Elizabeth A. Spencer, MD obtained her degree in Neuroscience from the College of William and Mary and graduated Alpha Omega Alpha from Eastern Virginia Medical School before her pediatric residency at UCLA and fellowships at Mount Sinai, Icahn School of Medicine in Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition, Immunotherapy, and Advanced Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Her primary research follows multiplex families, families with 3 or more first degree relatives with IBD, to try to ascertain the relative contribution of genetics, microbiome, and the metabolome to the development of IBD. In the multiplex IBD families cohort here at Sinai, she first identified that when multiple siblings are affected within a family they tend to cluster together more often than expected, spurring her to try to identify an environmental trigger behind this clustering. As part of her K grant through ConduITS, she will be exploring the microbiome and metabolome as potential sources of that observed clustering effect. Ultimately, she hopes to identify factors that could be used as a monitoring or preventative strategy for those with an increased risk of IBD.
Dr. Spencer is a new KL2 scholar in the CTSA program* her co-mentors are by Marla Dubinsky, MD the Chief of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition, Co-Director, Susan and Leonard Feinstein IBD Clinical Center and Judy Cho, MD, Director of the Charles Bronfman Personalized Medicine Institute, Ruth Ward-Coleman Professor in Translational Genetics, Medicine, and Gastroenterology, Vice-Chair, Genetics and Gastroenterology at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai NY.
*During the no cost extension year of the CTSA, ISMMS is providing funding for the KL2 scholars.
