2019 Webinar: Integrated Management of Alcohol-Related Liver Disease with Hepatologists and Addiction Specialists

Ashwani K. Singal, MD, MS, AGAF, FACG, FAASLD is a professor of medicine at the University of South Dakota Sanford School of Medicine and transplant hepatologist at the Avera transplant institute. In addition, he also directs the hepatology elective course for the senior medical students at the Sanford Medical School and is Chief of clinical research affairs at the Avera transplant institute. 

With clinical and translational research interests in alcoholic and non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases, renal injury in cirrhosis, and porphyria, Dr. Singal’s research has been funded by the American College of Gastroenterology, National Institute of Health, and pharmaceutical industry. He has over 200 original peer reviewed articles in national / international journals and book chapters. He is on the editorial board of many journals including Liver Transplantation, co-editor in chief for Translational Gastroenterology Hepatology, and associate editor for Digestive Liver Disease, PLoS one, Journal of Clinical Translational Hepatology and Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hepatology. Apart from reviewing research grants and scientific research abstracts for the AGA and AASLD, Dr. Singal is on the study section for the NIH. He is lead author on practice guidelines for alcoholic liver disease, has co-authored guidelines on vascular disorders of the liver and is currently involved in writing guidelines on nutritional management of patients with cirrhosis. Dr. Singal has been awarded the prestigious Edgar Achkar Visiting Professorship by the ACG and also chairs the special interest group on Alcohol-associated Liver Disease of the AASLD.

Lorenzo Leggio, MD, PhD, MSc is a physician-scientist who conducts clinical research on medication development and the role of neuroendocrine pathways in addictions. He is also an expert in the management and treatment of alcohol use disorder in patients with alcohol-related liver disease Dr. Leggio received his MD and PhD from the Catholic University of Rome and ‘Agostino Gemelli’ hospital (Italy), where he also completed residency and received Board Certification in Internal Medicine. He also received a masters in ‘Alcohol-related Diseases and Problems’ from the University of Florence. He was a visiting research associate, then postdoctoral research associate in Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Throughout his career, he has worked as a faculty member and principal investigator at Brown University and National Institutes of Health.

Geetanjali Chander, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Medicine. She is also an attending physician in the Bartlett Specialty Practice at Johns Hopkins Hospital where she practices HIV medicine among persons with alcohol, tobacco and other drug use. Her research focuses on the integration of evidence-based treatments for alcohol use into HIV, liver transplant and other clinical settings.

She is a co-investigator on a NIAAA funded P50 focused on liver transplant among persons with acute alcohol related liver disease. For over 15 years she has been a co-investigator with the Johns Hopkins HIV Clinical Cohort. She is currently the PI of a U34 planning grant that uses community-based participatory research (CBPR) to implement alcohol interventions for women with and at risk of HIV. She is also the multi-PI of the administrative core of the NIAAA Alcohol Research Consortium in HIV (ARCH), which supports both an intervention arm and an epidemiology arm within the CFAR Network of Integrated Clinical Systems (CNICS), a multisite clinical cohort of persons with HIV.

Dr. Chander is the Director of Research for the Brancati Center for the Advancement of Community Care at Johns Hopkins. The Brancati Center seeks to improve the health of communities by developing, evaluating and disseminating new models of healthcare that leverage the skills of a diverse range of health care providers.