Melanie Brazil joined Columbia University as Chief of Staff for the Precision Medicine Initiative in May 2015. She works closely with Initiative Director Professor Tom Maniatis, on all aspects of the Initiative.
Melanie spent 14 years at Nature Publishing Group in a variety of roles as Editor and Publisher: Her first role at Nature was as an Editor for Nature Immunology, in which she was responsible for selecting manuscripts for peer review, making decisions about article suitability based on journal criteria and referee reports. Melanie was also an Editor for the journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, responsible for commissioning scholarly reviews on a variety of subjects. As an Editor, she also authored a variety of materials for specialized and lay audiences and developed a large academic and biopharma network. Melanie’s final role at Nature was Publisher for the Biopharma cluster of journals, which includedNature Medicine,Nature Biotechnology, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery andNature Chemical Biology.She was responsible for management, strategy, content and new business development of Nature-branded journals. Melanie conducted the research and due diligence to prepare the research proposal to launch Nature Biomedical Engineering; the first issue was published in January 2017.
Prior to joining Nature Publishing Group, Melanie completed a post-doctoral position at Weill Cornell Medical School, investigating the role of microglia in processing beta-amyloid in fetal mouse brains. She carried out graduate research at the National Institute for Medical Research in London (now The Francis Crick Institute) in molecular immunology, specifically on antigen presentation in macrophages, and was awarded a Ph.D. by University College, London.
Prior to starting her Ph.D., Melanie was awarded a B.Sc. (Hons.) in Food Science from Leeds University, and completed a Masters in Applied Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (Distinction) from University College, London.
Christine Kim Garcia, MD, PhD, is the Frode Jensen Professor of Medicine, Director of the Columbia Precision Medicine Initiative, and Chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Medicine within the Department of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. Her laboratory studies the genetic basis of monogenic lung disease, with a specific focus on familial pulmonary fibrosis. Her group has identified several rare variants in genes belonging to the telomere, surfactant, and spindle pathways. She received her MD and PhD from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where she completed residency in internal medicine and fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine. In 2019 she moved to Columbia and has been a member of the Center for Precision Medicine and Genomics and an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Medicine. Dr. Garcia has received a number of awards and honors, including the Irene and Arthur Fishberg Prize from VP&S (2022), American Society for Clinical Investigation (2012), Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award (2008), President’s Research Council Distinguished Young Investigator Award from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (2006), Charles E. Culpeper Foundation Medical Scholar Award (2004), Parker B. Francis Fellowship Award in Pulmonary Research (2003) and Alpha Omega Alpha (1991). She
currently co-chairs the NIH Clinical Genetic (ClinGen) Pulmonary Domain Executive Committee.President Bollinger's announcement appointing Dr. Christine K. Garcia can be found here.
Betsy MacLeod is the Assistant Director for the Precision Medicine Initiative. Her professional background is rooted in versatility and includes grant management, fundraising, social media and email marketing, website and graphic design, event planning, and beyond.
Betsy is a graduate of the Nonprofit Management MS program in Columbia University's School of Professional Studies. She is also an avid volunteer and is the Vice Chair of the Surfrider Foundation - Central Long Island chapter, and sits on the Environmental Advisory Board for the City of Long Beach.