Fellow Focus in Four: Michail Kokkorakis, MD, PhD, Section of Digestive Diseases

I grew up in Greece and moved to the Netherlands at 18 to study medicine at the University of Groningen. Early in medical school, I joined a project comparing noninvasive diagnostic tools against invasive gold standards in real time. That experience changed the way I thought about medicine. Seeing how a well-designed algorithm could match a costly, invasive procedure made me realize the potential precision medicine holds not just for individual patients but for health care systems as a whole.

At that moment, I realized that I did not want to choose between the clinic and the lab, but was determined to do both. That realization led me to pursue an MD–PhD degree at Groningen, where I focused on developing noninvasive tools to predict cardiometabolic risk, which ultimately brought me to the United States.

I was drawn to the Yale Section of Digestive Diseases because of its strength in translational hepatology and its ability to bridge mechanistic bench research with large-scale clinical data.

Yale's Liver Center is one of only four liver-focused Digestive Diseases Research Core Centers supported by the National Institutes of Health. That concentration of expertise and infrastructure was hard to find anywhere else.

Last November, I came here as a postdoctoral fellow supported by the Rubicon grant funded by the Dutch Research Council and the Dutch Organisation for Knowledge and Innovation in Health, Healthcare and Well-being. The environment at Yale has been exactly what I hoped for, shaped by rigorous science, generous mentorship, and real opportunities to develop as an independent investigator.

I was honored to be nominated by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and to be selected through a multi-stage international review. What excites me most is the interdisciplinary nature of the meeting and the opportunity to exchange ideas with more than 75 Nobel Laureates and around 600 fellow young scientists across physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, economic sciences, and peace. I hope this exchange will help me think about my own research from entirely different angles.

My research at Yale, within the Mehal Lab, focuses on liver injury and inflammation. Specifically, I am studying the drivers of immune dysregulation in liver disease, using large-scale multi-omics and humanized mouse models to identify new therapeutic targets for steatotic (fatty) liver disease and alcohol-associated liver disease.

In the longer term, I am working toward a career as a clinician-scientist in gastroenterology and hepatology. I plan to pursue an internal medicine residency and a gastroenterology fellowship, combining clinical care with an independent research program at the intersection of hepatology and cardiometabolic medicine. My goal is to help detect and treat liver disease earlier and more precisely, before it becomes irreversible.