Category: feature

The “Food is Medicine” research partnership led by Dr. Seth Berkowitz is awarded a $3.25M grant by the National Institutes of Health. This second grant will support further research of medically tailored meal programs and investigate how addressing food insecurity impacts diabetes management for people with HIV.

Dr. Greg Scherrer, associate professor in the UNC Department of Cell Biology and Physiology, was selected for the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience. The Scherrer lab will generate a brain-wide map of pain emotional circuits in addition to separating out activated brain cells and sequencing their genetic code, with the...

Dr. Jennifer Elston Lafata was awarded $750K by Genentech to study how virtual care programs in cancer are considering equity and disparity issues. The goal of this research is to consider how virtual cancer care can improve quality and patient outcomes while reducing current health disparities. This research will be...

Dr. Katarzyna Kedziora, postdoctoral researcher in the UNC SOM Department of Genetics, was awarded a $740K Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Grant. Dr.Kedziora’s work will provide the imaging community with better access to improve data and metadata handling, the sharing of imaging datasets, and data quality control and reproducibility through machine and...

Dr. Jonathan Schisler, assistant professor of pharmacology and pathology & laboratory medicine at the UNC School of Medicine is a co-senior author of this study focused on determining the driver of cellular damage during space travel. Mitochondria defects are found to explain a series of health issues observed in astronauts...

Providers at UNC Medical Center and the UNC SOM will train the U.S. Army’s Forward Resuscitation Surgical Teams and other medical personnel from Fort Bragg, NC. Military personnel will have the opportunity to gain real-world experience in UNC Medical Center’s emergency department, ICU and operating rooms.

Drs. Senyene Hunter and Diana Dejas are this year’s recipients of the UNC Broyhill Research Award in Child Neurology. Dr. Hunter was awarded $25,000 to study novel genetic defects in participants with infantile spasms, and Dr. Cejas was awarded $12,500 to improve the transition of patients with neurodevelopment spasms from...

Researchers from UNC’s Departments of Genetics and Computer Science led the international consortium to develop the Mini Mouse Universal Genotyping Array (MiniMUGA). This tool intends to improve researchers’ understanding of the genetics of mouse models. The team included 69 researchers spanning UNC, in addition to partners from six other institutions.

UNC School of Medicine lab of Dr. Qi Zhang utilized MRI technology to discover a mechanism to regulate microRNA. MicroRNA are essential to gene regulation, and abnormal microRNA can be linked to cancer and other diseases. Understanding the role of microRNA is important to developing better RNA-targeted therapeutics.

Dr. Evan S. Dellon, winner of a 2018 Innovation Pilot Award from the Center for Health Innovation, is the co-leader of the Anti-Siglec-8 Antibody Trial. This phase-2 trial is the first randomized trial for eosinophilic gastritis and duodenitis, and shows promise for treating these underdiagnosed diseases.