Hannah Valantine, MBBS

Director, TRAIN

Hannah Valantine received her M.B.B.S. degree from London University, cardiology fellowship at Stanford, and Doctor of Medicine from London University. She was appointed Assistant Professor of Medicine, rising to full Professor of Medicine in 2000, and becoming the inaugural Senior Associate Dean for Diversity and Leadership, in 2004.

She pursued a data-driven transformative approach to this work, receiving the NIH director’s pathfinder award. Dr. Francis Collins, NIH director, recruited her in 2014 as the inaugural NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce diversity, and as a tenured investigator in the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s intramural research program where she established the laboratory of transplantation genomics. She is using the technology that she co-invented with Steve Quake, professor bioengineering at Stanford — donor-derived cell-free DNA in blood — to monitor organ transplant rejection in the GRAfT cohort, and to understand the mechanisms that explain how and why African Americans/Blacks reject their organ transplants at higher rates than White recipients.

Dr. Valantine has made several important inroads into improving diversity and equity among the extramural research community. For example, she has guided the National Research Mentoring Network program on coaching and mentoring for grant writing toward successful applications and awards supporting scientists from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Since her arrival at NIH, there has been a significant increase in the number of R01 applications and awards that identify African American/Black and Hispanic scientists as the Program Director/Principal Investigator (PD/PI). And for early career scientists, she has focused on career development awards (K-series), the penultimate stage before R01 grants, increasing the number of applications and awards on which African American/Black and Hispanic scientists are identified as PD/PIs, essentially eliminating the racial gap in success rates for K-awards.

Dr. Valantine is a nationally recognized pioneer in her field, with over 200 peer-reviewed publications, patents, and sustained NIH funding. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2020 for both her pioneering research in organ transplantation and workforce diversity.

Priscilla Pemu, MD, MS

Director, TRAIN

Priscilla Pemu is a Medical Doctor specializing in the care of adults with complex medical problems under treatment in clinic and hospital settings.  She also trains medical students and new medical doctors specializing in Internal Medicine. As a physician-scientist, she leads research funded with grants from the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Association, informed by her daily experiences with patients. She’s continuously inspired to investigate the best ways to improve the long-term health of patients living with chronic illnesses (e.g. cancer, diabetes, etc.).

Dr. Pemu is currently a Professor of Clinical Medicine, Medical Director of the Clinical Research Center and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Medicine at Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) in Atlanta, GA.

As part of a team at MSM, she developed a system and method for providing care to patients with chronic illnesses that empowers patients to change their behaviors relevant to their health; this is achieved by efforts to improve patient’s knowledge, provide support for their goal setting and accountability so they may sustain their lifestyle changes.

Dr. Pemu continues to explore and implement key patient-centered concepts that are relevant to improving health outcomes and transforming health care. She’s passionate about speaking to audiences such as health care managers and funders, affected patient groups, health coaches and other scientists who are interested in achieving that goal as well.

Muhammed Y. Idris, PhD

Co-Director, TRAIN

Dr. Muhammed Y. Idris, PhD is a Fellow at Capria, a leading global impact investment firm, and the cofounder and lead developer of Edel Technologies, an organization that build AI-powered tools and products for frontline humanitarian organizations and service providers, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

Inspired by own personal experiences with refugee resettlement, Idris left academia to build the world's first virtual advocate bot, Atar, that empowers refugees and other newcomers with information about what to do, where to go and what to expect using customized step-by-step guides.

Trained as a computational social scientist, Idris started his career in finance at BlackRock and went on to complete a PhD with a focus on research and development of open-source tools for leveraging socially-generating "big data" and make it easy to digest this complex technical information into actionable insights.

Idris's work has been presented at numerous academic, policy and industry conferences, and he has held teaching and research positions at the University of Washington, The Pennsylvania State University, Concordia University in Montreal as well as Harvard University, where he held a predoctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affair while completing his dissertation.

As a self-taught programmer, Idris enjoys teaching statistics and programming in his spare time. While his current focus in on helping streamline and scale refugee resettlement, his mission is to help improve social services delivery for all through collective and artificial intelligence as an entrepreneur and investor.

Fatima Rodriguez, MD, MPH

Co-Director, TRAIN

Dr. Fatima Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University and a noninvasive and preventive cardiologist. Dr. Rodriguez earned her medical degree from Harvard Medical School and her MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health as Zuckerman Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership. She then completed internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Rodriguez arrived at Stanford University in 2014, where she completed a cardiovascular medicine fellowship and served as Chief Fellow. She currently serves as the inaugural Section Chief of Preventive Cardiology in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine.

Dr. Rodriguez’s research interests include a range of issues relating to racial and ethnic disparities in guideline adherence, cardiovascular disease prevention, Hispanic cardiovascular health, advancing scientific workforce diversity, and leveraging technology to improve the care of diverse patients. She has authored over 140 peer-reviewed publications on these topics and recently received the American College of Cardiology’s Douglas P. Zipes Distinguished Young Scientist Award. She has also been a two-time winner of Stanford University’s Alderman Award for Excellence in Clinical Research and the Department of Medicine Chair Diversity Investigator Award. Her work is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and the American Heart Association. Dr. Rodriguez is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association and she is the Co-Chair of the National Minority Cardiovascular Alliance. She serves as an Associate Editor for the New England Journal of Medicine Journal Watch Cardiology and is a member of the American Heart Association’s Science Advisory and Coordinating Committee (SACC).