Leadership

Eugene P. Orringer, MD

Program Director UNC MD-PhD
Professor of Medicine
Executive Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Faculty Development

Eugene P. Orringer received an A.B. in Zoology from the University of Michigan in 1965 and an M.D. from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in 1969. He then moved to Chapel Hill, NC where, in 1975, after training in both Internal Medicine and Hematology, he joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal 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 ten year period that began in 1989. In 1999, he was named to his present position as Executive Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Faculty Development in the UNC School of Medicine.

Dr. Orringer's research activities have 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. Dr. Orringer has consistently held peer-reviewed grant support from the NIH for the past 26 years. Upon assuming the Directorship of the GCRC, he began to focus more and more of his efforts on clinical and translational research.

In addition to his own research activities, Dr. Orringer has been consistently involved in the training of young people. He has for years been a participant in numerous NIH-funded pre- and post-doctoral training programs. In 1995, Dr. Orringer assumed the Directorship of the UNC MD-PhD Program that has now grown from 12 to 65 students.  Dr. Orringer is also the Principal Investigator on three separate K12 awards from the NIH. These include: the Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (or BIRCWH) award; the Mentored Clinical Research Scholar Program Award; and the Multidisciplinary Clinical Research Career Development (Roadmap) Award. In addition, Dr. Orringer developed and currently directs two institutionally-funded junior faculty development programs: the Simmons (Minority) Scholar Program and the UNC Program in Translational Science. The three K12 awards combined with the two institutionally-funded programs are currently supporting 40 junior faculty members, all of whom are committed to academic, research-oriented careers.

In addition to these training programs, Dr. Orringer and Dr. Marilyn Telen, his counterpart from Duke University, together direct the combined Duke-UNC Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center. This five year center grant from National Heart Lung & Blood Institute (NHLBI) employs the U54 mechanism to support a variety of basic and clinical research projects at our two institutions. Drs. Telen and Orringer also developed two additional sickle cell-related R01 grants. These are entitled: Outcome Modifying Genes in Sickle Cell Disease and Pulmonary Complications of Sickle Cell Disease.

Dr. Orringer has served 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 is Treasurer and a member of the Steering Committee Clinical Research Forum. He currently serves as a member of two NIH Advisory Committees: the Sickle Cell Disease Branch of the NHLBI and the Office of Research on Women’s Health. Finally, Dr. Orringer was the 2006 recipient of the Philip Hench Award, an honor given to an individual selected by the School of Medicine of the University of Pittsburgh as its most distinguished alumnus of the year.

David P. Siderovski, PhD

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

Dr. David P. Siderovski, Associate 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 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