Buffalo Translational Consortium News
NIH Fellowships Awarded to Six Medical Students
A T35 NIH Training Grant jointly awarded to UB and Roswell Park supports research fellowships to medical students to introduce outstanding students to careers in academic medicine. Students perform 10-week summer fellowships in the laboratories of UB and Roswell Park faculty in the areas of infectious diseases, microbiology and immunology. A total of 20 applications were received for 6 positions. Based on a rigorous review by a committee of faculty and educational leaders, fellowships were awarded for the summer of 2013.
The following students were awarded fellowships and chose faculty mentors.
Student: Madison Galasso
Medical School: UB
Mentor: Timothy Murphy MD, Department of Medicine, UB
Student: Nicole Gaulin
Medical School: UB
Mentor: Sharon Evans PhD, Department of Immunology, Roswell Park
Student: Janice Kim
Medical School: UB
Mentor: Sanjay Sethi MD, Department of Medicine, UB
Student: Nancy Lin
Medical School: Albany Medical College
Mentor: Kelvin Lee MD, Department of Immunology, Roswell Park
Student: Theresa Neiderer
Medical School: UB
Mentor: Sandra Gollnick PhD, Department Cell Stress Biology, Roswell Park
Student: Everett Sinibaldi
Medical School: UB
Mentor: Amy Jacobs PhD, Department of Microbiology, UB
Microbiology
UB
The program includes:
• A mentored research project
• A weekly seminar series
• Training in the responsible conduct of research.
• Oral presentations by students at the end of the summer program
• Poster presentations by students at an annual research day.
Co Principal Investigators are Timothy F. Murphy MD, Senior Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Research in the UB School of Medicine and Kelvin Lee MD, Chair, Department of Immunology and Vice Chair, Department of Medicine at Roswell Park.
International Leader Recruited to UB as Chair of Department of Biomedical Informatics
Following an international search, Dr. Peter L. Elkin has been named Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics of the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Dr. Elkin is an internationally recognized leader in biomedical informatics who most recently was Professor of Medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, Director of The Mount Sinai Center for Biomedical Informatics and Vice-President for Biomedical and Translational Informatics at Mount Sinai Hospital. Dr. Elkin will assume his position at University at Buffalo in July 2013.
Dr. Elkin earned his M.D. from New York Medical College and completed an internal medicine residency at the Lahey Clinic. He was awarded an NIH/NLM sponsored fellowship in Medical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. Following his training, he joined the faculty at Mayo Medical School in 1996 where he rapidly ascended in academic rank to Professor of Medicine and Medical Informatics in 2004. In 2008 he joined the faculty at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
At Mount Sinai, Dr. Elkin created a common data infrastructure as an output to the Epic implementation for the secondary use of clinical data. He was involved at the executive level with the Epic implementation for both the outpatient (ambulatory) and in-patient (hospital) environment. He created an environment for asking any question of the Epic health record data and worked on the interface of the EHR data for research and administrative purposes such as the reduction of long length of stay initiative.
He has lectured nationally and internationally. His major research interests include controlled health vocabularies, knowledge representation, natural language processing, information retrieval, human factors engineering, clinical decision support systems, clinical genomic and translational informatics and electronic medical records.
Dr Elkin has been honored by election to Mastership in the American College of Physicians, Fellowship in the American College of Medical Informatics and to Fellowship in the New York Academy of Medicine. He was awarded the Homer R. Warner award for outstanding contribution to the field of Medical Informatics and was the recipient of the first international Master of the Danish Society of Medical Informatics.
The Search Committee for Chair of Biomedical Informatics was chaired by Dr. John Tomaszewski, and included faculty from multiple Buffalo Translational Consortium Institutions including
• John Tomaszewski MD
o School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
o Great Lakes Health
• Randolph Carter PhD
o School of Public Health and Health Professions
• Werner Ceusters MD
o School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
o Institute for Healthcare Informatics
• Thomas Furlani PhD
o School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
o Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences
• Carmelo Gaudioso MD PhD
o Roswell Park Cancer Institute
• Richard Gronostajski PhD
o School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
o Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences
• Barry Smith
o College of Arts and Sciences
• Peter Winkelstein MD MBA
o School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
o Institute for Healthcare Informatics
CTRC Hosts Clinical and Translational Research Colloquium
The Second Annual Clinical and Translational Research Colloquium was held on April 12 at the CTRC. Organized by Drs. Kenneth Tramposch, Steven Fliesler and Leonard Epstein this colloquium provides a venue for the winners of pilot studies in clinical and translational research to present their work to a broad audience of faculty, trainees and staff of institutions of the Buffalo Translational Consortium (BTC). Approximately 100 people attended the event which featured talks on cutting edge work that is advancing translational science.
The Translational Pilot Studies Program provides support to investigators to develop novel methods, collaborate in interdisciplinary teams and test the feasibility of novel approaches to translational research. These seed funds are intended to enable key preliminary studies to develop proposals that will generate major extramural support.
The Translational Pilot Program is made possible by the critical support of the following offices of BTC institutions:
• The Dean’s Office of the following schools:
School Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
School of Dental Medicine
School of Nursing
School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
School of Public Health and Health Professions
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
• UB Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development
• UB Office of the Vice President for Health Sciences
• Roswell Park Cancer Institute
The following teams were awarded support based on a rigorous, two-tiered peer review:
2012-2013 Pilot Studies Awarded
Chulhong Kim, *George Chen, Philip McCarthy, Theresa Hahn, Hong Liu, Maureen Ross, Paul Bogner, and Greg Wilding
• UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
• Roswell Park Cancer Institute
“Multifunctional optical imaging probe for cutaneous chronic graft versus host disease lesions”
Animesh A. Sinha, *Kristina Seiffert-Sinha, Norma J. Nowak, Song Liu, Richard W. Plunckett, and Raminder Grover
• UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
• Roswell Park Cancer Institute
“Novel multiplex autoantigen arrays for biomarker discovery in skin autoimmunity”
Javier G. Blanco, *Tracey O’Connor, and Vijay Iyer
• UB School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences
• Roswell Park Cancer Institute
“Anthracycline-related cardiomyopathy in breast cancer patients: impact of carbonyl reductase 3 genotype status on echocardiographic measurements of cardiomyopathy”
*Anthony Campagnari, Nicole Luke-Marshall, Thomas Russo, and Thomas Mang
• UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
• UB School of Dental Medicine
“Adapting photodynamic therapy into a novel treatment for bacterial infections”
*Brahm H. Segal, Scott Abrams, and Kunle Odunsi
• UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
• Roswell Park Cancer Institute
“Overcoming myeloid cell-mediated immunosuppression to enhance vaccine efficacy in ovarian cancer”
*Daniel D. Swartz and Stelios T. Andreadis
• UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
• UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
“One size fits all. Vascular graft – tissue engineered vasculature”
*Presenter at the Second Annual Colloquium
See this link for a story on the Colloquium.
