The Meredith C. Thomas Memorial Fellowship

Your support the past two years has directly funded the Meredith C. Thomas Memorial Fellowship, a research position set up by The Myositis Association.

TMA’s Meredith Thomas Memorial Fellowship is an award of $107,500 that will be granted for a fellow pursuing a disease-specific, targeted project focusing on Myositis, specifically antisynthetase syndrome and/or myositis interstitial lung disease.

Our first annual fundraiser in 2024 fully funded the first year of the Fellowship. We received many applications, and after a rigorous selection process, the Fellowship was awarded to Dr. Angeles Galindo-Feria, a rheumatology specialist and postdoctoral researcher at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

“This fellowship is a transformative opportunity to change how we understand and manage lung complications in antisynthetase syndrome,” said Dr. Galindo-Feria. “By profiling the immune cells that drive lung damage and developing simple saliva- and sputum-based tests, we aim to move beyond the current one-size-fits-all approach toward true precision medicine. Our goal is to predict which patients are at risk of severe, irreversible lung scarring—potentially with a test as simple as a sputum sample—so that earlier and more targeted interventions can be offered to those facing this challenging disease.”

Dr. Galindo-Feria was able to travel to our fundraiser (all the way from Sweden!) – you can watch her moving speech at this link.

With our 2025 fundraiser, we again fully funded another year of the Fellowship. We look forward to keeping you all updated on Dr. Galindo-Feria’s work, as well as future Fellows to come!