Dr. Justin Lathia has just been awarded the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute’s Inaugural Rising Star Award. This new, prestigious award honors scientists who are in their first 10 years of independent research with a rising trajectory in publications and funding, and who are strongly committed to making Lerner a better place. The Lerner Institute is home to basic, translational, and clinical research at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic (the number 2 hospital in the nation according to US News and World Report 2017 rankings).
After graduating from the NIH OxCam program in 2008, Dr. Justin Lathia became a post-doctoral fellow at Duke University and also at the Cleveland Clinic. He was hired as a faculty member in 2012. Dr. Lathia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Lerner Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic and mentor’s a lab of over 10 people, ranging from graduate students to postdocs to fellows. His work focuses mainly on malignant brain tumors, but his technology and interests are applicable to many other tumor types.
An incredible woman in science and inspiration to many, Dr. Dani Bassett is someone everyone should be watching! Dr. Dani Bassett, NIH OxCam Class of 2009, received her PhD in Physics under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Duke, Dr. Ed Bullmore, and Dr. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg. Then, she went on to become a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of California Santa Barbara and also, a Sage Junior Research Fellow, before become a faculty member at The University of Pennsylvania.
The Bassett Lab focuses on isolating problems at the intersection of basic science, engineering, and clinical medicine that can be tackled using systems-level approaches. They seek to develop new mathematical methods with the goal of predicting system behavior and designing perturbations to affect a specific outcome. The Bassett lab also develops analytic tools to probe the “hard-wired pathways and transient communication patterns inside of the brain in an effort to identify organizational principles, to develop novel diagnostics of disease, and to design personalized therapeutics for rehabilitation and treatment of brain injury, neurological disease, and psychiatric disorders.”
In 2014, she was the youngest individual to be awarded a MacArthur fellowship. Not to mention, in 2016, she was named one of the ten most brilliant scientists of the year by Popular Science magazine. Dr. Bassett is an Eduardo D. Glandt Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania mentoring more than 20 members and has seen even more go on to become students and professors at prestigious institutions. She was recently named the 2018 recipient of the Erdős-Rényi Prize in Network Science by the Network Science Society (NetSci) for her “fundamental contributions to our understanding of the network architecture of the human brain, its evolution over learning and development, and its alteration in neurological disease.”
The Lasker Lessons in Leadership lecture series provides strategies for developing essential leadership skills to PhD and MD/PhD students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. The series is a collaboration between the International Biomedical Research Alliance, the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation and the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. Dr. Anne Schuchat, Principal Deputy Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was the keynote speaker for the Lasker Lessons in Leadership event held on November 30, 2017 Her talk entitled “Going Public: From the Bedside to the Big Picture”
Scholars in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program recently experienced a career development field trip to the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The trip to NIBR, sponsored by the Alliance and thoughtfully coordinated by Drs. Eric Svensson and Jang-Ho Cha of Novartis, spanned a full day at the newly constructed $600 million campus in Cambridge. The agenda included research presentations made by both NIH OxCam Scholars and Novartis scientists, a synopsis of the Novartis Malaria Program, neuroscience and physician scientist career path panels, an overview of the NIBR Post-Doc Program, and a walking tour of the Novartis facilities. Patricia Gruver, Senior Science & Innovation Officer at the British Consulate General in Boston, made a morning visit to greet and welcome the Scholars. NIBR’s dynamic president, Dr. Jay Bradner, addressed the Scholars during their visit. Scholar Career Development Field Trips are a newly created initiative aimed at exposing Scholars to a variety a career options as well as providing an opportunity for Scholars to conduct formal presentations on their research.
To infinity and beyond! It’s not such far out concept as Scholars learned on a recent career development field trip to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Established in 1959 and named for American rocketry pioneer Dr. Robert H. Goddard, it is home to the nation’s largest organization of scientists, engineers, and technologists who build spacecraft, instruments, and new technology to study Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe. Goddard is home to Hubble operations and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Goddard manages communications between mission control and orbiting astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Goddard scientists stare into the sun, grind up meteorites for signs of life’s building blocks, consider the farthest reaches of space, and untangle the mysteries of our changing world.
The Goddard visit was focused on astrobiology (one of the many topics of science that NASA researches). Astrobiology is the study of the origins and evolution of life in the universe and on Earth. Astrobiology addresses whether life exists outside Earth and how we can detect signs of life in other areas of the universe. This field employs many of the scientific techniques that traditional biologists (like those at the NIH) use to understand the chemistry and evolution of life, but it also employs techniques developed to study the universe such as those used in astronomy, astrophysics, and aerospace engineering. For example, one of the NASA missions presented to the Scholars during their visit was OSIRIS-Rex, which involved using a satellite to intercept an asteroid and return a sample to Earth. Scientists believe that some of the precursor molecules important to life on Earth may have had origins in space. The researchers at NASA Goddard wanted to sample compounds from the asteroid to see if such molecules could be found on it.
Scholar Lindsey Rosen shared that astrobiology is more physics and analytical chemistry than it is biology: “Their aim is to study specimens retrieved from meteorites and asteroids for organic and inorganic compounds, thus determining if such environments are suitable for life (single-celled organisms and such). We also heard from folks who design instruments that are sent to Mars or used for meteorite/asteroid specimen collection. Such instruments are the result of international collaborations where many different institutions around the world contribute various devices.”
For many of the Scholars, space exploration has been an inspiring area of science from the time they were children. The fundamental questions that NASA seeks to answer are important to all of us: How did the universe form? Are there other life forms out there? Additionally, the advanced and diverse technology that NASA uses in its research is exciting and fascinating.
Scholar Keval Patel noted that “personally, space exploration was one of the main reasons for my pursuit of an engineering and science education. My lifelong dream is to travel to space and perform science that pushes the limits of human space exploration.”
