2022 Award Winners

Junior Award: Sara Auld, MD, MS

Sara Auld, MD, MSc joined Emory as a Fellow in 2013 and became an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine in 2017 with a joint appointment at Rollins School of Public Health in the Department of Epidemiology. As a clinician-scientist, her research interests have been on clinical epidemiology and transmission of tuberculosis (TB) and drug-resistant TB, as well as TB and HIV confection. 

In the spring of 2020, Dr. Auld focused her attention on the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). One paper published in Critical Care Medicine determined mortality rates among critically ill adults with COVID-19 from March 6, 2020, to April 17, 2020 across six COVID-designated ICUs at three Emory Healthcare acute-care hospitals in Atlanta, Georgia. The article has garnered numerous citations and informed clinical care in the ICU. Remarkably, Dr. Auld has published 15 papers on COVID while also maintaining an active and prolific research program on HIV and TB. Dr. Sara Auld is an exemplary researcher who stepped up when the world shut down to not only help patients directly but also through her research and important publications. She was able to quickly collect, analyze, and share data on the outstanding care provided in Emory’s ICUs.

Senior Award: Dean P. Jones, PhD

Dean P. Jones, PhD, joined the Emory faculty in 1985 and is currently a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine, with joint and secondary appointments in the Departments of Biochemistry, Ophthalmology, Pediatrics, and the Winship Cancer Institute. He is currently Director of the Emory Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory, Director of the Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core in the HERCULES Exposome Research Center, and Co-Director of the Center for Clinical and Molecular Nutrition. Dr. Jones has developed methods for quantitative detection of endogeneous metabolites, microbiome and environmental pollutants in humans.

Dr. Jones has conducted impactful and prolific research throughout his career at Emory. His recent work describes the development and use of a high-resolution metabolomics platform that provides unsurpassed coverage of endogenous metabolites, microbiome, and environmental pollutants. His group’s analytic methods have been used in numerous studies published in high-impact journals and have provided a long-lasting contribution to analytical sciences. Through development and application of new computational tools and integrative omics, Dr. Jones has shown for the first time that high-resolution metabolomics data can directly link exposures to disease phenotype. Through collaborations with clinical investigators and epidemiologists studying a broad spectrum of human diseases, including lung, cardiovascular, hepatic, renal, intestinal, endocrine, neurologic, eye, infectious disease, and cancer, as well as preterm and early development and aging, his group has extended applications of their analytic methods to address complex gene-environment interactions that underlie most human disease. Overall, Dr. Jones's work has enabled a new vision for environmental health and medicine and provided a foundation for research at the interplay of environmental exposure and biological effect.