Millie Long, MD: The Sherman Prize 2024

Dr Long, one of the winners of the 2024 Sherman Prize, discusses the importance of the prize in helping to move the field of IBD research and treatment forward. 

Millie Long, MD, is a professor of medicine, vice chief of education, and director of the fellowship program in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Hi, this is Millie Long. I'm here at Advances in IBD, where I was so honored to receive the Sherman Prize for Excellence in Clinical Care and Research this year at AIBD. The Sherman Prize was initiated about nine years ago by Bruce and Cynthia Sherman where they wanted to truly recognize leaders in our field who've made a difference not only in clinical care but also in translational science and clinical research and allow them allow us as a community to really share in their achievements but also potentially use this as kind of a lightning rod to future research to really moving the needle for patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Inflammatory bowel disease has touched the Sherman family and now they're really giving back through these Sherman prizes.

What I think is probably the greatest honor is that for these prizes you're nominated by your peers. Your peers put in nominations for various criteria and then a selection committee chooses the individual recipients who are also our peers. I was thrilled to be a part of a cohort this year that included Dermot McGovern from Cedars Sinai who won the Translational Science Award for the Sherman Prize and Jordan Axelrad who won the Emerging Leader Prize. I've had the pleasure of working with Jordan over the years on some of his projects and he's really going to shape the field in many wonderful ways and I'm thrilled for them both.

The work that the Shermans highlighted for me included the work I've done with IBD Partners, which really was the first internet -based cohort of patients with inflammatory bowel disease, really focusing on the role of patient-reported outcomes. The ability to really capture patients where they are and understand how they're living with their inflammatory bowel disease, this It ultimately included over 16,000 patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Over 400 researchers utilized the data in various forms. Patients themselves became citizen scientists and partnered with us on answering questions that were really important to them.

I have a background in methodology. I've been very involved in a number of our guidelines. And I'm currently the coeditor in chief of the American Journal of Gastroenterology. And through these avenues I have been able to really enhance the footprint of publication of methodologically rigorous, outstanding science in the field of inflammatory bowel disease and that has been a great honor to bring that work to the field to collate it in such a way that it's clinically relevant and practical and actionable for our our providers including myself in clinic each and every day.

I was also honored that they came and highlighted a few of my patients who talked a little bit about their experience at UNC and that they really found a very multidisciplinary, holistic place for their care where they're now thriving, rather than kind of suffering on the day to day with their inflammatory bowel disease. That's what we want for all patients.

And then finally, you know, one of the roles that I am most proud of is the roles I play in education and mentorship. I've been the fellowship program director at UNC for over 8 years now and have graduated a number of outstanding cohorts of fellows. We've really been able to train them across the spectrum in general GI, but obviously all of them leave our program incredibly well educated on inflammatory bowel disease as well. And really we've had some outstanding young people who've really changed the field both from a clinical and a research side including a former Sherman Prize winner, Dr. Ed Barnes who's one of our junior faculty at UNC who won the emerging leader Sherman Prize in 2022 I believe. So really we have the ability I hope at UNC to really provide great education, great clinical care, and actually some great research as well.

We're really trying to move the needle forward from an observational research perspective with some of our expertise there. So it was a real pleasure to accept this award. I think one of the key aspects of my acceptance speech was that while I was standing there as an individual, I think what I really represented was a whole team. A team that's moving forward with team science, a team that is moving forward with outstanding patient care and hopefully we as a research and clinical care community as a team can really move the needle on the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases so that one day we may even have a cure.