2026 Research Achievement Awardees
Early Career Research Achievement Awards
Hospital-Based Research Faculty
Justin Berk
Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine
Dr. Justin Berk’s research advances evidence-based healthcare for justice-involved populations by integrating addiction medicine, implementation science, and correctional care. He developed a novel partially randomized preference trial for carceral settings, published on hepatitis C treatments in jails, and coined the concept "prison implementation penalty." He has published over 75 peer-reviewed works in top journals like "JAMA" and "The New England Journal of Medicine," and he leverages his research to evaluate medical education as a host of the popular podcasts "The Curbsiders" and "The Cribsiders." In recognition of his impactful scholarship, Berk received the ASCI Early Career Research Award, the Lifespan Selya Award, the NIDA Young Investigator Award, and the Jeremiah Barondess Fellowship in Clinical Translation. He was also inducted into the Society for Pediatric Research and appointed to the NIH Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network.
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Jillian E. Beveridge
Associate Professor of Orthopaedics
Jillian Beveridge’s research focuses on knee joint injuries, specifically anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) tear, and the structural, functional, and neuromuscular changes that lead to early-onset posttraumatic osteoarthritis. She uses a variety of advanced quantitative and biomechanical imaging techniques coupled with electromyography to detect protective joint movement signatures across preclinical animal models and human clinical trials. She currently directs a multi-center, R01-funded study evaluating patient outcomes after ACL surgery in collaboration with the Multicenter Orthopaedics Outcomes Network knee group. In recognition of her innovative translational scholarship, Beveridge received the Journal of Orthopaedic Research Early Career Award, and her work was featured as a cover article in the journal Bioengineering. Furthermore, she serves on national NIH study sections, holds high-impact editorial board memberships, and was promoted to Associate Professor of Orthopaedics in 2025.
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Humanities and Social Sciences
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha
Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor of Early Modern Portuguese History
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha’s pioneering research reinterprets the rise of imperial power in the early modern Atlantic and Lusophone worlds by centering environmental history, marginalized people, and everyday struggles. His forthcoming book, The Atlantic Acceleration: Empires and Uprisings from the Oceanic Commons, draws from original archival research and interdisciplinary methods to examine how enslaved people, maroons, and commoners participated in shared ecologies and shaped the emergent Atlantic links between Africa, the Caribbean, Brazil, and Iberia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Additionally, Rocha has co-edited issues for renowned international journals like Itinerario and Revista Tempo. Recognizing his innovative scholarship, he won the Lester J. Cappon Award from the Omohundro Institute for his 2025 essay in The William & Mary Quarterly. Rocha also received a prestigious Mellon New Directions Fellowship to fund his next project on shipwrecks in the South Atlantic.
View Gabriel de Avilez Rocha's Research Profile
Life Sciences and Public Health
George Lisi
Associate Professor
George Lisi’s research utilizes nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to resolve the atomic-level structures and dynamics of enzymes critical to human health and disease. His laboratory pioneered NMR studies on the large CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing machine, revealing the impact of single atoms on its domain flexibility, nucleic acid recognition, DNA editing, and off-target cleavage behaviors. His NMR studies of the inflammatory cytokine macrophage migration inhibitory factor visualized its fleeting pathological structure, facilitating the design of therapies for hereditary childhood diseases. These and other foundational biophysical insights have appeared in more than 60 publications in journals including Nature Communications, Science Advances, Nature Catalysis, PNAS, and Nucleic Acids Research. His work has been funded by major grants from the NIH, as well as an NSF CAREER Award, and CRISPR Innovator Award.
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David Meyers
Associate Professor of Health Services, Policy and Practice
David Meyers’s research focuses on payment and delivery reform within the U.S. health care system, with a specific emphasis on the Medicare aDvantage program. His work has exposed how private insurers exploit payment rules to extract billions in additional federal spending which has directly informed federal legislation like "The No UPCODE Act" and "GUARD Veteran’s Health Act." Additionally, his studies on Medicare’s star-rating system influenced the development of a health equity index, while his groundbreaking NIH-funded research established the largest national cohort of transgender Medicare beneficiaries to analyze care disparities. In recognition of his prominent leadership in health policy, Meyers received the AJMC Seema Sonnad Emerging Leader in Managed Care Research Award. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact journals, including JAMA and Health Affairs, and frequently briefs congressional committees as an expert on managed care policy.
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Physical Sciences
Brendan Keith
Morton E. Gurtin Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics
Brendan Keith’s research advances scientific computing by combining optimization theory with numerical methods for partial differential equations to solve complex engineering problems. A leading example is his pioneering work on the proximal Galerkin finite element method for enforcing inequality constraints, which has recently helped resolve longstanding open problems in computational mechanics. His research has been published in leading journals, including Foundations of Computational Mathematics. In recognition of his contributions, Keith was named the inaugural Morton E. Gurtin Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. His honors include a 2023 DOE Early Career Research Award, a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship, a 2025 Langtangen Prize, and selection to Popular Science magazine’s “Brilliant 10” list. He also serves as director of the $5 million DOE-funded Center for Information Geometric Mechanics and Optimization.
