Leadership

Eugene P. Orringer, MD

Program Director, UNC MD-PhD Program
Professor of Medicine & Director,
Education/Training/Career Development Core- NC TraCS Institute

Dr. Orringer received his MD from the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh in 1969. He then moved to Chapel Hill, NC where, in 1975, after training in both Internal Medicine and Hematology, he joined the UNC faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine. Dr. Orringer was promoted to Associate Professor in 1979 and to Professor in 1986. He served as the Program Director of UNC’s NIH-funded General Clinical Research Center (GCRC) for a 10 year period that began in 1989. In 1999, he was named as the Executive Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs & Faculty Development in the UNC School of Medicine, a position that he held until late 2009.

Dr. Orringer's early research activities focused primarily on the membrane transport properties of the normal human erythrocyte and on its disordered physiology in a variety of pathological states, especially sickle cell disease. He received a Research Career Development Award from NHLBI in 1982, and for the past 28 years he has consistently held peer-reviewed grant support from the NIH. Along with Dr. Marilyn Telen, his counterpart at Duke University, Dr. Orringer helped to develop and lead the NIH-funded Duke-UNC Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center. For 20 years, this Center has been held up as a model of Duke-UNC inter-institutional collaboration. In 1989, Dr. Orringer assumed the Directorship of the UNC GCRC, after which he began to focus more and more of his efforts on clinical and translational research. He was a national leader in the NIH-funded clincial trials that demonstrated the ability of hydroxyurea (HU) to reduce the frequency and severity of the episodes of painful vaso-occlusion and acute chest syndrome that are experienced by patients with sickle cell anemia. These studies were pivotal in the approval by the FDA of HU as the only drug currently available specifically for the treatment of sickle cell disease. In addition, over the past five years, Drs. Telen and Orringer have held two large, multi-institutional sickle cell-related R01 awards from NIH that are entitled: Outcome Modifying Genes in Sickle Cell Disease and Pulmonary Complications of Sickle Cell Disease.

In addition to his own research activities, Dr. Orringer has focused much of his effort on the training of young investigators, playing a major role in numerous NIH-funded pre- and post-doctoral training programs. In 1995, Dr. Orringer became the Director of the UNC MD-PhD Program. Less than two years after assuming this new role, Dr. Orringer and his team wrote UNC’s first successful Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) grant from the NIH, an award that is now in Year -13. This grant has enabled the UNC MD-PhD Program to grow from 12 students in 1995 to its current level of 73 students. In addition to the MSTP Award, Dr. Orringer is the PI of a K12 grant supported primarily by the Office of Research on Women’s Health that is entitled the: Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (or BIRCWH) Award. UNC’s BIRCWH Program has just now begun its third five-year term after receiving an exceptional Priority Score of 10 on its recent competitive renewal. He was also the PI on two other K12 Awards: the Clinical Research K12 and the Multidisciplinary Clinical Research (Roadmap) K12, both of which were funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR). These latter two K12 awards were folded into the CTSA grant after it was awarded to UNC in 2008. Dr. Orringer serves as the Director of the Education, Training, & Career Development Core of UNC’s CTSA Program. Under the umbrella of this core, Dr. Orringer has been able to bring together a number of programs for both pre-doctoral students (i.e., TL1, MD-PhD, Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship, and the Howard Hughes Med-into-Grad Program) and junior faculty members (i.e., KL2, BIRCWH, Simmons [Minority] Scholar Program, the AHRQ-funded K12 Comparative Effectiveness Research, and the K2R Program). Finally, when he gave up the directorship and day-to-day management of the GCRC in 1999, he remained actively involved with this program, serving as the PI of UNC’s GCRC grant until 2008 when it too was subsumed within UNC’s CTSA. Based on all of these large NIH awards, Dr. Orringer has been among the highest of all NIH awardees in terms of NIH grant dollars received both here at UNC and nationally.

Dr. Orringer has served two terms as a member (and Chairperson) of the NIH Sickle Cell Disease Advisory Committee, as a member of the NIH GCRC Study Section, and as the President of the National GCRC Program Directors’ Association. He also served for 20 years on the North Carolina Governor's Council on Sickle Cell Disease, chairing the Medical Care & Research Committee. He is a member of the Steering Committee and the former Treasurer of the Clinical Research Forum, and he was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee for the Office of Research on Women’s Health. Finally, Dr. Orringer was the 2006 recipient of the Philip Hench Award, an honor given annually to that individual selected by the School of Medicine of the University of Pittsburgh as its most distinguished alumnus.

David P. Siderovski, PhD

Thomas J. Dark Research Director, UNC MD-PhD Program
Professor of Pharmacology

Dr. David P. Siderovski, Professor of Pharmacology, came back to academia in 1999, after four years working in drug discovery with AMGEN Inc. His research is centered on a unique family of molecules he discovered in 1996 – the Regulators of G-protein Signaling or “RGS proteins” – that modify the duration and strength of signaling from cell-surface G protein-coupled receptors. Dr. Siderovski’s group uses bioinformatics and cross-genome analyses to parse out new aspects of RGS protein architecture, then employs structural and cell biology, biochemistry and genetics to validate these predictions and hypotheses. Dr. Siderovski’s discovery and research on RGS proteins has resulted in over 60 peer-reviewed papers in the past 7 years, as well as editorialship over two volumes of the journal Methods in Enzymology dedicated to this protein superfamily. He has received four notable career awards since joining Carolina: a Year 2000 Neuroscience Research Scholar Award from the EJLB Foundation, the Burroughs-Wellcome Pharmacological Sciences New Investigator Award in 2001, the 2004 John Jacob Abel Award to the Outstanding American Pharmacologist under 40 from the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, and the 2006 Philip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

David Siderovski's Lab Site

MD-PhD Executive Committee

In addition to the leadership of Drs Orringer and Siderovski, the UNC MD-PhD Program is lead by the MD-PhD Executive Committee. This small committee comprised of basic science and clinical chairs as well as current MD-PhD student mentors help guide the leadership on important programmatic issues and concerns.

Alison Regan

Assistant Director

Carol Herion

Program Assistant