News

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.

The college was recognized for its strength in diversity and its graduates, who are filling a national need for physicians in rural and health professional shortage areas.

Drs. Tara Carr, Janet Funk, Elizabeth Juneman, Serena Scott and Tejo Vemulapalli are among 13 in the inaugural cohort for the re-envisioned and expanded Learning to Lead program designed to enhance the college’s leadership culture and build a better community of colleagues with shared goals.