Every year, the Cohn Family Foundation provides grant funding to support junior faculty at RUSH University who are mentees in the RUSH Research Mentoring Program.
The Cohn Fellowship allows mentees to gather preliminary data for research proposals and continue their research activities.
Class of 2026 Cohn Fellows
The following faculty members were selected as the Class of 2026 Cohn Fellows after a very competitive process.
Ahmed Babiker, MBBS, MSc, FIDSA, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases in RUSH Medical College. The overarching theme of his research is utilizing -omics techniques to directly address challenges posed by antimicrobial resistance. His research interests include the clinical and molecular epidemiology antimicrobial resistance organisms, the surveillance of antimicrobial resistance in low- and middle-income settings and the role of the gastrointestinal microbiome in colonization resistance.
His Cohn fellowship research will leverage a unique dataset of sequenced multidrug resistant organisms and associated epidemiological metadata, collected from asymptomatic carriers in both hospitals and community settings in low- and middle-income countries to identify the bacterial lineages and plasmids that serve as global reservoirs for efficient antimicrobial gene transmission. This integrated analysis will provide a high-resolution picture of antimicrobial resistance transmission in community and healthcare networks on a global scale and be an important step towards identifying drivers and risk factors for antimicrobial spread in low- and middle incomes settings. This will ultimately guide the design of synergistic one-health multisectoral tailored interventions for the containment of antimicrobial.
Lourdes Carolina Figueroa, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. Her research focuses on understanding the mechanisms that control calcium signals in the excitation-contraction coupling of skeletal muscle. Dr. Figueroa earned her PhD in Biophysics in Venezuela, where she studied the postnatal development of calcium homeostasis in skeletal muscle. During her postdoctoral studies at Rush University, she gained expertise in using advanced fluorescent microscopy techniques to quantify calcium dynamics in muscle cells. As an Instructor, she developed a platform using patient-derived skeletal cells to study and characterize calcium channel (RyR1) mutants associated with muscle disorders, such as Malignant Hyperthermia and Central Core Disease.
Recently, she has identified several small RyR1 inhibitors that specifically target the abnormal activity of the channel (i.e., due to genetic variants or post-translational modifications) without affecting its normal function, which is very attractive for therapeutic use. For her Cohn Fellowship, Figueroa will investigate the decline in muscle function associated with aging and evaluate the efficacy of these novel drugs in this context. Her research will contribute to our understanding of the mechanisms of muscle function loss with age and the search for interventions that improve the quality of life of our older adults.
Rachel Medernach, MD, MSCI, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases in the Rush Medical College. Her research focuses on understanding how multidrug-resistant organisms persist in healthcare environments and developing strategies to prevent their infectious potential and spread throughout facilities.
Her Cohn Fellowship will investigate a continuously active disinfectant against high-priority pathogens including carbapenemase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae and E. Coli on environmental surface materials found throughout the healthcare environment in a laboratory setting, with the long-term goal of applying the in vitro findings to real-world healthcare settings.
Ted K.S. Ng, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging, Department of Internal Medicine, Rush Medical College. His research integrates psychosocial stressors, biological markers, and cognitive outcomes to better understand Alzheimer’s disease risk, particularly among diverse community-dwelling populations. Grounded in a biopsychosocial framework, his long-term goal is to translate epidemiologic insights into precision prevention strategies for populations at elevated risk.
Dr. Ng’s Cohn Fellowship research will pilot a Stage I randomized controlled trial (RCT) of the Mindful Awareness Practice (MAP), a mindfulness intervention tailored for individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a preclinical stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Building on promising results from a proof-of-concept RCT in Singapore, this study will test whether MAP improves mindfulness, breathing regulation, and reduces perceived stress and related biomarkers—ultimately enhancing cognition, mood, and quality of life (QoL). Findings will inform a fully powered Stage III trial, with the long-term goal of establishing MAP as a feasible, acceptable, and low-risk intervention for improving mental and cognitive health in MCI populations at high risk for Alzheimer’s Disease.
Class of 2025 Cohn Fellows
The following faculty members were selected as the Class of 2025 Cohn Fellows after a very competitive process.
