A new generation of leaders
With the premature demise of Dr. Avioli in November 1999, leadership passed on to Roberto Pacifici, MD, on an interim basis until 2001 when Dwight A. Towler, MD, was appointed as the new division chief, a position he held for almost a decade.
Towler later moved on to a new endowed chair position at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX. Towler, a Washington University School of Medicine trainee, was interested in mechanisms of heterotopic calcification, and more recently, in valve and vascular calcification in arteriosclerosis and chronic kidney failure.
Under his leadership, the division continued its history of outstanding research contributions to the field of bone and mineral research, reinvigorated by the recruitment in 2001-2002 of research-oriented new investigators, namely Deborah Veis (Novack), MD, PhD, who focuses on the alternative NF-κB regulatory pathway in osteoclast-mediated bone loss and skeletal disease arising from arthritis and metastatic cancer, and more recently, on bone infections; and Fanxin Long, PhD, a developmental biologist interested in cell signaling in skeletal development and control of energy metabolism in osteoblast biology. After a transition to the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Long later moved to the University of Pennsylvania.
During a time of rapidly changing environment in the health care sector, the division continued to grow its clinical operations, and the Bone Health Program expanded its services to Barnes-Jewish West County Hospital, under the leadership of Kathryn Diemer, MD, who continues to function as its senior medical director.
Transformative Growth
In February 2010, Roberto Civitelli, MD, succeeded Towler as Chief of the Division of Bone and Mineral Diseases. Under Civitelli’s leadership, the division underwent a re-birth and substantial expansion of its research, teaching, and clinical operations.
Patient volumes and bone density services at the Bone Health Program have experienced double-digit growth for over a decade, and new clinicians have been recruited; including Carolyn Jachna (2010), James Avery (2011), Naga Yalla (2013), Mahshid Mohseni (2018), Elizabeth Lin (2019), who moved back to California in 2021, Kathleen Lowe, (2022), Gary Gottesman (2022), and Chinenye Udokwu (2025).
This growing cadre of expert physicians have contributed to make the WashU Bone Health Program the largest and most prominent referral center in the Mid-West. The constant growth in patient volumes led to further expansion of the Bone Health Program to a third site, in the Center for Advanced Medicine South County in mid-2016, and to the opening of an Adult Rare Bone Disease clinic in 2019, which provides state-of-the-art clinical services to adult patients with genetically-based and rare disorders of the skeleton.
Likewise, the division research activities have expanded, with the move, in early 2012, of the division laboratories and administrative offices to the 11th floor of the BJC Institute of Health, along with the Orthopaedic Surgery research laboratory, in an interdisciplinary partnership that established a new Washington University Musculoskeletal Research Center.
In 2010, Gabriel Mbalaviele, PhD, joined our faculty, after transitioning from an industry position, and developed a new line of research on the role of innate immunity in bone remodeling and disease. In 2016, the division welcomed new research faculty: Erica Scheller, DDS, PhD, who is interested in neuronal regulation of bone and the role of bone marrow fat, and currently also serves as Executive Director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine; Timothy Peterson, PhD, an expert in genetics and response to therapy, moved on to lead a biomedical start-up company in 2023; and Clarissa Craft, PhD, who initially focused on extracellular matrix in bone and was recruited to a leadership role with the graduate education program in 2019.
Over this period of time, and building upon the depth of knowledge and unique expertise of our faculty, the division launched innovative and successful educational programs aimed at forming the next generation of clinician and scientists focused on metabolic skeletal disorders.
A new NIH-funded, institutional Skeletal Disorders Training Program (STDP) was established in 2011, and renewed twice, consolidating a tradition of leadership in education and training in metabolic skeletal disorders. In its first 14 years of activities, the STDP has graduated over 30 among pre- and post-doctoral trainees, 10 of whom now hold faculty appointments at academic centers, most of them have remained active in research.
In 2017, the new Osteoporosis, Metabolic Bone Disorders (OMBD) Fellowship program was established, the first full-fledged clinical training program in our specialty in the United States. Three former OMBD Fellows, Mohseni, Lin, and Udokwu, were recruited as faculty in our division. Others have open new specialty practices in other centers all over the world.