Renal Section
DAVID J. SALANT, M.D.
Chief, Renal Section
Boston Medical Center
Boston University
School of Medicine
Professor of Medicine
Boston University School of Medicine
Evans Biomedical Research Center
Renal Section, Room 504
650 Albany Street
Boston, MA 02118-2393
Tel.:
617-638-7330
Fax:
617-638-7326
Email: djsalant@bu.edu
July 31, 2015
Department of Medicine
Awards Committee
Re: Vipul Chitalia, MD, PhD – Research Mentoring Award
I am very pleased to support the nomination of Dr. Vipul Chitalia for the Evans Department of
Medicine Research Mentoring Award. Although he is relatively junior and has not had many
years to assemble a long list of mentees, Dr. Chitalia deserves this award because of the impact
he has had on students, fellows and research associates that work with him. I emphasize the
“with him” rather than “for him” because that is exactly the relationship Vipul has with his junior
colleagues. He leads and inspires by example not instruction. He is a hands-on investigator who
shares bench space and duties with his lab members and in so doing, stimulates a sense of joy
about the process of experimentation.
A few examples are in order. Sowmwya Shivanna began joined Dr. Chitalia as an inexperienced
part-time lab assistant while he was at MIT working on his K Award. By the time Sowmwya left
his lab at BUMC for a prestigious pre-doctoral position at the University of Toronto, she had coauthored four papers and earned first authorship on two, including high impact papers in JBC and
the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Dr. Moshe “Shiki” Shashar joined Dr. Chitalia
as a Research Fellow with no previous lab experience. He too has blossomed under Vipul’s
guidance. He was awarded a highly competitive two-year research fellowship from the American
Society of Nephrology and has already published two papers including a first author review in
Seminars in Dialysis. Vipul has also co-mentored graduate students from the Department of
Pathology and the Division of Science and Technology at MIT who credit him for encouraging and
inspiring them in their own research efforts.
In my estimation, not only is Dr. Chitalia a highly worthy candidate for the Research Mentoring
Award, to receive such an award will be humbly accepted and inspire him to extend his excellent
record of mentorship and serve as an example of how we value and recognize our junior as well
as our senior faculty members.
Sincerely,
David J. Salant, MD
BOSTON UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
Boston Medical Center
Boston University School of Medicine
Boston University School of Public Health
Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dentistry