Sunil Eappen

Eappen Appointed Chief Medical Officer

Sunil “Sunny” Eappen, MD, MBA, will be joining Brigham Health as chief medical officer and senior vice president for Medical Affairs. Eappen currently serves as chief medical officer and chair of Anesthesiology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, and associate professor of Anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS). He will join the Brigham Health family on Monday, July 16.

Eappen has said that he was drawn to the opportunity to innovate. In addition to furthering key initiatives in physician recruitment and retention, medical affairs and patient care, he will implement strategies central to the Brigham’s Active Asset Management efforts. Eappen will build on ongoing efforts in these areas, while implementing new clinical care delivery strategies that will significantly improve efficiency, financial outcomes and patient outcomes, working closely with Associate Chief Medical Officers Kathryn Britton, MD, MPH and Charles Morris, MD, MPH.

Eappen initially joined the Brigham community in 1995 as an attending anesthesiologist and later took on the roles of director of the HMS Anesthesia Medical Student Rotation and vice chairman of Clinical Affairs for the Department of Anesthesiology.

Eappen earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an MD from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Yale University School of Management.

Eappen succeeds Stanley Ashley, MD, who is returning to the Department of Surgery.

Tarter Joins BWH and Appointed Lupus Center Director of Pregnancy and Reproductive Health

Lupus specialist Laura Tarter, MD, has joined the BWH Lupus Center team as director of Pregnancy and Reproductive Health.

Laura Tarter

Tarter attended Harvard Medical School and was an intern in internal medicine at BWH before completing her medicine and rheumatology training at the University of California, San Francisco. Prior to joining the Lupus Center, she served as director of the Stanford University Lupus Clinic. Her clinical and research interests focus on the treatment of lupus, and pregnancy and reproductive issues among women with lupus.

Providing additional expertise in pregnancy and lupus, Tarter’s program further expands the comprehensive and integrated care the Lupus Center provides with subspecialties across BWH, including cardiology, dermatology, nephrology, neurology and obstetrics and gynecology.

Gustafson to Step Down as President of BWFH

Michael L. Gustafson

After seven years as president of Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, and 25 total years serving Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Michael Gustafson MD, MBA, will be departing from BWFH.

During Gustafson’s time at BWFH, the hospital experienced record-breaking growth in the Operating Room, Emergency Department, inpatient units, imaging and many other areas. It achieved multiple national quality and safety honors. It also created an array of new specialty ambulatory practices on campus, including several comprehensive, integrated programs such as the Sleep, Spine, and Breast Centers.

Gustafson has accepted an offer to serve as the next President of UMass Memorial Medical Center, which is the 779-bed academic medical center partner of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

Athena Petrides

Petrides Appointed Medical Director for Pathology Informatics

Athena Petrides, PhD, MSc, has accepted a new position at BWH and will join the Brigham as medical director for Pathology Informatics.

Petrides will help oversee, direct and advocate for informatics needs across all areas of the department.  Petrides will partner with Cathy Andrew and the Brigham Health (BH) Lab IT team and will report to Jeffrey Golden, MD, chair of the Department of Pathology, and to Adam Landman, MD, BH chief information officer. She will also work closely with Partners eCare and Partners ePath, representing BWH Pathology.

Petrides is currently a clinical chemist at BWH who has taken on significant roles in lab control, point-of-care testing, toxicology and mass spectrometry. In these roles, she has taken on increasingly broader responsibilities in LIS (laboratory informatics). She will be stepping down from her current roles in lab control and point-of-care testing, but will continue her leadership roles in mass spectrometry, toxicology and general chemistry.