Amy Justice Receives 2025 John M. Eisenberg Award for Career Achievement in Research

Amy C. Justice, MD, PhD, C.N.H. Long Professor of Medicine (General Medicine) at Yale School of Medicine, professor of public health (health policy) at the Yale School of Public Health, and staff physician at the West Haven VA Medical Center, received the 2025 John M. Eisenberg National Award for Career Achievement in Research from the Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM). She accepted the award at the 2025 SGIM annual national meeting in Hollywood, Florida, in May.

Named after the late Dr. John M. Eisenberg, the award honors senior researchers whose work has significantly impacted patient care, research, and medical education.

“As a young investigator, the people who received this award were some of my greatest academic heroes,” Justice said. “I listened with rapt attention to their stories of scientific and personal discovery. It is an incredible honor to join their ranks.”

The award is also meaningful, Justice added, because Eisenberg was the chairman of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania when she was a resident there.

An internationally recognized leader in general internal medicine, Justice defined the study of aging with HIV infection. Through her work, she demonstrated that compared to similar people without HIV, those aging with HIV have excess risk for a wide variety of conditions, from cardiovascular disease to cancer, and experience polypharmacy a decade earlier. A dedicated mentor to many medical students, residents, fellows, and faculty members, Justice served as the chief of general internal medicine at the West Haven VA Medical Center for 12 years.

Justice was also one of the first investigators to leverage the national VA electronic health record for clinical research, validating clinical phenotypes and publishing these validations alongside primary results. She developed and validated two widely used indices, the VACS Index and the HIV Symptom Index. The VACS Index is a prognostic index that estimates the risk of all-cause mortality for those with and without HIV infection and has been implemented through MD Calc and multiple electronic medical record systems. The HIV Symptom Index, which standardizes the collection of patient-reported bothersome symptoms, is in wide use in clinical trials and has been translated into 20 different languages.

Patrick G. O’Connor, MD, MPH, Dan Adams and Amanda Adams Professor and chief of Yale General Internal Medicine, called Justice an extraordinarily gifted and world-class physician-scientist and mentor. “Her ground-breaking research on the impact of HIV on our patients’ health has profoundly advanced our understanding of this disease and its sequela,” he said. “The Eisenberg Award places her at the very top of our field as a leading researcher, and she brings great pride to all of us at Yale General Internal Medicine.”

“I knew John Eisenberg very well and know that he would also beam with pride with Dr. Justice’s receipt of this prestigious award,” O’Connor added.

In 2022, Justice received the William S. Middleton Award―the highest honor conferred by the VA Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development Service. In 2018, she was awarded, along with her team, the Gordon Bell Prize from the Association for Computing Machinery for outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. She has published over 600 peer-reviewed manuscripts and presented work at the United Nations, the International AIDS Society, the Royal Medical College in London, the White House, Congress, and the National Institute of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Her work has been continuously funded by NIH for more than 25 years.

Justice joins fellow Yale School of Medicine Department of Internal Medicine faculty member Mary Tinetti, MD, Gladys Phillips Crofoot Professor of Medicine (Geriatrics) and professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, as a recipient of this award. Tinetti received the award in 2009.

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