Marie Mihara

Dr. Eric Volckmann is the Director of the University of Utah Health Care Bariatric Surgery Program at the University Hospital in Salt Lake City. Dr. Volckmann specializes in minimally invasive upper gastrointestinal procedures and bariatric (weight loss) surgery. Dr. Volckmann received his medical degree from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He then continued on to his residency in Chicago at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. While at Northwestern, Dr. Volckmann also completed a two-year research fellowship focusing on the development of new minimally invasive surgical...

Tawnie J. Braaten, M.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Rheumatology, Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah and the SLC Veterans Affairs Medical Center. She is a general clinical rheumatologist who sees patients with all forms of rheumatic disease. She has a special interest in patients who developed immune related adverse events secondary to immunotherapy treatment for cancer. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry at Concordia College in Moorehead, MN and her medical degree from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, WA. She completed her internal medicine residency and rheumatology fellowship at the University of Utah School of Medicine in Salt Lake City, UT. During her fellowship she gained a special interest in immune related adverse events secondary to immunotherapy. This led her to do a postdoctoral fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD to develop her knowledge and skill set in caring for those with rheumatic immune related adverse events. Throughout this post-doctoral fellowship she actively cared for patients with rheumatologic immune related adverse events and worked on expanding their established cohort to better understand these novel conditions. During this time Dr. Braaten worked with the experts of this field at one of the main institutions actively pursuing treatment of these difficult cases. She has continued to care for individuals with rheumatic immune related adverse events in her current practice here at the University of Utah and is developing a cohort to continue to study these disease processes. She is also part of a consortium in which multiple institutions are collecting similar data on these patients to better understand the different clinical phenotypes, treatment responses, and outcomes. Dr. Braaten joined the University of Utah School of Medicine in 2019.