Congratulations to M&I faculty member Maureen Su, winner of a Jefferson-Pilot Fellowship that recognizes outstanding junior faculty. It’s been a good month for Maureen, who also just learned that she has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. See the link below for an engaging interview in which she describes her path from valley girl … Read more

In this interview, M&I Assistant Professor Ed Miao talks about his choices in education and career, as well as his research interests in innate immune responses to microbes. Don’t miss his analogy that explains caspase-11 in the context of a home alarm system.   The Battle against Microscopic Bugs Edward Miao, MD, PhD, earns a … Read more

A UNC Newsroom article on Ellen Perkowski (Miriam Braunstein’s lab) discusses her background, some key life choices, and her research on Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Read the interview/story at the link below.   Taking on Tuberculosis Graduate student Ellen Perkowski created a new tool to study how tuberculosis survives, thrives, and escapes our immune system defenses.

A PNAS article from Dirk Dittmer’s group demonstrates how targeted next-generation sequencing allowed them to identify single nucleotide variants in patients with primary effusion lymphoma (PEL), a herpesvirus-associated cancer. One of the consistent mutations is in the gene encoding IL-1 receptor-association kinase 1 (IRAK1) and introduces a novel phosphorylation site. See the article at the … Read more

Congratulations to Youssef (postdoc in Ed Miao’s lab) and Vineet (postdoc in Ralph Baric’s lab) for being selected as 2014 recipients of these awards that recognize outstanding postdocs throughout the UNC campus. The awards will be presented in a ceremony on November 17. See the article at the link below.   Postdoc Awards for Research … Read more

For this year’s FASEB BioArt competition, the Griffith lab generated one of the award-winning images using single particle reconstruction of the ICP8 protein from HSV-1. See all the winning images and videos at http://www.faseb.org/About-FASEB/Scientific-Contests/BioArt/2014-BioArt-Winners.aspx

Congratulations to M&I Assistant Professor Ed Miao for winning this prestigious award established by the UNC Medical Foundation through the generosity of the Jefferson-Pilot Corporation. This annual award is given to junior faculty members at the School of Medicine in recognition of both past performance and future promise in research. M&I faculty who have received … Read more

This month marks M&I Professor Fred Sparling’s retirement after a 45-year career at UNC. He was the third Chair of M&I (1981-1989) and the fifth Chair of the Department of Medicine (1989-2000). After Fred became Director of the Southeastern Regional Center for Excellence for Biodefense (SERCEB), UNC emerged as the headquarters of a diverse biodefense … Read more

The summer months are a busy time for research conferences, and M&I has been well-represented in the programming of a wide variety of international meetings: Blossom Damania was invited to speak at the Second International Symposium on Viral Strategies of Immune Evasion (Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, Braunschweig, Germany). Beth Shank and Stephani Page (graduate … Read more

A new Nature Medicine article (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25064127) from Stan Lemon’s group shows how lipid peroxides downregulate the efficiency of HCV replication, limiting tissue damage and facilitating viral persistence. See the UNC News story at the link below. news.unchealthcare.org/news/2014/july/unc-researchers-discover-how-hepatitis-c-virus-persists-for-years