The Sherman Emerging Leader Award: Oriana Damas, MD

Awarded the Sherman Emerging Leader Prize at the Advances in IBD annual meeting, Dr Oriana Damas encouraged others to use passion, dedication, and vision to move the field forward.

Oriana Damas, MD, is an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and director of Translational Studies for the Crohn’s and Colitis Center at the University of Miami.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everyone. I'm Oriana Damas. I'm an IBD physician at the University of Miami, and I am deeply honored to be receiving the Emerging Leader Award for the Sherman Price. It is the deepest honor of my life. I am so incredibly grateful that I was elected to be this year's Emerging Leader Award recipient at the Advances in IBD meeting. My patients have been my greatest inspiration. Learning from my patients has really inspired the work that I do. I continue to fuel that passion through my patients and understanding what are their needs. And I try to translate that as much as possible into practical and pragmatic ways of doing research that can deliver within a few years to improving the lives of inflammatory bowel disease patients. Some of the work that I've done includes understanding what are factors that contribute to the development of inflammatory bowel disease in patients that are emerging, including patients that are of Hispanic background who have developed inflammatory bowel disease.

I myself am Hispanic, I am Colombian, and I noticed that there were many patients in my community who were getting impacted by inflammatory bowel disease. So I decided to look further and understand what were both genetic and environmental factors that contributed to the development of IBD. In addition, I've also started to examine, fueled by that initial passion of understanding these factors, what were dietary recommendations and how to approach diet in a way that was evidence-based. And in that space, I've developed a couple of clinical trials that are aiming to really understand how can we use diet in a precise way to improve outcomes for patients, including for both Crohn's disease and patients with ulcerative colitis. And to those junior faculty and all those budding researchers and IBD physicians who are passionate about their career and want to make a difference, you can be here too.

It just takes dedication, a vision, and a lot of passion, always thinking about the patient care in mind. And you can be here too. I want to make that clear because I was in your space just a couple of years ago. And this is one of the ways in which I feel the responsibility as from mentee to mentor to carry this vision forward of research of physician scientists and of patient care excellence.

So again, I'm deeply honored to be receiving this award. I never thought it would be me. And I want to thank the Sherman family for having the vision to create this award and for carrying it forward in this space. It really is like an Oscar for inflammatory bowel disease. And I have, throughout my GI career for the last 10 years, seeing incredible people receive this award, and I am just so deeply honored to be one of them today.