CUIMC Update - May 29, 2024

May 29, 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

New Chef and Dining Options at Faculty Club
You can now dine in for lunch at the Faculty Club, which has a new head chef, Keily Busby, the 2018 runner-up of MasterChef Dominican Republic.

VP&S Open Forum: June 3 at 1 p.m.
All VP&S faculty and staff are invited to attend the next VP&S Open Forum on Monday, June 3, at 1 p.m. VP&S leadership will share updates on community engagement, education, and other campus initiatives.

New York City Students Celebrate Graduation from a Columbia STEM Program
More than 300 New York City middle and high school students celebrated their graduation from Columbia’s State Pre-College Enrichment Program (S-PREP) this month.

Fort Washington Greenmarket Opens June 4
Members of the CUIMC community are invited to visit the Fort Washington Greenmarket on Haven Plaza for local produce and specialty food products, occasional cooking demos, and seasonal celebrations. The site will be open every Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. through Nov. 26.

How to Stay Safe During "Fungus Summer"
The yeast Candida auris is a global health threat that can cause a range of infections, from mouth, skin, or vaginal yeast infections to very severe infections when it grows out of control. Gregory Berry, associate professor of pathology & cell biology at VP&S, shares what to know about Candida fungi and how to help stop the spread.

Events

Grants

Mailman School of Public Health

  • Julie Herbstman and Amy Margolis, Environmental Health Sciences
    $7,646,645 over two years from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for "Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health in ECHO II: Impact of environmental exposures on children's health and the co-morbidity of asthma and ADHD."
  • Alfred Neugut, Epidemiology
    $1,032,911 over two years from Kyowa Kirin for "Columbia Center for Clinical Pharmacoepidemiology, Pharmacovigilance, and Health Outcomes Research."
  • Miriam Rabkin, ICAP
    $30,000,000 over five years from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for "Strengthening Regional, National, and Subnational Institutional Capacities to Sustainably Combat HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis under the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)."

School of Nursing

  • Rebecca Schnall
    $5,158,684 over five years from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities for "MyPEEPS Mobile Plus: A Multi-Level HIV Prevention Intervention for Young MSM."

Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

  • Anca Askanase, Medicine
    $1,496,478 over three years from the Department of Health & Human Services for "Tri-State Area Lupus Outreach and Clinical Trial Education Program."
  • Jason Carmel, Neurology
    $755,336 over two years for a subaward from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for "Sensitrak: Automated assessment of forelimb sensation—Phase II."
  • Philip De Jager, Neurology
    $31,360,905 over five years from the National Institute on Aging for "Defining the effect of Alzheimer pathologies on the aged brain in 3 dimensions."
  • Dympna Gallagher, Medicine
    $615,836 over five years from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for "Support Mentoring of Early Career Clinical Researchers from Diverse Backgrounds."
  • Thomas Hays, Pediatrics
    $832,885 over five years from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for "The Genetic Basis of Morbidity and Mortality in Small for Gestational Age Preterm Infants."
  • Krzysztof Kiryluk, Medicine
    $3,977,544 over five years from the National Human Genome Research Institute for "Multi-Omics for Chronic Kidney Disease."
  • Matthew Lebowitz, Psychiatry
    $2,355,965 over four years from the National Human Genome Research Institute for "Genetic Attributions and Racialized Perceptions of Obesity."
  • Marcin Leszczynski, Psychiatry
    $252,004 over five years for a subaward from the National Institute of Mental Health for "Neurobiology and Cognitive Role of Slow Brain Network Fluctuations."
  • Shawn Liu, Physiology & Cellular Biophysics
    $3,998,028 over five years from the National Institute of Mental Health for "MeCP2 reactivation from the inactive X chromosome as treatment for Rett syndrome."
  • Monica Lypson, Vice Dean For Education
    $610,765 over five years for a subaward from the Health Resources and Services Administration for "Northeast Regional Alliance (NERA) HCOP Academy MedPrep Program."
  • Joseph John Mann, Psychiatry
    $827,905 over five years for a subaward from the National Institute on Aging for "Comparison of normal aging with Alzheimer's Disease: cellular, synaptic, and vascular indices affecting brain plasticity and neurogenesis."
  • Randolph Marshall, Neurology
    $2,236,659 over five years from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for "Stroke Trials Network of Columbia and Cornell."
  • Uma Reddy, Kelli Hall, and Jacquelyn Taylor, Obstetrics & Gynecology
    $2,328,060 over seven years from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for "NY Community-Hospital-Academic Maternal Health Equity Partnerships."
  • Lena S. Sun, Anesthesiology
    $1,721,851 over four years from the Food & Drug Administration for "Health and Neurodevelopmental Outcomes in Infants at Risk for Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndromes (NOWS): Effects of Timing and Duration of Prenatal Opioid Exposure (POE) & Postnatal Management with Eat-Sleep-Console (ESC)."
  • Giuseppe Tosto, Sergievsky Center
    $14,231,266 over five years from the National Institute on Aging for "Latino Sequencing Study for AD 30."
  • Aaron Viny, Medicine
    $2,484,921 over five years from the National Cancer Institute for "The role of the cohesin complex in hematopoietic transformation and leukemia maintenance."
  • Harris Wang, Systems Biology
    $452,375 over two years from the National Human Genome Research Institute for "Rapid and efficient generation of sequence variants by templated synthesis."
  • Chunhua Weng, Biomedical Informatics
    $3,414,865 over five years from the National Library of Medicine for "ClinEX – Clinical Evidence Extraction, Representation, and Appraisal."
  • Shirley ShiDu Yan, Surgery
    $3,655,230 over five years from the National Institute on Aging for "Role of clearance of toxic metabolites in mitochondrial and tau pathology."
  • Yiyi Zhang, Medicine
    $335,885 over four years for a subaward from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute for "Bayesian machine learning for causal inference with incomplete longitudinal covariates and censored survival outcomes."
  • Zhiguo Zhang, Institute for Cancer Genetics
    $2,288,841 over five years from the National Cancer Institute for "Epigenetic dependence of diffuse midline glioma with H3K27M mutation."

Honors

Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

Social Media Snapshot

Columbia Medicine | The #ColumbiaNursing alumni passed down their wisdom to the newly graduated nurses. 🎓

In the News Highlights

  • Fauci Warns Columbia Medical Graduates of Conspiracy Theories, Anti-Science Rhetoric
    May 16, 2024
    NBC 4 New York (video)
    In his commencement speech to Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons graduates, Dr. Anthony Fauci shared three lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Scientists Are Studying Weight-Loss Drugs for Way More Than Weight Loss
    May 21, 2024
    TIME
    Reproductive health experts caution that the connection may not be as direct as people might think. “What would surprise nobody is that getting weight into normal range will promote fertility,” says Dr. Zev Williams, director of the Columbia University Fertility Center. “If that’s through diet, exercise or medications, the net result is that there is a common pathway from reducing obesity to improving fertility.”
  • Bizarre Bacteria Defy Textbooks by Writing New Genes
    May 22, 2024
    Nature Magazine
    Bacteria fend off viruses and other invaders by deploying myriad defences, such as the juggernaut gene-editing system CRISPR. One of the more mysterious defence systems contains the DNA gene for a reverse transcriptase and a short stretch of mysterious RNA without any clear function: the sequence didn’t seem to encode any protein. To work out how this system works, a team co-led by molecular biologist Stephen Tang and biochemist Samuel Sternberg, both at Columbia University in New York City, searched for the DNA molecules made by a reverse transcriptase from bacteria called Klebsiella pneumoniae.