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Monica Martinez Wilhelmus
Thomas J. and Alice M. Tisch Assistant Professor of Engineering
Monica Martinez Wilhelmus studies transport phenomena at the intersection of fluid mechanics, oceanography, and biology — how mass, momentum, and energy move through environmental systems, and how organisms both shape and are shaped by the flows around them. In the Arctic, her lab develops algorithms that track individual ice floes across satellite imagery, treating the ice as a tracer for the ocean eddies beneath it and recovering the small-scale dynamics that current climate models cannot resolve. In the water column, she analyzes how swimming organisms interact with the fluid around them and translates those mechanisms into engineered systems, including Pleobot, a krill-inspired underwater robot developed by her group. Most recently, she has taken up breastfeeding as a physics problem, using reduced physical models to ask what drives milk flow, what impedes it, and what could make the practice more sustainable for women — a question of obvious consequence that has rarely been posed in mechanical terms. Her work has been supported by an ONR Young Investigator award and by NASA, and she was selected for the National Academy of Engineering's 2025 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.
Mid-Career Research Achievement Awards
Hospital-Based Research Faculty
Anne CC Lee
Levinger Family Professor of Pediatrics
Dr. Anne CC Lee’s research focuses on reducing global mortality and improving health outcomes for mothers, newborns, and children through enhanced perinatal care. As the founding director of the Brown Global Alliance for Infant and Maternal Health Research, she implements complex, population-based international studies. Lee has published over 150 peer-reviewed papers in high-impact journals, including the Lancet, BMJ and JAMA Pediatrics. Her scientific expertise has been sought by international bodies, leading technical groups for the World Health Organization and serving on the National Academies of Sciences committee that produced the report "Developing a Framework for Research for Pregnant and Lactating Persons." In recognition of her prominent leadership, Lee was inducted into the prestigious American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2024. She also maintains extensive research funding from the NIH, the Gates Foundation, and Wellcome Leap.
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Humanities and Social Sciences
Stephen E. Kidd
Associate Professor of Classics
Stephen Kidd’s research integrates cultural history with philosophical analysis to address vital questions in ancient Greek literature, aesthetics, literary theory, and the philosophy of art. His foundational book, "Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy," redefined cultural debates about meaning, by asking why audiences so often find comedy to be “nonsense”. His "Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece" transformed scholarly understanding regarding the pleasures of art by showing the differences between ancient and modern understandings of play. And his recent monograph, "Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference," showed, through close readings of the second-century CE author Lucian of Samosata, how reading changes readers in unexpected ways. Additionally, he has published nearly two dozen peer-reviewed articles in prestigious venues. In recognition of his impactful scholarship, Kidd has been promoted to full professor.
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Life Sciences and Public Health
Jane Metrik
Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
Dr. Jane Metrik is a pioneering expert in translational behavioral pharmacology, renowned for advancing the global understanding of cannabis's impacts on alcohol use, psychiatric comorbidities, and driving impairment. Twenty years ago, she established Brown University’s first human cannabis administration laboratory. Her groundbreaking portfolio includes conducting the first balanced-placebo cannabis study to isolate pharmacological effects from expectancies, developing cannabis cue reactivity paradigms, and providing the first experimental evidence that cannabis acutely reduces alcohol consumption. Additionally, her research clarifies complex links between cannabis use disorder, PTSD, and mood disorders to inform effective clinical interventions. As a prominent global leader, she has secured nine federal awards, including six NIH R01s and VA grant awards, contributing to a total of 24 federally-sponsored projects. She serves as President of the Research Society on Marijuana, successfully translating rigorous science into international evidence-based guidelines and clinical standards.
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Physical Sciences
Javier Gómez-Serrano
Professor of Mathematics
Javier Gómez-Serrano is a renowned mathematician pioneering the integration of artificial intelligence into mathematical research. His work operates at the intersection of fluid mechanics and computer-assisted proofs, notably utilizing Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to discover unstable singularities in complex fluid equations. In a separate breakthrough, he collaborated with Google DeepMind on AlphaEvolve, an AI model that automates mathematical and algorithmic discovery. Beyond AI and fluids, his research spans spectral geometry, exploring the ancient questions of studying the resonances of polygonal drums.Internationally recognized, Gómez-Serrano has received an ERC grant, the R.E. Moore Prize, and the 2025 Mathematical Congress of the Americas (MCA) Prize. His innovations are frequently featured in prominent publications, including Quanta Magazine and El País.