News Release

BU medical students place in Massachusetts Medical Society poster symposium

Grant and Award Announcement

Boston University School of Medicine

(Boston)--Two medical students from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM), recently took home first- and second-place honors in the Massachusetts Medical Society's (MMS) 12th annual poster symposium.

Second-year student Travis Hallett won first place in the Health Policy/Medical Education category for his poster "Cardiovascular Mortality Improvement by State-Level Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion Status, 2012-2015."

Aditya Mithal, a third-year MD/PhD student, won second place in the Basic Research category for his poster "Generation of an IPSC CDX2-eGFP Reporter Line to Create an In Vitro Model of Crohn's Disease."

Over the past year, Hallett became interested in the population health-level effects of the Affordable Care Act expansion of Medicaid eligibility to previously ineligible U.S. adults. Since 2014, about half of the states have chosen to expand Medicaid while the remainder have not. "Because the Medicaid expansion has the potential to significantly affect access to care for many thousands of people, it is possible that this difference in Medicaid expansion among states is affecting health and mortality at a population level," explained Hallett. In his poster, he presented preliminary evidence from the first two years of Medicaid expansion data that found cardiovascular mortality improved in states that expanded Medicaid while it did not change in the holdout states.

Hallett is the treasurer of BUSM's chapter of the American Medical Association and MMS. He also serves as the student representative on the MMS Committee on Medical Education and as Class of 2020 representative on the Appropriate Treatment in Medicine Committee at BUSM.

Mithal works at the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) at BU/Boston Medical Center in the Mostoslavsky Laboratory, where they are developing an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-based system to model certain aspects of Crohn's Disease. "iPSC's will enable us to study the cell-intrinsic properties of the disease, and hopefully identify new features of its pathogenesis as well as potential therapeutic targets," he said.

Mithal is a member of Student Committee on Medical School Affairs, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education Independent Student Analysis and was a leader of the BU Chapter of the American Medical Student Association as well as the Clinical Neuroscience Society.

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About BUSM

Originally established in 1848 as the New England Female Medical College, and incorporated into Boston University in 1873, Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) today is a leading academic medical center with an enrollment of more than 700 medical students and 950 students pursuing degrees in graduate medical sciences. BUSM faculty contribute to more than 950 active grants and contracts, with total anticipated awards valued at more than $693 million in amyloidosis, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, cancer, infectious diseases, pulmonary disease and dermatology, among other areas. The School's teaching affiliates include Boston Medical Center, its primary teaching hospital, the Boston VA Healthcare System, Kaiser Permanente in northern California, as well as Boston HealthNet, a network of 15 community health centers. For more information, please visit http://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm/


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