St. Albert’s Day is annual celebration of research at Twitter 注册时间为2009-2020年 包首登, reinforcing the mission to advance knowledge, cultivate discovery, and foster a vibrant scientific community dedicated to improving human health and understanding. It provides an opportunity for students to showcase research posters, emerging scholars to present their findings, and established researchers to offer insight.

One tradition of St. Albert’s Day is to recognize one junior scientist and one senior scientist with awards for their scientific contributions that help gain greater understanding human body functions, disease progression and prevention, and how to translate bench to bedside discoveries more broadly to communities. This year’s Junior and Senior Scientist of the Year Award winners exemplify Stritch’s commitment to translating fundamental science discoveries into treatments to improve human health and patient outcomes.

In the Q&A below, they share information on the focus and impact of their research, as well as what trainees in their lab can expect to learn.

Congratulations to this year’s award winners!

Junior Scientist of the Year

David Barefield, PhD
Assistant Professor, Cell and Molecular Physiology

What is the focus of your research?
My lab studies the sarcomere, the complex protein machine responsible for our heart and muscle contraction. We focus on how inherited mutations in genes that help build the sarcomere impair contraction or relaxation of the heart and cause diseases like cardiomyopathy and atrial fibrillation. Basically, we figure out how specific parts of this machine work together, and how to alter its function to combat heart disease. At Loyola, my work has focused on looking at these mechanisms specifically in the atria of the heart, which are the two smaller top chambers of the heart and their sarcomere function in disease is virtually unstudied. 

What impact has this research made?
We are in a very exciting time in medicine for treating cardiomyopathy. Several groundbreaking drugs have been recently developed that directly target the contractile function of the sarcomere, which is the root cause of some major forms of cardiomyopathy. These drugs were developed to treat the larger chambers of the heart, the ventricles, but the sarcomeres in the atria are considerably different. When I started my lab at Loyola in 2020, very few people in this field thought that this could be an issue, or that there might be ways to treat the atria or the ventricle specifically depending on the cause of disease. I’ve seen a shift in this perspective, in which I think I played a part.

What can trainees in your lab expect to learn?
Physiology takes a broad approach, and my trainees use everything from mouse models of disease and cell culture models using induced pluripotent stem cells lines that we program into cardiomyocytes to biophysical measurements of individual cardiomyocytes or classical biochemistry approaches. Trainees learn how to ask the right questions to drive their projects forward and employ the right techniques to ask these questions. Importantly, my trainees also learn how to take their scientific data, the currency of academic research, and leverage it so they can get talks at conferences, expand their professional networks, and advance their careers.

Is there one more thing you would like to share?
Academic research careers are built on mentorship, and I credit the many fantastic official and unofficial mentors I've had over my career. I did my PhD training at Loyola, and one of the reasons I came to Loyola as a professor was to mentor the next generation of graduate student researchers in this excellent environment. 

Senior Scientist of the Year

Harel Dahari, PhD
Professor, Hepatology

What is the focus of your research?
My lab’s research is conducted at the intersection of experimental, clinical, and theoretical biology with an emphasis on viral infection dynamics and treatment response with a particular focus on hepatitis viruses such as hepatitis C, B, D, and E.

One core area of focus is hepatitis C data-driven theoretical research efforts I have been working on since the late 1990s when I co-authored a seminal modeling study on hepatitis C dynamics during treatment that was published in Science. Since then, I have worked to develop the field of viral dynamics by modeling acute and chronic hepatitis C infection in cell culture, animals, and individuals, as well as population and patient clinical data, with the aim to find and optimize interventions and therapeutics that may ultimately prevent and/or cure hepatitis C. This research has helped to reveal the mode of action of several anti-HCV drugs and their efficacies.

What impact has this research made?
Through partnerships, my lab is making a direct impact on patients, moving from theory to the heart of patient care. We were the first to use real-time mathematical modeling of hepatitis C viral kinetics to tailor the duration of anti-HCV therapy in patients, which was a significant departure from the existing one-size-fits-all approach, allowing the patient to participate in shared decision-making for length of treatment. In collaboration with clinicians in Toronto, Canada, an anti-HCV treatment approach was developed to inhibit hepatitis C infection post transplantation, a strategy to use of hepatitis C-infected organs for transplantation and thus could have a major effect on organ availability across North America and other regions. With such highly potent anti-Hepatitis C agents available, we have entered an era of refining research to achieve cost-reduction and ease of treatment.

Finally, together with public health researchers in Chicago and partnerships, Dahari’s lab developed an agent-based modeling approach for people who inject drugs (PWID) in the Chicago metro area called the HepCEP model (Hepatitis C Elimination in PWID). HepCEP highlights the importance of several public health strategies to achieve and maintain hepatitis C elimination goals set by the World Health Organization and for the design of hepatitis C vaccine trials among PWID.

What can trainees in your lab expect to learn?
Students, postdocs, researchers, fellows or residents can expect exposure to experimental and clinical data and theoretical modeling to provide new insights into the dynamics of viral-host-drug interactions during infection and treatment from the molecular to the population level.

Is there one more thing you would like to share?
I believe solving complex problems requires global, multidisciplinary collaborations and that an international community of students, faculty, trainees, and staff promotes innovative research, increases quality of patient care, and provides the richest set of viewpoints for solving these problems.

January 2026