Ana V. Chee, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Rush Medical College. Her research focuses on understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms of back pain and designing and testing biological therapies to combat these diseases. Using intervertebral disc tissue cultures, she has studied inflammatory chemokines and cytokines released by disc cells; the function of immune cell receptors on disc cells; and tested anti-inflammatory treatments to reverse the inflammatory process. Using preclinical models, she has studied disc degeneration and back pain and tested cell therapies and anti-inflammatory treatments.
Her Cohn Fellowship research will utilize intervertebral disc tissues retrieved from spine surgeries to characterize T cell populations in the intervertebral disc that contribute to inflammation and chronic back pain, and to identify sources of intervertebral disc inflammation that induce T cell migration and activation. Her studies will give us a better understanding of the role of T cells in back pain and help discover potential biological targets for back pain treatment.
Catherine Yuh, PhD, is an instructor in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Rush Medical College. Her research includes characterizing mechano-biological relationships in mechanoactive tissues and studying relationships between joint anatomical shape and tissue properties, in the context orthopedic disorders including femoroacetabular impingement syndrome and intervertebral disc degeneration.
Her Cohn Fellowship will investigate how joint shape is associated with underlying tissue structure and biochemistry in hips with femoroacetabular impingement syndrome. This research will contribute to a long-term collaborative effort to establish a platform of multi-modal approaches, including tissue characterization, imaging, motion analysis, and computational simulation, to study the multifaceted etiology of pre-arthritic hip disorders.
Hyejin Kim, PhD, RN, is an assistant professor in the Department of Adult Health and Gerontological Nursing at Rush University College of Nursing. Her research focuses on psychological and social aspects of late-life cognitive changes such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) and mild cognitive impairment. Her training on ADRD caregiving stress in ethnically diverse populations has led her to a technology-based approach for detecting stress in Korean-American home care workers of persons with ADRD, a significant yet understudied ethnic group.
Her Cohn Fellowship research will use wearable technology (i.e., Ōura ring) to assess heart rate variability, an emerging stress biomarker, over time in Korean-American HCWs who provide care to Korean-Americans diagnosed with ADRD.
Jeffrey Schneider, PhD, is an assistant professor in the department of Microbial Pathogens and Immunity at Rush Medical College, where he is currently investigating HIV, COVID-19, breast cancer, and Alzheimer’s Disease. Schneider got his PhD from the University of Chicago where he studied biochemistry. He did his postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Hope, where he used these skills to tease apart mucosal antibody interactions in the context of HIV infection. During this time, he helped develop a platform to track antibodies in vivo through fluorophore conjugation and contributed to this body of research by helping to show that it takes a week for antibodies to reach the vaginal mucosal surface following IV injection. He received a K01 to use this platform to investigate how the timing of broadly neutralizing antibody injection affects distal site accumulation of virus following intravaginal challenge.
In this Cohn fellowship, Schneider will tease out the cellular populations involved in HIV rebound in the brain, following cART cessation, in order to gain insight into potential ways of targeting this viral reservoir.
Steven P. Mell, PhD, is an instructor in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery. His research focuses on studying the mechanical behavior of natural and artificial human joints. Specifically, he is interested in studying the in vivo behavior, failure and disease processes of orthopaedic implants and natural joints through computational modeling. During his PhD, he investigated total knee replacement wear through both computational and experimental methods. He has been active in the study of patella-femoral joint mechanics, total hip replacement taper assembly, and the mechanical behavior of articular cartilage.
For his Cohn Fellowship research, Mell will study how FAI disease severity affects hip joint contact mechanics. He will use motion analysis and musculoskeletal modelling to compare joint contact forces before and after hip arthroscopy for cam type femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) using high throughput markerless motion capture and develop finite element models of a cam type FAI population using statistical shape modeling. If successful, this research will provide insight into how arthroscopic surgery and FAI disease severity affect hip joint mechanics, with an overarching goal of identifying modifiable factors of FAI associated with hip osteoarthritis development.
If you are interested in applying for the Cohn Fellowship next year, email us at mentoringprograms@rush.edu.