University of Miami Miller School of Medicine

Dr. McCauley is a genetic epidemiologist whose research focuses on the use of molecular techniques, bioinformatics, and statistical methods to identify genetic variation and to characterize its role in disease susceptibility and outcomes within a variety of human diseases. He has significant experience overseeing biological sample collection, tracking, quality control, genotyping, sequencing and analysis involved in large-scale human genetics projects. Dr. McCauley is a member of several multidisciplinary collaborations with colleagues both nationally and internationally. He has been involved in studying a variety of complex human diseases including autism, Alzheimer disease, stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), multiple sclerosis, and inflammatory bowel disease. Dr. McCauley has collaborated for over a decade with Dr. Abreu to help establish one of the largest clinically annotated biospecimen collections of Hispanic IBD patients in the US. This invaluable resource is at the foundation of many collaborative studies to better understand the molecular underpinnings of IBD.

Dr. Abreu is a gastroenterologist who specializes in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Dr. Abreu has more than 20 years of leadership experience in basic, translational and clinical research and mentoring. She was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation in 2010 and in 2018 to the Association of American Physicians (AAP). She was awarded the Sherman Prize for her research in IBD (https://shermanprize.org/prize-recipients/maria-t-abreu-md/). Dr. Abreu’s research laboratory has done pioneering work describing the role of innate immune signaling to drive colitis-associated cancer and some sporadic colon cancers. On the translational research side, she first described that Crohn’s disease patients with Nod2 mutations have stricturing disease. This observation is the basis of prognostic testing in Crohn's disease. Her laboratory routinely applies translational approaches using patient tissue and clinical metadata to interrogate disease response to therapeutic agents. At present, the “University of Miami IBD Center Clinical Phenotype Database and Tissue Repository” has clinically annotated biospecimens (DNA, RNA, and tissue) from over 3000 patients including one of the largest cohorts of Hispanic samples in the US. Her group has distinguished itself for focusing on the genetic and environmental factors that contribute to development of IBD in Hispanics. With the support of the NIDDK, they look forward to contributing even more to this important, understudied group of patients. Finally, her interest in the burgeoning IBD risk in Hispanic immigrants has led to diet intervention studies which use comprehensive, multi-omic approaches to study the microbiome and the effect of diet on disease state. We are excited to be part of the IBDGC family.