Disease Monitoring and Treatment for IBD

Gil Y. Melmed, MD, MS, received his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and his gastroenterology fellowship at UCLA, where he also received a master's of science in clinical research. He is board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in gastroenterology.

Dr. Melmed is director of Clinical Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) and associate professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. His main clinical and research interests are clinical outcomes in IBD (Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis), including health-related quality of life, post-operative outcomes, vaccination and health maintenance issues in patients with IBD, and quality of care for IBD. He has authored or co-authored more than 70 publications and serves as a review editor for Inflammatory Bowel Disease and as the IBD associate editor for the American Journal of Gastroenterology. He is an active member of the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA) and co-chairs the CCFA's national Quality of Care Committee, and he is a past chair of the IBD section of the American Gastroenterology Association's Quality Measures Committee.

Adam S. Cheifetz, MD, is the director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Program at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Cheifetz graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in Rhode Island before earning his MD from Cornell University Medical College in New York. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut and his fellowship in gastroenterology at Yale University before serving as the Present-Levison Fellow in Inflammatory Bowel Disease at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

Dr. Cheifetz specializes in the treatment of Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and other inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). For the last 8 years, he has been cited in Boston Magazine as one of Boston's "Top Doctors." In addition to his clinical work, he is involved in multiple research projects relating to IBD and has published more than 100 articles and chapters on the subject. Dr. Cheifetz's research currently focuses on optimizing the use of biologics through the proactive use of drug concentrations and antibodies. He lectures nationally and internationally on IBD and has been involved with the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA) for more than 10 years on both a regional and national level.

Dr. Cheifetz is actively involved with teaching and mentoring medical students, residents, and fellows, and is proud to have trained numerous physicians who now specialize in IBD. He is director of the Harvard Medical School Gastroenterology Clerkship Elective and assistant director of the Advanced Fellowship in Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. In addition, he serves on numerous editorial boards, including Inflammatory Bowel Diseases, Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology, Journal of Crohn's and Colitis, and World Journal of Gastroenterology.

Meenakshi Bewtra, MD, MPH, PhD, graduated from Yale University and received her medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed training in internal medicine and a fellowship in gastroenterology with specific training and expertise in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). While a resident, Dr. Bewtra also completed a Master of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health with a specific focus on epidemiology and biostatistics. She completed her PhD at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CCEB) at the University of Pennyslvania, with a focus on the use of discrete choice experiments in IBD.
 
Dr. Bewtra is an assistant professor in the Division of Gastroenterology and a senior scholar at the CCEB at the University of Pennsylvania. In her role at the CCEB, Dr. Bewtra serves as the primary research mentor for college students, residents, and fellows within the institution's Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology program. She is a member of the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America, American Gastroenterological Association (AGA), American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, and American College of Gastroenterology, and she has previously served on the executive management board of the AGA Digestive Health Outcomes Registry.
 
Dr. Bewtra has been conducting epidemiological research in the field of IBD for more than a decade and has authored many articles, editorials, reviews, and book chapters in peer-reviewed and other research publications. She has obtained a K08 National Institutes of Health grant, with a specific focus on outcomes research and discrete choice studies in ulcerative colitis and evaluating medical versus surgical therapies in these patients. She is currently conducting several additional discrete choice studies evaluating IBD patients' risk preferences. Dr. Bewtra is the primary investigator of an IBD biorepository at the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with the Institute of Immunology. The university and the institute have several ongoing and completed studies and grants related to this work, linking clinical metadata with immunological and microbiological tissue.