Scripps Translational Science Institute

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Current KL2 Scholars

Barrett, Paddy, M.D. MRPCI

STSI KL2 Clinician Scholar
Cardiology Fellow
Member Royal College of Physicians of Ireland

Paddy Barrett, MD MRCPI is the winner of the A. Menarini/Irish Cardiac Society Travelling Research Scholarship, the McArdle Prize in surgery for outstanding academic performance and is a member of the prestigious Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

His research interests lie mainly in the fields of personalized medicine and wireless health technologies with particular focus on the molecular and genomic characterization of circulating endothelial cells released during myocardial infarction. He firmly believes that this and other ground breaking research being carried out at the Scripps Translational Science Institute will revolutionize how we will tailor the diagnostics and therapeutics of today and the future.

After graduating from University College Dublin, Ireland he went on to do residency training in major tertiary centres in both Sydney, Australia and Dublin, Ireland. In 2009 he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland and was accepted on to the Irish Cardiology Fellowship training programme.

Dr. Barrett has published previously on topics ranging from the echocardiographic strain patterns in cardiotoxic chemotherapeutics to the mortality trends in the end stage kidney disease population with peripheral artery disease.

Komatireddy, Ravi, MD

Ravi Komatireddy is an Internal Medicine physician and KL2 scholar in wireless health. Finishing his internship in Internal Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock medical center and residency in Internal Medicine at the University of California San Diego, he is passionate about applying a multi-disciplinary approach to healthcare innovation. Working jointly with the West Wireless Health Institute Dr. Komatireddy is involved with the design of novel technology and systems designed to tackle the medical problems associated with high value disease states while lowering the cost of care. Dr. Komatireddy is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, volunteer faculty in General Internal Medicine at the University of California San Diego and also holds a position with a Bay Area organization working on novel algorithms to aid in clinical decision support and diagnostics. Additionally, he’s currently involved in research applying novel wireless physiologic sensor technology to Space Passengers involved with commercial space exploration. Dr. Komatireddy actively practices as an Internal Medicine Hospitalist and is on staff at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, CA.

Liu, Xiaoli, M.D., MSc.

Xiaoli Liu is a resident in the physician-scientist track of Scripps Clinic’s Internal Medicine Residency and is currently conducting her research studies as a KL2 Scholar at Scripps Translational Science Institute. Dr. Liu is passionate about individualized medicine using a genetics/genomics approach. In her current project, she is conducting methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus genomic sequencing, expecting that bacterial genomic data will help to guide clinicians toward more effective and timely management of infected patients.

Dr. Liu obtained her medical degree from Shandong Medical University in China, followed by a Master’s degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, with an interest in understanding disease pathogenesis from a genetic and molecular level. Her research work focused on the effect of 9-cis-retinoic acid on human lung cancer. After relocating to the United States, Dr. Liu worked at University of Alabama at Birmingham as a research assistant, with studies involving cystic fibrosis and Hurler’s syndrome, before joining Scripps.

Muse, Evan, MD, PhD

Evan D. Muse, M.D., Ph.D., joined the Scripps Translational Science Institute in 2012 as a KL2 Clinical Scholar and Cardiovascular Research Fellow. As a KL2 Scholar Dr. Muse takes unique advantage of his training as a physician-scientist to more fully understand the pathogenesis and prevention of atherosclerotic heart disease from both the basic science and clinical-translational perspectives.

He completed his medical and graduate studies as part of the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York where he studied the connections between obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus in the laboratory of Dr. Luciano Rossetti. Following internship and residency at the Columbia University Medical Center - New York Presbyterian Hospital and several years of clinical cardiology fellowship training at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, he made the cross-country move to the west coast to join the STSI.

Scott, Erick, M.D., M.H.S.

Erick R. Scott, M.D., M.H.S is a doctoral student in the labs of Ali Torkamani, Ph.D. and Peter G. Schultz, Ph.D. He is integrating his experiences in experimental biology and clinical medicine with training in translational bioinformatics and high-throughput drug discovery.

He graduated with honors from UCSD, before studying molecular microbiology and immunology at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He recently graduated from The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Uribe-Bruce, Liliana, M.D.

Liliana Uribe-Bruce, M.D., was a medical student in Colombia when she first witnessed the power of community based participatory research. “I understood then that even the best scientific and medical knowledge would not have been able to impact individual or group health without the ability to reach into and engage the community,” she said.

As a KL2 Scholar, Lilliana is again reaching into and engaging the community, specifically the Hispanic population served by Project Dulce™, which provides culturally tailored diabetes care, self-management and prevention education to low-income and uninsured individuals in San Diego County. Working with the Scripps Whittier Diabetes Institute, which sponsors Project Dulce™, she hopes to establish a gene bank that will enable scientists to identify the DNA variations that predispose individuals with Hispanic ancestry to diabetes and that influence their response to diabetes therapies.

Although they are at high risk for diabetes, Hispanics, who constitute almost 30% of San Diego’s population, have not yet been adequately included in most genomic studies to date, she said. The Scripps San Diego Diabetes Genebank will expedite genomics research focusing on Hispanics in such areas as the physiopathology of diabetes and disorders of glucose metabolism, diabetes risk classification, pharmacogenomics, personal risk for diabetes complications, and variation of genetic risk for disease by ethnicity.

Lilliana, a volunteer at Project Dulce™ for several years, will involve the Hispanic community in a dialogue about the potential value of such a database, because she recognizes the importance of engaging the community throughout the entire research process, from the initial formulation of the research to the dissemination of the findings.

After receiving the M.D. degree, she completed residency programs at Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia, where she was born, and Jackson Memorial Hospital at the University of Miami, Florida, and then an endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism clinical and research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.