News

Faculty, fellows, residents and students – 77 in all – mingled and gnoshed together at a social mixer designed for medical students to learn more about internal medicine, its specialties and the people dedicating their careers to the field. See the mini-photo gallery.

Augmented by an additional 15 new faculty in August and 11 more in July, the Department of Medicine added 37 faculty members this summer. The most recent include five hospitalists, three internists, two cardiology researchers and an oncologist. See who they are and what they’ve done.

With just a few weeks under her belt as a faculty member, Dr. April Ehrlich, in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, was off to NIA headquarters for a weeklong summer aging research symposium named for the institute’s first two directors.

Infectious Diseases division chief Dr. Liz Connick received $703,000 in NIH/NIAID bridge funding for a study to identify factors in secondary lymphoid tissues that lead to continuous low-level expression of HIV in people living with HIV and receiving antiretroviral therapy, or ART.

Fifteen new faculty will join the DOM this month, including three pulmonologists, two hospitalists, two infectious diseases specialists, a cardiologist, dermatologist, endocrinologist, geriatrician, oncologist, and palliative medicine specialist – and two researchers, one studying GI cancers and the other the role of cellular aging (senescence) in age-related bone loss. Read all about them.

The pet pharmaceutical firm, which licensed research on a vaccine for dogs developed by the University of Arizona Valley Fever Center for Excellence in 2017 and has worked closely with the center, has enlisted partners to move forward on a human vaccine for the respiratory illness caused by fungal spores endemic to soils of the U.S. Southwest.

A new review published in The Lancet, with U of A Center on Aging co-director Dr. Janko Nikolich as co-author, highlights the global scale and impact of long COVID, explains biological mechanisms behind the condition and suggests priority areas for future research.

Faculty Innovation Ambassadors, a new program of University of Arizona commercialization arm, Tech Launch Arizona, creates envoys to serve as mentors and information resources for colleagues across the U of A campus. Pulmonary division’s Dr. Julie Ledford is in inaugural cohort and headlines a luncheon Sept. 30 in COM-T Social Hall.

A College of Medicine – Tucson fellowship for women in medicine and science supported projects that improve education, research and patient care — and prepare participants for leadership. The DOM’s Drs. Olivia Hung and Salma Patel were among the inaugural fellows, and four more DOM faculty joined for the second.