CUIMC Update - May 16, 2024

May 16, 2024

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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

Medical School Celebrates 2024 Graduates
The VP&S Class of 2024 celebrated graduation with friends and families yesterday. The ceremony honored 142 students who received MD degrees from VP&S and 86 students who received PhD degrees in biomedical sciences from Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Stories from the Class of 2024
Hear from VP&S and Nursing graduates about why they decided to pursue a career in health sciences, their experience entering school during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how their time at Columbia impacted them.

COMBO Playdate Bolsters Family and Community Health
More than 500 community members attended Columbia’s COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcomes (COMBO) Initiative's third annual Playdate, a free event in Washington Heights that offered family-friendly activities, games, prizes, and an introduction to community resources available to families. 

Mailman Faculty, Staff, and Students Participate in Inaugural Day of Service
More than 130 students, faculty, and staff volunteered at nine organizations that focus on causes that include food insecurity, support for the elderly, immigration, and community health.

Faster Approach More Effective for Starting Extended-release Injectable Naltrexone
Starting people who have opioid use disorder on injectable, extended-release naltrexone within five to seven days of seeking treatment is more effective than the standard treatment of starting within 10 to 15 days, according to results from a clinical trial led by Columbia researchers.

Events

Grants

College of Dental Medicine

  • Amy Herbert
    $250,000 over five years from the New York State Department of Health for "School-Based Dental Home Program."

Mailman School of Public Health

  • S. Patrick Kachur, Population & Family Health
    $2,500,000 from the Duke (Doris) Charitable Foundation for "Sustaining the African Health Initiative Community of Practice."
  • Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, Environmental Health Sciences
    $649,389 over three years for a subaward from the National Institute on Aging for "Historical social and environmental determinants of memory decline and dementia among U.S. older adults."
  • Sen Pei and Wan Yang, Environmental Health Sciences
    $324,998 over one year for a subaward from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for "Modeling and forecast of COVID-19 and RSV to inform public health decision making."

School of Nursing

  • Rebecca Schnall
    $860,287 over two years for a subaward from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for "Drive to Zero: Developing a digital cohort to understand the drivers of non-sustained viral suppression in the Deep South."
  • Maxim Topaz and Jacquelyn Taylor
    $2,696,411 over four years from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities for "Identifying and reducing stigmatizing language in home healthcare: the ENGAGE study."

Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

  • Hashim Al-Hashimi, Biochemistry & Molecular Biophysics
    $456,827 over one year from the Office of the NIH Director for "Acquisition of 600 MHz NMR Console, QCI-P CryoProbe and CryoPlatform."
  • Vanessa Babineau, Obstetrics & Gynecology
    $261,684 over two years from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for "Maternal Childhood Maltreatment-Influenced Prenatal Programming of Early Brain-Behavior and Risk for Future Psychopathology."
  • Matthew Baldwin, Medicine
    $3,554,792 over five years from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for "Immune, hormonal, and muscle mitochondrial determinants of recovery in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome Survivors."
  • Andrea Califano and Barry Honig, Systems Biology
    $7,236,356 over five years from the National Cancer Institute for "Center for Cancer Systems Therapeutics (CaST)."
  • Peter Canoll, Pathology & Cell Biology
    $463,445 over five years for a subaward from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for "Fatty acid metabolic regulation of anti-tumor immunity against irradiated glioblastoma."
  • Carla Concepcion-Crisol, Molecular Pharmacology & Therapeutics
    $438,592 over two years from Prelude Therapeutics for "Evaluating SMARCA2 degraders in genetically engineered mouse models of SMARCA4-deficient LUAD."
  • Riccardo Dalla-Favera, Institute for Cancer Genetics
    $6,909,000 over seven years from the National Cancer Institute for "From pathogenesis to new therapeutic targets in Diffuse Large B cell Lymphoma."
  • Philip De Jager, Neurology
    $350,000 over one year from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for "Human Microglial Single-Cell Reference Taxonomy."
  • Barry Fine, Medicine
    $350,000 over two years from New York Community Trust for "Improving Cellular Resiliency During a Heart Attack."
  • Angela Gomez-Simmonds, Medicine
    $2,438,140 over five years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for "Genetic factors associated with phenotypic beta-lactam resistance in extended-spectrum beta-lactamase-producing Enterobacterales."
  • Gamze Gursoy, Biomedical Informatics
    $323,817 over one year from the Office of the NIH Director for "Delineating the functional impact of recurrent repeat expansions in ALS using integrative multiomic analysis."
  • Matthew Harms, Hemali Phatnani, Frank Provenzano, and Neil Shneider, Neurology
    $316,084 over one year for a subaward from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for "ALSynCC – A Nationwide Network to Bridge ALS Research and Clinical Data."
  • Shirong Li, Medicine
    $750,000 over three years from the Leukemia Research Foundation for "Targeting GCK as a novel and selective therapeutic strategy against RAS mutated Multiple Myeloma."
  • Joseph John Mann, Psychiatry
    $560,175 over five years for a subaward from the National Institute of Mental Health for "Human brain multi-omics to decipher major depression pathophysiology."
  • Sumit Mohan, Medicine
    $1,289,653 over five years from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for "APOL1 Long-term Kidney Transplantation Outcomes Network (APOLLO) Clinical Center."
  • Joshua Motelow, Pediatrics
    $1,266,625 over five years from the National Human Genome Research Institute for "Genetic Risk Underlying Pediatric Critical Illness."
  • Catarina Maria Quinzii, Neurology
    $3,318,094 over five years from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for "Role of SUMOylation in mitochondrial/synaptic axis dysfunction induced by abnormal tau in FTD."
  • Neil Shneider, Neurology
    $250,000 over one year from Massachusetts General Hospital for "ALS Clinical Research C9 ID Fund."
  • Milton Wainberg, Psychiatry
    $2,070,379 over five years from the National Institute of Mental Health for "Global Mental Health (GMH) Research Fellowship: Interventions that Make a Difference."
  • Timothy Cragin Wang, Medicine
    $6,909,000 over seven years from the National Cancer Institute for "The role of stem cells and the microenvironment in gastrointestinal cancers."

Honors

Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Social Media Snapshot

Columbia Medicine | Congratulations to the #ColumbiaNursing Class of 2024 as they embark on their nursing journeys. 🎓🥳

In the News Highlights

  • The Quest for Treatments to Keep Weight Off After Ozempic
    May 8, 2024
    The Wall Street Journal
    There is more at stake than looking better. If people put weight back on, they won’t reap the long-term health benefits that losing pounds provides. “Weight regain is the major problem at this point because it really impacts the long-term success medically or otherwise of weight loss,” said Dr. Rudolph Leibel, a researcher on the genetics and physiology of obesity at Columbia, and a study investigator.
  • Herbert Pardes, Who Steered the Growth of a Giant Hospital, Dies at 89
    May 9, 2024
    The New York Times
    Dr. Herbert Pardes, a psychiatrist and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health who brought order to the merger of two major medical centers that became NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and ran it for 11 years, died on April 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.
    Dr. Pardes (pronounced par-diss) was named president and chief executive of the hospital in late 1999, nearly two years after the merger of New York Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital. The previous decade he had been the dean of the faculty of medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Presbyterian’s affiliated medical school.
  • Experimental Gene Therapy Restores Some Vision in Patients with Inherited Blindness
    May 6, 2024
    CNN Online
    These new Phase 1/2 trial results provide a “building block” for scientists to work off of in the future when developing gene therapies to treat eye disorders, said Dr. Vlad Diaconita, a retinal surgeon and assistant professor of ophthalmology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He was not involved in the trial.
    “We still have to wait a little longer to see if this pans out in the long-term,” said Dr. Aliaa Abdelhakim, an ophthalmologist-geneticist, retina specialist, and assistant professor of ophthalmology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She also was not involved in the trial.