Leadership and Staff

Bharat Ramratnam, MD is chief science officer at Lifespan, medical director of the Lifespan Clinical Research Center, and vice chair of research for the department of medicine at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, with appointments in the divisions of infectious diseases and hematology/oncology. He also leads the laboratory of retrovirology for the Lifespan/Tufts/Brown Center for AIDS Research and Rhode Island Hospital’s NIH-funded COBRE Center for Cancer Research Development.

In his role as chief science officer, Dr. Ramratnam provides scientific guidance to the vice president for research administration and to senior Lifespan management on matters of biomedical and translational science. In addition, he serves as co-chair of Lifespan's Research Advisory Committee, helps determine the goals and status of institutional core labs, and advises on the ongoing laboratory space management and new construction.

Dr. Ramratnam received his bachelor’s and medical degrees from Brown University; and completed his internal medicine residency and chief residency at The Miriam Hospital. He was a clinical scholar at Rockefeller University in New York and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in virology at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University in New York.

Dr. Ramratnam has received numerous awards including the NIH Career Development Award, the Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Award, the Daland Fellowship in Clinical Investigation from the American Philosophical Society, and the Culpepper Award from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Locally, he received the Lifespan Bruce Selya award for Research Excellence and the Dean’s Teaching Excellence Award from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He serves as a permanent member of the NIH AIDS Immunology and Pathogenesis Study Section.

Dr. Ramratnam’s current research focuses on host factors that impact HIV-1 replication, including histone metabolism and noncoding RNA. His laboratory has made important contributions in multiple fields including virology, basic RNA biology, extra-cellular communication and translational.

Karen Tashima, MD, is the director of clinical trials at the Immunology Center, and is the clinical research site leader for The Miriam Hospital, a research site of the Harvard/Boston/Providence AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) Unit. She also oversees the Lifespan Clinical Research Center collaboration with the specimen processing laboratory at The Miriam Hospital.

Dr. Tashima is a professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.