Course Director

Meena B. Bansal, MD, FAASLD, joined the faculty at Mount Sinai in 2001 after completing her gastroenterology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2002, she became director of the Transplant Hepatology Fellowship, overseeing one of the largest transplant fellowship programs of its kind in the United States. Both clinically and scientifically, she has mentored well over 80 trainees, shaping the careers of the next generation of academic hepatologists.

From 2013 to 2021, in addition to maintaining a National Institutes of Health-funded research program focused on the molecular mechanism of liver fibrosis with seminal contributions to our understanding of liver fibrosis in people living with HIV, Dr. Bansal held many different leadership roles at Mount Sinai, including director of Translational Research, medical director of Hospital-Based Clinics, chief medical officer of Mount Sinai Care, LLC, deputy chief medical officer for Mount Sinai Health Partners, and vice president of Population Health for Quality and Efficiency. In these roles, she helped generate increased quality dollars in value-based contracts, created Mount Sinai’s first ambulatory pharmacy program, addressed broad population health needs, and gained knowledge about payer relations in an ever-changing healthcare landscape. She has also served as the principal investigator for numerous clinical trials for MASH/nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

At the international/national levels, she has chaired numerous committees and held the position of secretary for the American Association for the Study of Liver and currently serves as the director of the newly formed MASLD/MASH (Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease/NASH) Center of Excellence at Mount Sinai.

Most recently, in January 2024, Dr. Bansal was named System Chief, Division of Liver Diseases for the Mount Sinai Health System.

Naim Alkhouri, MD, FAASLD, is the chief medical officer, chief of Transplant Hepatology, and director of the Steatotic Liver Program at Arizona Liver Health (ALH) in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr. Alkhouri is also the medical director of research at the Clinical Research Institute of Ohio and the director of the Steatotic Liver Program at Northshore Gastroenterology and Endoscopy in Westlake, Ohio.

Prior to joining ALH, Dr. Alkhouri served as the director of the Metabolic Health Center at the Texas Liver Institute and as associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Texas.

Dr. Alkhouri completed his gastroenterology and transplant hepatology training at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also was appointed assistant professor of medicine and director of the Metabolic Liver Disease Clinic at the Cleveland Clinic Digestive Disease and Surgery Institute.

Dr. Alkhouri is a key opinion leader in the field of MASH therapeutics and an advisor/consultant to many pharmaceutical and biomarker development companies. He is principal investigator on several multicenter global MASH trials and a member of the AASLD MASLD Special Interest Group.

Dr. Alkhouri has been published in over 250 publications, including the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, Nature Medicine, Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and the Journal of Hepatology. He presents his work at both national and international medical conferences.

Prof Quentin M. Anstee is the Chair of Experimental Hepatology and the Dean of Research & Innovation in the Faculty of Medical Sciences, Newcastle University, UK. A practicing clinician, he is also an Honorary Consultant Hepatologist in the Liver Transplant Unit at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital, where he leads one of the largest Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) clinical services in the U.K. He trained in medicine at University College London where he was awarded a First Class Honours degree and won First Prize in Medicine in the final MB BS examination.

Prof Anstee’s translational research has made major contributions across the pathophysiology, natural history, diagnosis and treatment of NAFLD. His work has provided key insights into temporal changes in steatohepatitis during disease evolution, identified genetic and epigenetic modifiers of liver disease progression and hepatocellular carcinoma risk, and has substantially advanced the field of biomarker development in liver disease. He coordinates two major international research consortia that are studying NAFLD pathogenesis and developing/validating accurate biomarkers to assist the diagnosis, risk-stratification and monitoring of patients with NAFLD: ‘EPoS’ Elucidating Pathways of Steatohepatitis (EU H2020 funded €6 million, 2015-2019) and ‘LITMUS’ Liver Investigation: Testing Marker Utility in Steatohepatitis (EU IMI2 funded €47.3 million, 2017-2024). He leads the European NAFLD Registry and is the chief investigator of multiple ongoing clinical trials assessing new medical therapies for NAFLD. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Hepatology.

Dr. Bugianesi MD, PhD, is Full Professor of Gastroenterology and Scientific Director of the Dept of Medical Sciences at the University of Turin in Italy. Dr. Bugianesi is an international acknowledged expert on Metabolic dysfunction Associated Steatotic Liver Disease (MASLD) with over 20-years of experience. She contributed in the field with work describing the metabolic mechanisms of insulin resistance related to the onset and progression of liver damage, the natural history of the disease (including the first demonstration of HCC as a complication of NASH), the development of non-invasive markers of fibrosis, and the involvement in several trials for the treatment of NAFLD/NASH. Her contribution to science is testified by over 300 publications, an H Index = 82 (Scopus), N. Citations = 43,830.

Mazen Noureddin, MD, MHSc, did his internal medicine residency at the University of Southern California (USC) and then moved to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he enrolled in a 3-year hepatology fellowship at the Liver Diseases Branch of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. There, he finished the NIH/Duke University Master of Health Sciences in Clinical Research program. After completing his NIH fellowship, he completed a gastroenterology fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, where he was a T32 NIH fellow. He joined USC as an assistant professor of clinical medicine in 2013. Dr. Noureddin was then recruited to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 2015 and was appointed as the founding director of the Fatty Liver Program.

Dr. Noureddin is internationally known for his research in the area of NAFLD/NASH and NASH-related cirrhosis. He conducted more than 50 investigational clinical studies of novel treatments for NASH. He is an expert in noninvasive testing and biomarkers of NASH and cirrhosis. He has published in all these areas and has been invited to consensus panels on these topics by multiple international societies, including the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), the European Association for the Study of Liver Diseases, the Asian Pacific Association for the Study of the Liver, and the Latin American Association for the Study of the Liver. He has given invited lectures on NAFLD/NASH at national and international society meetings and serves on several steering committees/advisory boards for industry. He is the vice chair of the AASLD NASH special interest group and has served on the editorial board for major gastrointestinal (GI) journals, including Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. He is an associate editor for Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. Dr. Noureddin has been funded by the National Cancer Institute and has served as a reviewer on NIH study sections. He has published over 230 papers in many journals including The Lancet, Nature Medicine, Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Science Translational Medicine, the Journal of Hepatology, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

In May 2022, Dr. Noureddin moved to Houston. He is currently a professor of medicine at the Lynda K. and David M. Underwood Center for Digestive Disorders at the J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center, Sherrie and Alan Conover Center for Liver Disease and Transplantation at Houston Methodist Hospital (currently ranked #5 in GI and GI surgery by US News). He also has established the Houston Research Institute, which is a state-of-the-art facility that offers patients with liver disease access to new innovative noninvasive diagnostic testing and breakthrough therapies.