WELCOME NEW FACULTY

Brigham's Women's Hospital to the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Anna Helena Jonsson, MD, PhD, joined the Division of Rheumatology in July from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. She may have just arrived in Aurora, but she has many links with the Division already. She completed her MD and PhD degrees at Washington University in St. Louis and she did her PhD work with Wayne Yokoyama, Chief of the Division of Rheumatology at WashU. After Helena’s research took an unexpected turn into the complement field in 2021, Dr. Holers agreed to join her K08 grant advisory committee and provided fantastic advice and feedback on her project.

Prior to coming to CU Anschutz, Helena was an Instructor and Associate Physician in rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she did her internal medicine residence and rheumatology fellowship. She completed her post-doc research in Michael Brenner’s lab, studying granzyme K-expressing CD8 T cells in rheumatoid arthritis. She was also heavily involved in the Accelerating Medicines Partnership Program: RA/SLE, leading the synovial tissue disaggregation pipeline in 2019 and playing a significant role in data analysis and manuscript writing since that time. She worked closely with Fan Zhang PhD, another recent transplant from BWH to the CU Division of Rheumatology, on both the CD8 T cell project and the AMP consortium work, and she’s hoping for many more productive collaborations with Fan in the coming years.

Helena is starting her independent research lab on the third floor of the Barbara Davis Center Her work will focus on CD8 T cells in rheumatoid arthritis and other rheumatologic diseases using human blood, synovial fluid, and synovial tissue samples as well as mouse models. She sees rheumatology patients in the Outpatient Pavilion every Tuesday afternoon and will also attend on the consult service. She is thrilled to be here and is looking forward to getting to know her know colleagues on both the clinical and research sides.

Martin Kriegel, MD, PhD Associate Professor Adjunct of

Faculty Dr. Melissa Griffith’s VuMedi video “Interstitial Lung Disease in Rheumatic Diseases” was 3rd most watched in DOM !