Meet the 2025 Winner: Sneha Naik, BA, Msci, Mphil
Sneha Naik is a Ph.D candidate at Columbia University, New York in the Biomedical Engineering department. Sneha's academic journey began at Cambridge University (St John's College), where she earned a First Class degree in Natural Sciences. After working in Investment Banking for a few years, she returned to Imperial College London as a Google DeepMind Scholar for a Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence. She graduated top of her cohort with awards for her thesis on AI-based liver disease staging under the supervision of Professor Elsa D. Angelini. Sneha began her PhD journey at Columbia in 2022 under the expert guidance of Professor Andrew F. Laine, Professor Elsa D. Angelini, Dr Benjamin M. Smith and Dr. R. Graham Barr. She is studying the impact of airway tree and lung structure on chronic pulmonary disease risk using deep-learning methods, as well as leading a team of engineers to execute a multi-center CT image harmonization effort (the C4R CT study) for studying the impact of COVID-19 severity and Long COVID. She is passionate about mentoring women in STEM and has collaborated with Google DeepMind outreach programs as well as volunteering for the last three years with charity MAGIC (More Active Girls in Computing).
This award was established in 2011 to honor the memory of Dr. Stuart J. Hirst, a long-standing and active international supporter of the RSF Assembly. Stuart was born in Blackpool, UK, on May 15, 1964. He graduated from Portsmouth University in 1986 with a BSc (Honours) in Pharmacology and moved to London to undertake a PhD with Maureen Dale at University College London. In 1990, he joined Charles Twort and Jeremy Ward at St Thomas’, part of the United Medical and Dental Schools in London. In 1998, Stuart spent 9 months in the laboratories of Newman Stephens and Andrew Halayko at the University of Manitoba, before being appointed to a tenured position as lecturer at King’s College London in 2001. In 2003 he was promoted to Reader (Associate Professor) and in 2008 Stuart moved to Monash University, Melbourne Australia.
Stuart Hirst was synonymous with airway smooth muscle (ASM). He provided the first detailed characterizations of human ASM proliferation in culture and developed the important concept of ASM cells secreting key cytokines to, therefore, contribute to the inflammation associated with asthma. Stuart also developed techniques for measuring and understanding the events governing contractile function in small bronchioles and isolated ASM cells. Using these techniques, he was the first to demonstrate ex vivo that repeated antigen exposure induced increased ASM content, ASM phenotypic modulation as detected by decreased levels of contractile proteins, and subsequently increased airway contraction. He made significant contributions to our understanding of the signaling pathways associated with both ASM contraction and those regulating phenotypic modulation from a contractile to a synthetic phenotype and was integral in the initial explorations of the functional consequences of ASM / extracellular matrix interactions in asthma. He also pioneered the characterization of the role of ASM derived mediators in promoting airway microvascular changes in the context of airway remodeling in asthma.
Stuart was an outstanding teacher and mentor. He was highly respected for his thoughtful and hands-on efforts to promote the success of graduate students, as well as clinical and basic research fellows in the area of airway biology and pathophysiology. To his students and employees, he was an enthusiastic group leader, a father, and a friend. He was an integral part of the team that founded the Smooth Muscle Young Investigator meetings which continue to be a unique networking meeting for junior members of the RSF and beyond. Like other founding members, he committed himself to mentor the young researchers from Europe, Australia, USA, and Canada, who aspired to make a contribution to this ever-growing field. These young researchers are now forming collaborations of their own, many of which were catalyzed by Stuart. A number of Stuart’s trainees and mentees have established themselves as young and upcoming faculty members across the world, and are highly active members contributing to the RSF, a true reflection of the lasting legacy left by Stuart Hirst.
This memorial award is presented annually at the ATS International Conference to the trainee submitting the top-ranked abstract (determined by the mean score given by the RSF Programming Committee) in an RSF abstract category relevant to airway biology and physiology.