2025 Recipients
Brienne Miner, MD, MHS & Melisa Wong, MD, MAS, AGSF
Brienne Miner, MD, MHS is an Assistant Professor in Internal Medicine in Geriatrics at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, CT.
Dr. Miner completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Yale University including serving as chief resident, followed by subspecialty training in geriatrics and sleep medicine, and a postdoctoral fellowship in geriatric clinical epidemiology and aging-related research. Her research path became clear while caring for patients in Yale’s Geriatric Assessment Clinic, where sleep disturbances are pervasive and challenging to manage. Her research, funded by GEMSSTAR and Beeson awards from the NIA, focuses on the evaluation and management of sleep deficiency in older persons. She uses both self-reported and objective measures — including devices such as gold-standard polysomnography, actigraphy, and encephalography-measuring headbands — to evaluate sleep comprehensively. Her work, published in leading aging and sleep medicine journals such as the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society (JAGS) and the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (JCSM), supports combining self-reported and objective measures as the best method to evaluate sleep. Ultimately, she aims to decrease the burden of sleep deficiency in patients and their care partners through interventions to promote sleep health.
Over the course of her career, Dr. Miner has served in leadership roles in aging and sleep societies, including as Chair of the AGS Junior Faculty Special Interest Group and of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation’s Sleep Research Program for Advancing Careers. She is a past recipient of the AGS New Investigator Award, a Tideswell Emerging Leaders in Aging scholar, and currently serves on the editorial board of JAGS.
Melisa Wong, MD, MAS, AGSF is a Research Scientist II in the Division of Research at Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC) and Associate Adjunct Professor in the Division of Geriatrics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
She is a thoracic medical oncologist and geriatric oncology clinician-investigator who completed her residency in internal medicine at UCSF, followed by fellowships in medical oncology and aging research. Her research aims to transform cancer care for older adults — to help patients clarify their goals and values in the face of uncertainty and to support oncologists to keep these truths at the core of the care they provide. As an NIA Beeson K76 Scholar, Dr. Wong adapted, and pilot tested, the Best Case/Worst Case (BC/WC) communication tool from geriatric surgery to geriatric oncology to support shared decision making for older adults with cancer. She also developed the infrastructure for a multicenter prospective cohort study of older adults with lung cancer with serial geriatric assessments to develop risk prediction tools for functional and cognitive decline.
Dr. Wong was a 2022-2023 UCSF Pepper Center Pilot and Exploratory Studies Core Scholar and was inducted to the American Geriatrics Society Fellows in 2023. Amongst a plethora of honors and awards, her research paper ‘“You have to be sure that the patient has the full picture’: Adaptation of the Best Case/Worst Case communication tool for geriatric oncology” received the Journal of Geriatric Oncology’s Dr. Arti Hurria Best Paper Award for 2021-2022. As one of Dr. Hurria’s geriatric oncology mentees, Dr. Wong is especially honored to continue advancing the field that Dr. Hurria dedicated her career to.