Dr. Jeremiah (Jake) Stitham joins the Department of Medicine in the Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Lipid Research as an Instructor in October 2022. Dr. Stitham grew up in Amherst, New Hampshire. He received his Bachelor of Science in Microbiology from the University of New Hampshire, and subsequently completed his Doctorate of Philosophy in Pharmacology and Toxicology from Dartmouth College. He completed his medical education at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada, after which he pursued a postdoctoral research fellowship within the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Yale University and the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center. He remained at Yale for his clinical residency training within the Internal Medicine program at Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH) Medical Center and Yale-Waterbury Hospital, where he stayed an additional year to serve as Chief Resident. He completed his subspecialty fellowship training in Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Lipid Research here at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Dr. Stitham comes to the Division of Endocrinology with clinical interests in diabetes and cardiometabolic disease. He looks forward to developing innovative care delivery models to provide comprehensive patient care across various areas of endocrinology. His research interests center around platelets and exploring mechanisms of platelet dysfunction and thrombotic risk associated with hyperglycemia and dietary modulation in both animal models and human patients. Dr. Stitham has published extensively on the molecular and genetic characterization of the human prostacyclin (hIP) receptor, an important protein found on platelets and vascular smooth muscle cells that acts to promote the cardioprotective effects of vasodilatation and inhibition of platelet aggregation. He published the first case-control study correlating increased disease progression and cardiovascular events with defective prostacyclin activity, which closely paralleled the voluntary withdrawal of certain selective COX-2 inhibitors. He has also published on molecular pathways for hyperglycemia-induced mitochondrial dysfunction in platelets in diabetes mellitus.
He has also published a study looking at trehalose, a natural disaccharide, which serves as a potent activator of autophagy-lysosomal biogenesis. Throughout his fellowship training, Dr. Stitham has grown a strong interest in transgender medicine. He undertook a quality improvement project aimed at bettering healthcare quality and access for transgender and gender nonconforming patients, which included curriculum development and outpatient resources for internal medicine and primary care residents. The aim was to identify barriers to gender transition-related primary care and bring awareness to the underserved transgender adult patient population. Dr. Stitham has enjoyed teaching in a variety of settings throughout his training, and looks forward to working with undergraduate and graduate medical trainees at Washington University in St. Louis.