Category: New Faculty

Please join us in welcoming Maria Edelen, PhD, as a new faculty member in the Department of Surgery.

Maria Edelen, PhD
Associate Director, Patient-Reported Outcomes, Value & Experience (PROVE) Center

Before coming to the Brigham, Dr. Edelen worked as a senior behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, where her research focused on patient-reported outcome (PRO) development, refinement and evaluation in health settings. Dr. Edelen’s recent work has focused on the use of PROs for quality measurement in a number of contexts, including primary, specialty, post-acute and hospice care.

At the PROVE Center, Dr. Edelen will be directly involved in all activities related to the center to acquire PROs for selected surgery patients at Brigham Health and to implement a culture that embeds PROs as a standard. She will lead efforts to expand the center as a resource for faculty members in all surgical disciplines, establish collaborations inside and outside of Brigham Health and Mass General Brigham, and advance PRO reporting for outcomes research, clinical care, quality improvement and value-based health care.

Dr. Edelen graduated from Boston College with a BA in psychology. She holds a master’s degree and a PhD in quantitative psychology from the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

Please join us in welcoming Piamkamon Vacharotayangul, DDS, PhD, as a new faculty member in the Department of Surgery.

Piamkamon Vacharotayangul, DDS, PhD
Associate Surgeon, Division of Oral Medicine

Dr. Vacharotayangul received her DDS from Mahidol University and a graduate diploma in clinical sciences from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. She then completed a fellowship in oral medicine at UC San Francisco, where she also completed a PhD in oral and craniofacial sciences.

She is board certified by the American Board of Oral Medicine. She is a member of the American Academy of Oral Medicine (AAOM), the Massachusetts Dental Society (MDS) and the American Dental Association (ADA).

Before coming to the Brigham, Dr. Vacharotayangul worked as head of the Division of Oral Medicine and instructor at Srinakharinwirot University. She was also a part-time oral medicine specialist in various private hospitals in Thailand.

Dr. Vacharotayangul’s clinical and research interests include improving the oral and general health in people living with HIV, as well as those with chronic oral lesions and oral morbidities after head and neck cancer treatments.

Please join us in welcoming Jennifer Guerriero, PhD, as a new faculty member in the Department of Surgery.

Jennifer Guerriero, PhD
Lead Investigator, Division of Breast Surgery

Dr. Guerriero graduated from Northeastern University with a BS in biochemistry. She obtained a PhD in immunology and pathology and molecular and cellular biology at Stony Brook University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in medical oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Dr. Guerriero is an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is a member of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR); the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC), where she is the chair of the Early Career Scientist Committee; and the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). She is a working group member of the Immuno-Oncology interest group and the TNBC breast group of the Translational Breast Cancer Research Consortium (TBCRC), which conducts innovative and high-impact clinical trials for breast cancer.

Dr. Guerriero is also the director of the breast immunology laboratory for the Dana-Farber Susan F. Smith Women’s Cancer Program, and she serves on the Executive Committee of the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science (HiTS). She will continue in both these roles after starting her new role at the Brigham.

Dr. Guerriero’s research interests include harnessing the anti-tumor potential of tumor-associated macrophages for breast cancer immunotherapy, understanding how breast cancer cell intrinsic mutations regulate the tumor microenvironment, and elucidating the biology, diversity and ontogeny of tumor macrophages in breast tumors. The major goal of the breast immunology lab is to perform in-depth analysis of animal models and patient samples to efficiently guide rational use and development of immunotherapy modalities for the treatment of breast cancer.