Congratulations to our Five DIF Travel Award Winners!
We are pleased to announce that five outstanding early-career professionals have been selected as the recipients of the 2025 Dermatology Innovation Forum (DIF) Travel Award. Nominated by AID’s Research Leadership Council and chosen for their promise and dedication to advancing dermatology through innovative solutions, these awardees reflect the very spirit of the AID community. Their selection highlights our collective commitment to fostering emerging talent and shaping the future of skin health.
By supporting their attendance at the upcoming DIF in Orlando, we continue to champion meaningful collaboration, mentorship, and dialogue among innovators, clinicians, researchers, and investors. These individuals will not only benefit from the knowledge and expertise within our network but also bring fresh perspectives that can spark new discoveries. We look forward to witnessing the impact of their engagement and celebrating the future of dermatological innovation together.
Dr. Honari is a dermatologist at Stanford University and a former Stanford Biodesign Faculty Fellow. She specializes in eczema and is involved in clinical care and research in this field. Her work focuses on improving access to specialized eczema care through digital health solutions, particularly by integrating innovative diagnostic tools into remote care platforms. She is especially interested in leveraging human-centered artificial intelligence, telemedicine, and mobile health applications to deliver efficient, reliable, and accessible specialty care. She strives to complement traditional dermatological practices with technologies to enhance and innovate remote patient care across diverse settings.
Dr. Little is Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Yale School of Medicine and Director of the Yale Vulvar Dermatology Clinic. She is a board-certified dermatologist and immunologist specializing in the study and care of patients with autoimmune skin diseases that disproportionately affect women, with a primary research focus on cutaneous lupus and lichen sclerosis.
Cutaneous lupus is a disfiguring autoimmune skin disease, which may occur alone or in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. Dr. Little’s research interests involve understanding T cells in cutaneous lupus disease pathogenesis. In Dr. Little’s post-doctoral and early faculty work, she performed human translational and mouse studies to identify tissue adaptation and effector pathways activated by pathogenic T cells. She is continuing these investigations with the goal of developing novel therapeutics. She also has a developing research program studying similar pathways in lichen sclerosus, an autoimmune skin disease that most commonly affects female anogenital skin, causing scarring and predisposing to cancer development.
Dr. Little’s research aims to advance science in women’s health dermatology. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIAMS), Dermatology Foundation, DorisDukeFoundation, Colton Center for Autoimmunity at Yale, and Robert E. Leet and Clara Guthrie PattersonTrust. Her scientific work has been published in high-impact scientific journals, including NAS, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Nature Medicine, and JAMA Dermatology. She is a member of the International Society for the Study of Vulvovaginal Disease, the Women’s Dermatologic Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Dermatology. Dr. Little completed her undergraduate education at Amherst College and then received her MD and PhD in immunobiology at Yale University. She completed a residency in dermatology followed by post-doctoral research under the mentorship of Joseph Craft, MD, at Yale University, where she now sees patients and performs translational research in the Department of Dermatology.
Dr. Mirza serves as Chief Resident in the Department of Dermatology at Brown University Health, where she has emerged as a global leader in integrating artificial intelligence into clinical care. She obtained her bachelor's degree at Harvard College, her master's at Cambridge University, and her medical degree at Yale, where she was an NIH TL1 Awardee. Her research, published in leading journals including The New England Journal of Medicine's NEJM AI, JAMA Surgery, and Nature's npjDigital Medicine, has helped improve informed consent processes and healthcare accessibility for over 40,000 patients annually. As a member of the OpenAI Trusted Partners program, Dr Mirza's on AI-assisted voice reconstruction for patients with head and neck cancers has been covered by The Associated Press, NBC Nightly News, and The New York Times, among others. Her contributions have been recognized at the White House, and she has delivered invited lectures for the National Institutes of Health and the United Nations General Assembly. In 2025, she was appointed Chair of the American Academy of Dermatology's Resident and Fellows Committee. Her clinical interests encompass cutaneous oncology, dermatologic surgery, and Mohs micrographic techniques.
Dr. Toulmin is a 2nd year dermatology resident at the Harvard Combined Dermatology Residency Program. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry as an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She then spent two years performing translational research at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases studying immune correlates of protection in HIV patients and HIV vaccine recipients. She received her medical degree and PhD in immunology from the University of Pennsylvania, where her thesis work focused on antigen presentation and viral immunity in the context of respiratory infections such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2, for which she received an NIH F30 award. Her career interests include complex medical dermatology and inflammatory skin diseases and translational research and discovery in these areas. During residency, she is pursuing a specialized training track with dedicated time to perform translational and clinical trials research, where she will be focusing on therapeutics for hidradenitis suppurativa.
Dr. Vesely is an Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Yale School of Medicine who specializes in inflammatory skin diseases, cancer immune resistance, and skin toxicity from cancer immunotherapy. He now leads a translational research lab focused on harnessing immune regulation for the treatment of cancer and autoimmunity. He earned his MD and PhD in Immunology at Washington University in St.Louis, where he trained under Robert Schreiber, PhD, identifying antigen-specificity as a key mechanism of cancer immunoediting (Nature). He completed his dermatology residency at Yale School of Medicine and post-doctoral fellowship with Lieping Chen MD, PhD, studying immune inhibitory receptor agonism as a novel therapeutic strategy to treat autoimmunity (Science Translational Medicine). Combining single-cell spatial proteomics and transcriptomics on human samples with mouse models, Dr. Vesely’s research program aims to delineate the pathogenesis of inflammatory skin diseases, such as cutaneous lupus and lichen planus and design novel therapeutic strategies to translate these findings through investigator-initiated clinical trials. Clinically, he focuses on treating patients with complex medical dermatological diseases including cutaneous lupus, lichen planus, and cutaneous immune-related adverse events (iRAEs)to cancer immunotherapy. Dr. Vesely’s research has been supported by a Physician-Scientist CareerDevelopment Award from the Dermatology Foundation, National Institute of Arthritis and musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS, K08), Colton Center for Autoimmunity, National EczemaAssociation, and Melanoma Research Alliance.