Mark your calendars – 2025 Lambrew Retreat will be Friday, May 2, 2025.

This annual research retreat brings together more than 200 physicians, nurses, scientists and trainees from MaineHealth for a two day-long, multi-disciplinary, biomedical research symposium. The event gives basic and clinical researchers – and those who support them – the opportunity to catch up on each other’s work, to ask questions, to create new collaborations, and to discuss research in more depth.

MaineHealth’s research retreat is named in honor of Costas T. Lambrew, MD. The naming recognizes the many contributions of Dr. Lambrew to the academic mission and culture at MMC over his decades of service.

Dr. Lambrew (known to colleagues as “Gus”) worked at Maine Medical Center (MMC) from 1977 until he retired as Chief of Cardiology in 2004. Dr. Lambrew began at MMC as a Physician Educator in Emergency Medicine, followed by positions as VP of Health Affairs; Director, Division of Cardiology and CICU; and finally Chief of Cardiology.

Among his many achievements while at Maine Medical Center, Dr. Lambrew led a highly successful Cardiology fellowship program which trained many of the cardiology attending physicians working at MMC and MaineHealth today. He also brought nationally recognized thrombolysis in myocardial infarction (“clot buster”) trials to MMC, which advanced care for patients with acute heart attacks and launched the modern era of clinical research at MMC. Dr. Lambrew died on December 12, 2019 at the age of 87, after a full and meaningful life.

2024 Lambrew Research Retreat Keynote Speaker- Dr. Jane Liebschutz

Past Keynotes

2024: Jane M. Liebschutz, MD, MPH, FACP
2024: Jane M. Liebschutz, MD, MPH, FACPChief, Division of General Internal Medicine University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Liebschutz’s research focuses on prevention and treatment of OUD in medical settings, with a focus on opioid prescribing for pain and treatment of OUD. She uses implementation science and health services research methods, including analysis of databases, survey research, intervention development, qualitative studies, and large randomized trials.
2023: Joe Nadeau, PhD
2023: Joe Nadeau, PhDMaineHealth Institute for Research
Dr. Nadeau is an internationally-recognized geneticist with expertise in genomics, development, epigenetics, metabolism, bioinformatics and systems biology and with a focus on mouse models of human disease. He has been a pioneer in comparative genomics, transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, the genetics of fertilization, and the origins of non-genetic non-environmental phenotypic variation and disease risk.
2022: Katrina Armstrong, MD
2022: Katrina Armstrong, MDColumbia University Irving Medical Center
Dr. Armstrong is an internationally recognized investigator in medical decision making, quality of care, and cancer prevention and outcomes, an award-winning teacher, and a practicing primary care physician.
2021: Vivek Kumar, PhD
2021: Vivek Kumar, PhDThe Jackson Laboratory
Dr. Kumar researches behavior and behavioral abnormalities, including addiction, ADHD, and depression, using mouse genetics as a platform.
2020: Virginia Lee, PhD
2020: Virginia Lee, PhDUniversity of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine
Dr. Lee’s expertise is in Neurodegenerative Disease Research. She and her team have been engaged in helping to develop scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying important neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, frontotemporal dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
2019: Cliff Rosen, MD
2019: Cliff Rosen, MDSenior Scientist & Director of the Center for Clinical & Translational Research, MHIR
Dr. Rosen spoke about the history of research at MaineHealth. He is a world-renowned researcher in the field of bone metabolism. His laboratory focuses on the study of marrow adiposity and bone formation and he has over twenty years of experience with NIH-funded clinical trials.
2018: Dr. Nadia Rosenthal, PhD F.Med.Sci
2018: Dr. Nadia Rosenthal, PhD F.Med.SciScientific Director of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor
Dr. Rosenthal is a global leader in the use of targeted mutagenesis in mice to investigate mammalian development, disease and repair. Her research focuses on the role of growth factors, stem cells and the immune system in the resolution of tissue injury for applications to regenerative medicine. She spoke about her research on cardiovascular disease.
2017: Dr. Vasan Ramachandran, MD
2017: Dr. Vasan Ramachandran, MDProfessor Boston University School of Medicine
Dr. Ramachandran is a Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at BUSM/BUSPH, and Chief, Section of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology, Department of Medicine, BUSM. He is the Jay & Louis Coffman Professor of Vascular Medicine at BUSM. Dr. Ramachandran is a trained cardiologist with subspecialty training in echocardiography. The focus of his talk was the Framingham Heart Study,
2016: Gary Gibbons, MD
2016: Gary Gibbons, MDDirector, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health
Dr. Gibbons is Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he oversees the third largest institute at the NIH, with an annual budget of more than $3 billion and a staff of 917 federal employees. One of the long-term goals of Dr. Gibbons’ research is to utilize new genomic technologies to integrate the areas of physiologic genomics, functional genomics and human molecular genetics in the field of vascular biology and medicine.