Meet The Team
Executive Committee
The Executive Committee of PORTICO leads the activities of PORTICO. The members of the Executive Committee consists of the Directors and Co-Directors of the Administrative Core, the Methodology Core and the Patient Assessment Resource Core.
Hermine Brunner MD, MSc, MBA is the Director of PORTICO. Dr. Brunner is a professor of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati, and is the director of the Division of Rheumatology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She has a special clinical and research interest in childhood-onset lupus. As head of the Lupus Center at Cincinnati Children’s, she is involved in the conduction of the Lupus Clinic. She also pioneers the development of outcome measures and improving the quality of clinical care for children with lupus and other rheumatic diseases. Dr. Brunner serves as the Scientific Director of the Pediatric Rheumatology Collaborative Study Group. As such, she is involved in the design and conduct of clinical trials of new medications for children with Pediatric Musculoskeletal Diseases.
Susmita Kashikar-Zuck PhD, is the Co-Director of PORTICO. Dr. Kashikar-Zuck is a clinical psychologist with expertise in non-pharmacologic approaches to chronic pain management in children. She has led a number of clinical trials of cognitive behavioral therapy and combined behavioral and exercise-based treatments for musculoskeletal pain conditions such as juvenile fibromyalgia. She is a Professor of Pediatrics & Clinical Anesthesiology and Associate Director of the Center for the Pediatric Pain Research Center at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. She currently serves as the Chair of the Pain Subcommittee of the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance (CARRA) and is an Associate Editor for the journal PAIN. Dr. Kashikar-Zuck has over 100 publications and has been a research mentor for graduate students, residents, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty interested in pain research for over 20 years.
Maurizio Macaluso, MD, DrPH, FACE directs PORTICO’s Methodology Core. Dr. Macaluso has 35 years of research experience in epidemiology and clinical and translational science, and has served as the principal investigator on grants and contracts with federal agencies, non-profit organizations, and industry receiving over $40M in funding. He served as a professor of Epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and as a distinguished consultant and branch chief at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has authored over 220 articles published in peer-reviewed journals, has extensive experience teaching epidemiologic research methods, has advised over 60 graduate students, and has mentored ASPH and Preventive Effectiveness Research fellows at CDC and post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty in multiple institutions. He is the associate director of the Center for Clinical and Translational Science and Training, serves on the Board of Directors of the American College of Epidemiology, and is associate editor of the Annals of Epidemiology.
Mekibib Altaye PhD, MSc is a Co-Director of the PORTICO Methodology Core. Dr. Altaye is a biostatistician with more than 20 years’ experience on the design and analysis of health-related studies. He has been working with multidisciplinary teams on multiple NIH funded projects including those involves multi-site studies. His research focus is on design and analysis of correlated data focusing on high dimensional data obtained from imaging studies including MRI, fMRI, DTI, and MRS. Dr. Altaye is the Director of the Data Management and Analysis Center within the Division of a Biostatistics and Epidemiology, and he has extensive collaboration on including high dimensional data analysis, randomized clinical trials, and observational studies.
Michael Wagner PhD, is a Co-Director of the PORTICO Methodology Core. Dr. Wagner has a long-standing interest in applications of machine learning techniques to bioinformatics problems such as protein structure prediction, disease classification, and protein identification. He is also currently involved in a number of NIH-funded coordinating center projects that implement complex software and data infrastructure. For the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute-funded Pediatric Cardiology Genomics Consortium, part of the Bench to Bassinet network, he plays a leadership role in the development and maintenance of a data Hub, which now houses tens of thousands of whole exome and thousands of whole genome sequencing data sets. He is also the informatics lead of the Data Management and Coordination Center of the NCATS-funded Rare Disease Clinical Research Network.
Charles Dumoulin PhD, is the Director of Patient Assessment Resource Core. Dr. Dumoulin received his BS in chemistry from Florida State University in 1977 and his PhD degree in analytical chemistry in 1981. He then spent three years performing high-resolution NMR spectroscopy research at Syracuse University before moving to General Electric’s Research and Development Center in Niskayuna, NY, where he became part of the team that developed the first industrial prototype MR scanners. Later, Dr. Dumoulin made major contributions to the fields of magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), dynamic MRI and interventional MRI (resulting in over 100 issued patents). In 2008, Dr. Dumoulin moved to Cincinnati and became the director of the Imaging Research Center. His current research interests include MRI imaging of neonates, MR-guided focused ultrasound ablation, and interventional MRI.
Robert C. Coghill is a Co-Director of the Patient Assessment Resource Core. Dr. Coghill is focused on delineating the neural mechanisms supporting multiple forms of pediatric chronic pain. His research interleaves data obtained with functional MRI of brain activity with subjective reports of pain and psychological state. His work encompasses studies of the effects of expectations on pain, brain mechanisms supporting attention to pain, and processes associated with the cognitive modulation of pain. He is also highly interested in understanding how the nervous system evaluates and constructs an experience of sensory components of pain, including perceived intensity and location. Dr. Coghill also seeks to develop of better tools for the measurement of multiple dimensions of the pain experience. Dr. Coghill earned his PhD from Virginia Commonwealth University and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Universitè de Montrèal and the Montreal Neurological Institute, and the National Institutes of Health. He then joined Wake Forest School of Medicine where he earned the rank of Professor. He is currently the Director of the Pediatric Pain Research Center and a Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology at Cincinnati Children's Hospital.
Mark DiFrancesco PhD, is a Co-Director of the Patient Assessment Resource Core. Dr. DiFrancesco is a physicist, obtaining his BS at Carnegie-Mellon University and PhD at the University of Pittsburgh on the topic of pattern formation in condensed matter physics. Following post-doctoral studies in laser spectroscopy at Exxon Research, Dr. DiFrancesco spent over a dozen years in the medical device industry focused on photonics and ablative technologies. He joined CCHMC as a neuroimaging researcher in 2004 and was appointed to faculty in the Imaging Research Center in 2007.
Dr. DiFrancesco has collaborated with a wide range of clinical research faculty at CCHMC, including those in Rheumatology, Pulmonary Medicine, Endocrinology, Radiology, Neurology, Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology, and Communication Sciences. Collaborations also extend to Radiology and Neurology researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. His research develops and applies advanced MRI techniques including volumetric, functional and diffusion MRI, and methods for brain connectivity and morphometry. Recent interests have focused on integrity of the neurovascular unit, with assessments of perfusion, vascular density, blood-brain-barrier permeability and vascular reactivity.