuses on transcription factor regulation in systemic sclerosis and other chronic fibrotic lung diseases.

Emery N. Brown, M.D., Ph.D

The Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT; the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School; and an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Professor Brown was born and grew up in Ocala, Florida. He graduated high school from the Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H.  He received his B.A. in Applied Mathematics (magna cum laude) from Harvard College, his M.A. and Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University and his M.D. (magna cum laude) from Harvard Medical School. Professor Brown completed his internship in internal medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and his anesthesiology residency at MGH.  

Professor Brown is an anesthesiologist-statistician whose research is defining the neurophysiological mechanisms of how anesthetics produce the states of general anesthesia. He also develops statistical methods for neuroscience data analysis.  Professor Brown is a fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and the American Philosophical Society.

Professor Brown has received an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Applied Mathematics, the American Society of Anesthesiologists Excellence in Research Award,  the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, the Pierre Galletti Prize, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, and  Doctors of Science Honoris Causa from the USC and SUNY Downstate.

Titus A. Reaves, PhD

An Associate Professor in the Department of Regenerative Medicine and Cell Biology at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). He also has a joint appointment in the Department of Medicine and Clinical Medicine. He holds a Ph.D. in Anatomy from the University of South Carolina School Of Medicine; his thesis was the understanding the biology of the Basement Membrane and development of the heart. He completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship Emory University in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine where he investigated Neutrophil Migration in Intestinal Inflammation. At MUSC, Dr. Reaves is an instructor the Anatomical Basis of Medicine (Human Anatomy) to first and second year medical students; He has served as an instructor in the GI physiology course. He has been an instructor of “research ethics” to first year MD, Ph.D. students. Dr. Reaves is the organizer of the Ernest Everett Just Scientific Symposium that supports First generation, rural, economically disadvantaged students in graduate Medical Education. In this capacity, nearly 400 undergraduate students from the States’ of SC, NC, GA, Fla, and MD attend a one-day conference on the campus of MUSC on the impact of Dr. Ernest Everett Just, Ph.D., scientist from Charleston, SC. Dr. Reaves received the Basic Science Award in recognition of an exemplary research presentation at the Macro Cabrera Poster Session of the NMRI 7th Annual Workshop NIDDK at the National Institutes of Health. He was nominated for an Educator-mentor award for mentoring students at his current position at MUSC. His research aims are to understand the role that intestinal fibroblast play in inflammation in the large intestine and has shown that intestinal fibroblasts can function as non-professional immune cells. Dr. Reaves is also the CEO of the Ernest Everett Just Foundation-Charleston Chapter; that provides scholarships for middle and high school students. In particular, these scholarships foster this interest in science as a career.

Tyreek Jenkins

A fourth-year PhD candidate in the Biomedical Sciences Program at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). He graduated Cum Laude and with honors in 2021 from the University of South Carolina with a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering and a Minor in Chemistry. Throughout his undergraduate training Tyreek participated in various research experiences ranging in topics including drug addiction, cancer therapeutics, and hearing loss.

Currently, Tyreek’s dissertation research focuses on understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms contributing to cochlear inflammation in metabolic age-related hearing loss under the guidance of his mentor Dr. Hainan Lang (Professor, Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at MUSC) and co-mentor Dr. John J. Lemasters (Professor and GlaxoSmithKline Distinguished Endowed Chair, Drug Discovery & Biomedical Sciences and Biochemistry & Molecular Biology at MUSC).

In addition, Tyreek has received numerous awards throughout his predoctoral training including the NIH/NIDCD institutional training grant for Interdisciplinary Research in Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences and the NIH/NIDCD Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (F31 predoctoral fellowship). Notably, he is the first student from MUSC to be awarded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Gilliam Fellowship.