Our Team

Professor of Internal Medicine, Division of Infectious Disease. Professor of Microbiology and Immunology

Kathleen Collins is a graduate of Wellesley College (BA in Molecular Biology) and the Johns Hopkins University MD/PhD program. Dr. Collins undertook residency training in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious disease at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, MA. She has been a faculty member at the University of Michigan since 1998 and was appointed Director of the MSTP in 2020. She is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), The American Association of Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the ASCI journal, JCI Insight. Dr. Collins is active in basic research and the teaching of graduate students. Research in the Collins lab focuses on molecular mechanisms of HIV immune evasion and persistence. In 2019, she was the recipient of the Dean’s                                                        Award for Basic Research.

Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Division of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and Immunology

Dr. Dawid obtained a BA in Molecular, Cellular, Developmental Biology from University of Colorado-Boulder and an MD/PhD from Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Dawid completed residency/fellowship training in pediatric infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She has been on faculty at here since 2008 and holds joint appointments with the departments of Pediatrics and Microbiology and Immunology. She has been an MSTP operating committee member since 2017 and an Associate Director since 2018. Dr. Dawid is actively involved in the clinical care of pediatric patients with suspected or confirmed infectious diseases. Her research group focuses on inter-bacterial interactions that promote bacterial survival and adaptation using the pathogen, Streptococcus pneumoniae, as a model organism.

Professor of Pediatrics, Division of Pulmonary Medicine and Professor of Molecular and Integrative Physiology

Dr. Lumeng is a graduate of Princeton University (A.B. in Molecular Biology) and received his PhD in Human Genetics and MD from the University of Michigan MSTP. He completed residency training in Pediatrics in the Boston Combined Pediatrics Residency Program and completed fellowship training in Pediatric Pulmonology at the University of Michigan.  Dr. Lumeng became an MSTP Associate Director  in 2019.   Dr. Lumeng's research is on the mechanisms by which inflammation contributes to obesity-associated diseases such as type 2 diabetes. His lab has a particular interest in adipose tissue immune cells and their contribution to metabolic disease using pre-clinical and clinical approaches.

Keith S. Henley MD Collegiate Professor of Gastroenterology, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics

Elizabeth (Liz) Speliotes is a graduate of Yale University (BS/MS biology) and the Harvard/MIT MD/PhD program. Dr. Speliotes completed residency training in internal medicine and a fellowship in gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She carried out post doctoral training in human and population genetics at the Broad Institute and the Framingham Heart Study and completed an MPH at Harvard School of Public Health. She was recruited to University of Michigan in 2011 where she sees patients in gastroenterology and directs her own lab. Her group carries out human genomic studies of obesity and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease to identify genetic variants that predispose to these diseases and define disease subtypes. Her groups targets candidate variants/genes to create cell and animal models of disease to define their mechanism of action and to screen for therapeutics. She has been awarded the Jerome Conn Award for research in Internal Medicine and the Deans award for Basic Science Research. She reviews for multiple NIH, National, and international study sections and journals. She has been elected to and serves as the Institutional Representative for the American Society for Clinical Investigation where she works to recruit and support physician scientists. She is committed to training and serving individuals from diverse backgrounds and serves on multiple committees and organizations to develop and implement policies to improve under represented minority representation and access.

Justine is responsible for the overall management of the MSTP Office and student services.

Liz is the MSTP's financial guru. She is responsible for all matters relating to student funding, payments, travel money, etc.