CUIMC Update - January 22, 2025

January 22, 2025

Share this page

CUIMC Update is a weekly e-newsletter featuring medical center news and the accomplishments of our faculty, staff, and trainees. Please send your news, honors, and awards to cuimc_update@cumc.columbia.edu. Grants are provided by the Sponsored Projects Administration office.

News

What You Need to Know About Norovirus
Norovirus is a highly contagious virus that causes vomiting and diarrhea—and cases are rising this winter. Columbia gastroenterologist Ava Anklesaria provides guidance on how to prevent it and what to do if you get it.

Making Ourselves Heard: How Mailman Gets the Word Out About Public Health
Today’s information landscape is punctuated by an increased mistrust of science, a partisan political climate, and a cacophony of social media voices. Learn about the innovative strategies students and faculty at the Mailman School of Public Health are using to communicate public health messages.

Columbia Nursing Tops Again in NIH Funding
For the third year running, Columbia University School of Nursing has ranked #1 among all U.S. nursing schools in National Institutes of Health research funding.

A Conversation with Ajay Gupta, Chair of the Department of Radiology at VP&S
Ajay Gupta became chair of the Department of Radiology at VP&S last year. Hear about his first months at Columbia and what it is like to lead a radiology department in a time of rapid technological change.

Events

Grants

Mailman School of Public Health

  • Qixuan Chen and Andrew Gelman, Biostatistics
    $2,072,382 over five years from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for "Improving the analysis and use of contaminated immunoassays: from methods development to implementation."
  • Andrea Howard, ICAP
    $1,623,536 over five years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for "Global HIV Implementation Science Research Training Grant."
  • Gary W. Miller, Environmental Health Sciences
    $18,474,445 over three years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health for "IndiPHARM: Individual Metabolome and Exposome Assessment for Pharmaceutical Optimization."

School of Nursing

  • Maryam Zolnoori
    $746,941 over three years from the National Institute on Aging for "Development of a Screening Algorithm for Timely Identification of Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Dementia in Home Healthcare."

Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

  • Ali Gharavi, Andrew Bomback, and Krzysztof Kiryluk, Medicine
    $4,624,999 over five years from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for "The Columbia PCC for CureGN: the Cure Glomerulonephropathy network."
  • Chi-Min Ho, Microbiology & Immunology
    $300,000 over five years from Pew Charitable Trusts for "Structure and mechanism of a malarial micropore implicated in drug-resistance."
  • Louise Kuhn, Sergievsky Center
    $450,059 over two years from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for "Strengthening informed consent for authentic participation in perinatal HIV research."
  • Andrew Marks, Physiology & Cellular Biophysics
    $571,456 over one year from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for "Calcium and the Pathophysiology of Neurodegenerative Disorders."
  • Serge Przedborski, Neurology
    $1,493,233 over three years from the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command for "Gene therapy in a nonhuman primate model of cognitive defects in Parkinson’s disease."
  • Muredach Reilly, Medicine
    $2,687,384 over four years from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for "Integration of spatial transcriptomics, genetics, and histomorphology for causal inference in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease."
  • Peter Sims and Donna Farber, Systems Biology
    $1,087,356 over five years from CZ Biohub New York for "Context-Specificity of Immune Cell Regulatory Networks."
  • Rajesh Soni, HICCC
    $849,660 over five years from the National Cancer Institute for "Advancing Proteomics Technologies for Cancer Research."
  • Milton Wainberg, Psychiatry
    $984,391 over five years from the National Institute of Mental Health for "Increasing Access To Depression Care For Black Women Survivors Of Intimate Partner Violence."
  • Dian Yang, Molecular Pharmacology & Therapeutics
    $1,480,500 over three years from the National Cancer Institute for "Towards a Comprehensive, Spatiotemporal Roadmap of Cancer Metastasis."

Honors

Mailman School of Public Health

Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

  • The Polycystic Kidney Disease Center has been recognized as one of the PKD Foundation's Centers of Excellence.

Social Media Snapshot

Columbia University Irving Medical Center

Twenty-one graduate students from Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons successfully competed for prestigious The National Institutes of Health (NIH) fellowships in the latter half of 2024. Their achievements were celebrated at a special event that brought together research education leaders, directors of graduate studies, and thesis mentors.

Learn more about the students, their mentors, and their projects: https://lnkd.in/e9SD5k6G

In the News Highlights

  • Online Therapy Boom Has Mainly Benefited Privileged Groups, Studies Find
    Jan 15, 2025
    The New York Times
    “I think that the whole system of care—and maybe the internet delivery is a piece of this—appears to be pivoting away from those in greatest need,” said Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the lead author of the studies on access to care. “We’re seeing that those with the greatest distress are losing ground, in terms of their likelihood of being treated, and that to me is a very important and disconcerting trend,” he added.
  • Experts Argue It’s Time for Obesity to Be Defined Beyond BMI
    Jan 14, 2025
    TIME
    "Obesity is nuanced. It’s a spectrum,” Rubino says. “It’s not a single thing.” That distinction alone requires a mindset shift, says Dr. Tirissa Reid, an endocrinologist, obesity-medicine specialist, and associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who was not involved in the Lancet proposal. Reid says she and most other obesity specialists already do much of the testing and analysis the report suggests. But, she says, it’s “a big deal” for a group of experts to further the idea that “excess body fat doesn't necessarily equate with illness automatically.”
  • Aspiring Parents Have a New DNA Test to Obsess Over
    Jan 15, 2025
    The Atlantic
    Analyzing an embryo’s DNA to predict its chances of developing genetically complex conditions such as diabetes is an even thornier issue. The tests, which can run thousands of dollars and are typically not covered by insurance, involve sending a small sample of the embryos to the companies’ labs. But the control these services offer is an illusion, like promising to predict the weather a year in advance, Robert Klitzman, a Columbia University bioethicist and the author of the book Designing Babies, told me.