The Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation

Mitchel B. Harris, MD, is co-director of The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation at Brigham aand Women’s Hospital (BWH). His overarching goal for the center is to bring together individual scientists and clinicians with a common interest in trauma to help streamline research and encourage multi-institutional collaborations. Until fall of 2016, Harris served as the chief of Orthopaedic Trauma Services at BWH, where he was awarded the Stepping Strong Distinguished Chair of Orthopedic Surgery. Currently, he is a professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School, chair of the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the administrative chief of Orthopedic Trauma for Partners HealthCare System. He was a recipient of the International Volvo Award for Low Back Pain Research, has received three “Teacher of the Year” awards, and received the Hippocrates Society’s Humanitarian Award (2015) from the Brigham and Women’s Physician Organization.

Ali Salim, MD, is co-director of The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). A leader in trauma care research and support programs for trauma survivors, Salim is focused on the Stepping Strong Center’s mission to advance trauma research, education, community engagement and policy advocacy. He also serves as a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the chief of the Division of Trauma, Burns, Surgical Critical Care, and Emergency General Surgery at BWH. As a traumatologist and a surgical intensivist at BWH, Salim is a clinically active trauma, general and critical care surgeon and devotes his time with equal intensity to research, surgical education and clinical service. His clinical interests focus on the care of acutely ill trauma, emergency surgery and intensive care unit patients and his clinical research is focused on the care and outcomes of trauma patients, traumatic brain injury, improving the physiology of organ donors, and improving the rate of organ donation.

Matt Carty, MD, is director of strategy and innovation for The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation. He also serves as director of the Lower Limb Extremity Transplant Program at BWH and as assistant professor at HMS. Carty is focused on reinventing how lower extremity amputations are performed in order to provide amputees with greater control of prosthetics and restore their limb responsiveness. In collaboration with Hugh Herr, PhD, from the Center for Extreme Bionics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and with funding from Stepping Strong, Carty’s team has completed multiple studies in animal models and human simulations. Recently, Carty and his team performed a modified amputation procedure in six patients. The pioneering surgery makes it possible for an amputee to use a bionic prosthetic that acts like a natural limb.

Nish Acharya is the program director of The Gillian Reny Stepping Strong Center for Trauma Innovation. Acharya brings a wealth of experience to his role, having served as CEO of Equal Innovation Consulting, a firm that consults with some of the world’s leading universities, governments, foundations and companies to assist them with innovation, entrepreneurship, and globalization strategies; as senior fellow with the Center for American Progress; and as co-chair of the NIH National Centers for Accelerated Innovation Review. Previously, Acharya was appointed by President Obama as the director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and senior advisor to the Secretary of Commerce, where he led the President’s efforts to nurture economic growth through innovation, entrepreneurship, and commercialization.