2023 Awardees of the Inaugural Career Life Balance Award

Lauren Surface, PhD
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan School of Dentistry

Bio
Dr. Lauren Surface is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Dentistry. She received her Ph.D. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying the role of chromatin in embryonic stem cell lineage commitment. Her postdoctoral research was done at Harvard University under Dr. Erin O'Shea and Massachusetts General Hospital under Dr. Michael Mannstadt, where her work utilized genome-wide association to understand the response of osteogenic cells to drugs and mineral ions. She is the recipient of the NIH/NIAMS K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Grant and is a UM Biological Sciences Scholar.

Statement
This award came a critical time in my personal and professional life, when a little over a year into starting my independent lab, I gave birth to my daughter. As childbirth and caring for a newborn can be disruptive (though joyous!) life events, I feel so grateful that the award from ASBMR allowed me to hire a technician to work on a project that was picking up steam in the lab. Over this past year, this technician has conducted critical experiments, and we intend to submit this project for publication soon. Without the extra funds from ASBMR, these advances would have been substantially slowed due to my parental leave. Thank you to ASBMR for supporting women during this critical career stage!

Jialiang (Shirley) Wang, PhD
Instructor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Massachusetts General Hospital, Endocrine Unit

Bio
I am an Instructor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. I have been an ASBMR member since 2018. I'm taking an interdisciplinary approach that spans genetics, genomics, multi-omics, in vivo and in vitro models, to characterize how aberrant genetic factors can cause abnormal osteocyte maturation and lead to skeletal disease. 

Statement
I am a recipient of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00). During my maternity leave, I was able to hire a research technician with the ASBMR Career-Life Balance Award. This supports me to continually make great progress for the K99 and to take care of the newborn.

Shawon Debnath, PhD
Research Associate, Weill Cornell Medicine
New York

Bio
As a Research Associate in the lab of Professor Matthew Greenblatt, my research into the functional significance of the periosteum identified a novel osteoblast periosteal specific stem cell which is essential for fracture healing (Nature 2018). More recently this work provided insight into potential treatment approaches for craniosyntosis, identifying a calvarial specific skeletal stem cell (Nature 2023). I have attained funding from NIDCR K99/R00 for this work.
My long-term career goal is to become an independent investigator at the intersection of stem cell research and developmental biology that has been shaped by interactions with many inspiring role models in various fields, and by the challenges and enormous satisfaction I find in performing and communicating science.

Statement
I am so thankful to receive the Career-Life Balance Initiative award from ASBMR. This award came at a very critical point in my career where I faced challenges to raise my family as a single parent. This award was a true blessing for early career investigators like me, who wants to have a fulfilling experience of motherhood and to pursue an ambitious scientific career.

Elizabeth Curtis, MBBS, PhD
Associate Professor in Rheumatology and Honorary Consultant Rheumatologist at the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Centre, University of Southampton, and Southampton University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, UK.

Bio
Beth undertook her undergraduate medical training at the University of Oxford, graduating in 2010. Whilst there, she gained a first class BA in Medical Sciences and developed interests in both rheumatology and human development.
She joined the clinical academic training programme in Southampton. Working on her interest in early-life determinants of osteoporosis, she was awarded a prestigious Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Training Fellowship and completed her PhD in 2019, supervised by Professors Cyrus Cooper and Nick Harvey and epigenetics specialists Professor Karen Lillycrop and Dr Christopher Bell. Her doctoral research was based on the early life determinants of bone health, working on the Southampton Women’s Survey and the MAVIDOS randomised controlled trial of vitamin D supplementation in pregnancy. She has also contributed to projects on drug safety in various rheumatological conditions, working with the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF), the European Society for Clinical and Economic Aspects of Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases (ESCEO), and with the British Society for Rheumatology, in addition to projects on fractures, bone health, ageing and frailty using data from Clinical Practice Research Datalink and UK Biobank. She is a Clinical Ordinary Member of the UK Bone Research Society committee, is part of the European Calcified Tissue Society (ECTS) webinar committee and is a member of the IOF Committee of Scientific Advisors.

Statement
It already enabled me to put together abstracts for conferences including ASBMR and World Congress on osteoporosis to present our data on the risks of fracture in diabetes using BioBank data. This is really helping me to establish my reputation and keep my publications up, and provides groundwork for future publications.

Xiaowei Sherry Liu, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Orthopaedic Surgery
University of Pennsylvania

Bio
Associate Professor Lin  Received her Ph.D. degree in bone biomechanics and imaging in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. Her postdoctoral training continued in the Division of Endocrinology at the Columbia University Medical Center where shed translated advanced image analysis and mechanical modeling techniques into clinical studies of osteoporosis prevention and treatment using high-resolution clinical imaging modalities.  Joining the department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania as a faculty member in 2012, she was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2018. Her research program focuses on biological processes in bone and how they influence bone material, microstructural, and biomechanical properties in aging, disease, and therapies, leading to more than 90 peer-reviewed, full-length journal articles. Recently her work focuses on defining maternal bone adaptation mechanisms that exert protective effects during challenging physiological events such as lactation and menopause. Our work is well received, winning an AAOS Kappa Delta Young Investigator Award, an ORS New Investigator Recognition Award, and two ASBMR Young Investigators Awards.

Statement
This award is critically important during a challenging time of my career and personal life. It allows us to conduct an essential pilot experiment for revision of my first R01 renewal. And I also want to mention that this R01 project specifically addresses women's skeletal health during breastfeeding and its long-term impact post menopause. I am grateful that with the support from ASBMR and my home institution I had a fruitful year filled with excitement and joy from both my work and personal life.