Junior Faculty Scholars

Dr. Neethi Pinto received her Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy from Stanford University. She completed the Jane Addams fellowship in Philanthropy and directed an enrichment program for at risk youth before returning to Stanford for medical school. In 2001, she came to The University of Chicago where she completed a pediatric residency, chief residency, critical care fellowship and a Masters of Science in Health Studies and then joined the faculty. Dr. Pinto cares for patients in the pediatric ICU and on the Pediatric Sedation Service. She serves as a resident faculty advisor and directs a monthly journal club. She has established an evidence based medicine curriculum for pediatrics. She leads a cohort of undergraduate students in the Bucksbaum Institute Clinical Excellence Scholars track. Dr. Pinto’s research interests focus on the long-term outcomes of children who survive critical illness.

Dr. Pinto was appointed as a Senior Faculty Scholar in 2018.

In 2019, Dr. Pinto joined the faculty at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.

Dr. Lyon’s academic interests encompass global health, human rights scholarship and advocacy, social medicine, prisoner health, and medical education. He has collaborated with Partners In Health [www.pih.org] in Haiti and at other sites for more than 18 years. He has been extensively involved in physician, nurse, and community health worker training for more than a decade. He is on the board of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago and teaches health and human rights at the College Dr. Lyon is the lead faculty on a University of Chicago Delhi Center funded project to advance “Rights-based Approaches to Tuberculosis” in collaboration with the Law School. Dr. Lyon is the lead faculty for the Global Hospital Medicine Fellowship at the University of Chicago, with fellows now working between Chicago and Haiti, Rwanda, and China.

Closer to home, Dr. Lyon is a primary care and hospital medicine physician in the University of Chicago Comprehensive Care Program. Continuing “global health at home,” Dr. Lyon delivers home-based primary care on the South Side of Chicago providing continuity between house calls and the hospital. Third year Pritzker students are now accompanying Dr. Lyon to learn from house calls during their core Family Medicine Clerkship.

In 2020, Dr. Lyon joined Partners in Health.

In 2016, Dr. Lyon joined the faculty at Heartland Alliance in Chicago, IL.

Dr. De Souza participates in both clinical and outcomes research studies on malignancies of the upper aerodigestive tract, especially head and neck cancers. His research focuses on the use of novel therapeutic agents along with measurements of financial burden, patients’ preferences, and the trade-offs between the risks and benefits of cancer therapies. His research has sought to integrate outcomes research, patient preferences, health policy, and economics into clinical practice. His ultimate goal is to increase access to essential cancer therapies by providing policy makers and scientific communities with the required information on patient preferences and on barriers that lie between cancer patients and access to care.

De Souza has authored and presented papers and given lectures on head and neck malignancies, reimbursement methods in oncology, and evidence-based care. He is the principal investigator for a trial examining the role of SPECT-CT in the follow-up of patients with locally advanced head and neck cancers.

De Souza earned his MD from the University of Rio de Janeiro State. He completed his residency specializing in internal medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in 2008 and a fellowship focusing on hematology/oncology at the University of Chicago in 2011. Dr. de Souza is currently pursuing his MBA at Booth to aid in his research about Cost Communication in Hematologic Malignancies. His ultimate goal is to increase access to essential cancer therapies by providing policy makers and scientific communities with the required information on patient preferences and on barriers that lie between cancer patients and access to care.

Dr. Jonas de Souza is now the Medical Director for Humana in Louisville, KY.

2013 Pilot Grant Project: A Pilot Program of Cost Communication in Hematologic Malignancies

Raymon Grogan, MD, is a specialist in the surgical management of thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal gland diseases. He has expertise in the surgical management of endocrine cancers as well as benign endocrine gland disorders.

As a clinician and a scientist, Dr. Grogan is actively involved in clinical, translational, and basic science research. He is currently working on identifying genetic and proteomic biomarkers in thyroid and adrenal tumors. Understanding the genetic and molecular changes in these tumors could lead to better diagnosis and treatment strategies for patients with cancer. The ultimate goal is to improve patients’ lives by translating state-of-the-art research findings into everyday clinical practice.

Dr. Raymon Grogan is the section chief of endocrine surgery at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX.

2013 Pilot Grant Project: “A Formal Curriculum in Surgical Professionalism and Ethics”: To enhance and encourage the professionalism of surgical residents and their understanding of the central concepts of surgical ethics

2012 Pilot Grant Project: Understanding of the Psychology of Thyroid Cancer Patients in an Era of Increasing Incidences

Dr. Yoon is an academic hospitalist and medical educator with research interests in the field of virtue ethics, moral psychology, and the moral and professional formation in medical education. He is currently co-investigator on the Project on the Good Physician, a longitudinal study of medical students funded by the New Science of Virtues Project at the University of Chicago. After completing a Clinical Ethics and Hospitalist Scholars research fellowship at the University of Chicago in 2010, he also completed the MERITS Fellowship in Medical Education devoted to the study of professionalism and moral formation in medical education.

He has recently received grants from the Center of Health Administration Studies at the University of Chicago as well as from the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHD) to support his work. Dr. Yoon also has an interest in global health and recently returned from a trip to Pyongyang, DPRK to promote academic collaboration in the areas of international medical education and public health.

2012 Pilot Grant Project: Operationalizing the Virtues for Good Doctor-Patient Relationships

Alex Langerman is an Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Section of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery and is a specialist in the treatment of head and neck cancer and other diseases of the skull base, throat, and larynx as well as reconstruction of the head and neck.

Alex attended medical school at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine during which time he also served as a fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his MD with Honors in 2005 and continued at the University of Chicago for his Otolaryngology residency training. He subsequently completed fellowship training in Head and Neck Surgery, Skull Base Surgery, and Microvascular Reconstruction at Vanderbilt University before returning to the University of Chicago as faculty in 2011.

Alex’s research centers on improving the care of head and neck cancer patients. He conducts comparative effectiveness, social science, and translational research on topics including patient decision-making, perioperative management, human tissue specimen workflow, and education in the operating room. As a Bucksbaum Scholar Alex is studying methods to augment the Primary Care Physician-patient relationship in the setting of multidisciplinary referral care for complex diseases. In addition to a busy clinical practice at the University of Chicago Medicine, Alex also participates in yearly humanitarian missions to the Dominican Republic as part of Medical Aid for Children of Latin America and he was recently appointed to the Humanitarian Efforts Committee of the American Academy of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery.

2013 Pilot Grant Project: Dynamic Operational Mapping – Annotation for Patient and Family Education

Dr. Langerman joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN.