Inspired by the Grand Rounds model and a student-organized element since the inception of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program, regularly scheduled clinical case conferences have been a staple for students in the Scholars Program.
Originating at Johns Hopkins Medical School in the late 19th century, Grand Rounds provided a new way of teaching young clinicians from the bedside. This exercise consisted of a review of a patient’s medical problems and treatment plan, with the patient present and participating in the conversation. Baffling and unique cases were often highlighted. Over the years, the original methodology has given way to new approaches. The challenges of 2020 presented yet another hurdle for student organizers, however the series, sponsored by the Cozzi Family, carried on. Despite the shuttering of laboratories at the NIH and around the world, Chad Phillips-Hart, NIH- Oxford Scholar in the MD/PhD program, managed to keep the conferences running, scheduling and executing a majority of the monthly Cozzi Family Clinical Case Conferences as planned. “Organizing the Cozzi Family Clinical Case Conferences has been such a fun, interactive medium to open the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars community to cutting-edge clinicians engaged in exceptional research. Although we do miss our in-person events, each and every speaker, both local and abroad, has been so gracious and willing to help us transition to an online platform due to the COVID19 pandemic. Each speaker brings to light key clinical pearls we will take into our future careers” explained Chad.
Scholar Olive Jung led the first ever Scholar-Mentor Cozzi Family Clinical Case Conference. Dr. Grisel J. Lopez and Dr. Ellen Sidransky joined Olive to present a case of a young patient with Gaucher disease and walk the students through the typical differential diagnostic work up of the patient’s condition. Chad led the next Scholar-Mentor Cozzi Family Clinical Case Conference with his clinical mentors, Dr. Ramya Ramaswami and Dr. Kate Lurain, who are both physicians in the HIV/AIDS Malignancy Branch at the NIH. In addition to Scholar-Mentor presentations, , the Scholars heard from alumnus Dr. Aaron Neal, who is an International Health Scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Dr. Neal guided students through international, collaborative clinical trials being conducted in the face of epidemics, from the Ebola epidemic in 2014 to the current SARS-CoV2 pandemic. Furthermore, Dr. Neal concomitantly provided a career-based discussion on how his pathway through the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program has led him to be a scientist in the Collaborative Clinical Research Branch, and help foster international collaborative efforts in mitigating and preventing pandemics.
Scholars also held Cozzi Family Clinical Case Conferences with Dr. Christina Annunziata, Senior Investigator at the Women’s Malignancies Branch of the National Cancer Institute/Center for Cancer Research at the NIH, Dr. Tom Mou, a general surgical resident at the University of California San Diego, Dr. David Stagliano, Lieutenant Colonel, Army, Division Chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and Director, Transitional Year Internship Program, National Capital Consortium, and Dr. Nirali Shah, NIH Lasker Clinical Research Scholar, NIH Distinguished Scholar in the Head, Hematologic Malignancies Section of the National Cancer Institute. In the coming months, Scholars will hear from Drs. John Dekker and Sean Agbar-Enoh, who are both NIH Lasker Clinical Research Scholars.
The Cozzi Family Clinical Case Conferences are open to all students in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. Students and speakers are also encouraged to invite members of their laboratories to attend the talks.
Mosquitoes – responsible for transmitting malaria, Zika, dengue, West Nile, chikungunya, yellow fever – are mankind’s most successful serial killers. Whilst at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the NIH, NIH Oxford-Cambridge Program Scholar Dr. Gianmarco Raddi created the first cell atlas of mosquito immune cells and discovered new types of mosquito immune cells, including a rare cell type that could be involved in limiting malaria infection. Dr. Raddi and colleagues also identified molecular pathways implicated in controlling the malaria parasite. Their results – published in Science – are the most comprehensive transcriptomic study of a whole invertebrate organism immune system to-date and represent an important advance in the fight to eradicate malaria. The new knowledge will prove useful in developing vector control strategies not only for malaria, but also Zika and Dengue, as well as to further more fundamental immunological understanding in model systems such as Drosophila.
“We have carried out the first ever large-scale survey of the mosquito immune system, and using single cell sequencing technology we found immune cell types and cell states that had never been seen before. One of these cell types – the megacytes – appear to turn on anti-malarial defences. This is the first time a cell type has been associated to malaria infection control: it is a very exciting discovery” said Dr. Raddi.
NIAID: An Anopheles gambiae mosquito, one of the mosquito species which the study examined.
Looking to the future, Dr. Raddi aims to combine academic research with clinical medicine and journalism, with particular attention to acute medicine, global health and infectious diseases. As the public’s response to the coronavirus outbreak demonstrates, science and medicine are often not enough. Even the most effective medications or public health responses can be blunted by panic and scientific illiteracy. Doctors and scientists need to engage the public with both logos – that comes easy – and pathos. Dr. Raddi’s holy grail? A regular column, and the professional leverage to engage the wider public and help stem the tide of anti-scientific thought.
The International Biomedical Research Alliance introduced two new recognition awards to honor Scholars in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge/Wellcome Trust Scholars Program who demonstrate exceptional community service and leadership. These awardees were nominated by their peers to be recognized for their exceptional leadership and service, not only to the Scholars Program, but also to the greater community. It is always an honor to be recognized, but especially notable when the recognition comes from peers who have a unique and focused view of the awardee and their efforts. The ceremony to honor the winners was held during the 2020 NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Workshop June 15th-18th.
The recipient of the International Biomedical Alliance Leadership Award is a role model for their peers and possesses the ability to inspire others to be better and do better by encouraging creativity, cooperation, promoting respect for others, emphasizing collaboration, demonstrating initiative, and adapting to new and changing needs and circumstances. The outstanding Leader has a keen sense of organization and embodies leadership in all that they endeavor, combining clarity in thought with humility in character. The recipient of this award is Hannah Mason. Hannah is a fourth year NIH-Cambridge Scholar pursuing her PhD in the laboratories of Dr. Dorian McGavern at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD and Prof. Ole Paulsen at the University of Cambridge in the UK. She studies how the brain’s immune system responds to and is shaped by repetitive head injury and degenerative processes. After Hannah completes her PhD, she will attend medical school at Emory University.
The recipient of the Building a Better Community Through Service Award honors an individual who continuously places significant importance on the well-being of their community. Committed to social responsibility, they invest their time and talent to elevate and inspire others and, in doing so, uplift the community as a whole. The recipient of this award is Lauren Wedekind. Lauren is a third year NIH-Oxford Scholar pursuing her PhD in the laboratories of Dr. Robert Hanson at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Phoenix, AZ and Prof. Mark McCarthy and Dr. Anubha Mahajan at the University of Oxford in the UK. She investigates how genetic and environmental diversity jointly influence cardiometabolic disease etiology, to ultimately shape prevention and treatment strategies.
“I am continually in awe of the passion and perseverance of this year’s awardees,” said Katie Stagliano, PhD, Executive Director, NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. “As we continue to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, our tight-knit community supports each other at home and abroad. Lauren and Hannah’s inspirational leadership and service gives me hope of a brighter future in science, health care, and our communities.”
The International Biomedical Research Alliance introduced two new recognition awards designed to honor the achievements of alumni and newly-graduated students of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. The ceremony to honor the winners was held during the 2020 NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Workshop June 15th-18th.
Dr. Danielle Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor, Bioengineering (BE), Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) at the University of Pennsylvania, was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Award which recognizes achievement of an exceptional nature in scientific and medical inquiry, professional practice, and enhancing the lives of others both personally and professionally. This Award is not given in recognition of a single remarkable achievement but is reserved for an NIH-OxCam alumni who has attained and maintained extraordinary impact throughout their career in their chosen fields of endeavor and in their service to society at large. Dr. Bassett completed her PhD in 2009 from Cambridge University. Her mentors were Daniel Weinberger and Ed Bullmore.
Dr. Bassett is well known for her work blending neural and systems engineering to identify fundamental mechanisms of cognition and disease in human brain networks. Her journey to academia was extremely unique as detailed in a feature article published in Science magazine (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6436/118). She is the recipient of multiple prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant in 2014. She is the author of more than 290 peer-reviewed publications, which have garnered over 22,000 citations (h-index 63), as well as numerous book chapters and teaching materials. She is the founding director of the Penn Network Visualization Program, a combined undergraduate art internship and K-12 outreach program bridging network science and the visual arts.
Dr. Bassett is committed to extending her work beyond the sphere of academia and into the lives of the community, including presenting her work to middle school, high school, and college youth students. Dr. Bassett is also deeply committed to enhancing and supporting diversity in science. She has been involved in organizations supporting women in STEM since her time as an undergraduate. Since arriving at Penn, she spent 5 years as the Faculty Co-advisor for Society of Women Engineers. She has also given talks and engaged in discussions at many events advancing women in science. She is currently spearheading efforts in Penn’s School of Engineering to support LGBTQ+ graduate students, and serves as a formal point-of-contact for graduate students who would like to discuss issues of diversity or climate in Penn’s Department of Bioengineering specifically and School of Engineering & Applied Science broadly. More recently, Bassett has begun contributing to the scholarly study of gender and racial disparity in academia, and developing tools to mitigate that disparity. The work began with a study of “The extent and drivers of gender imbalance in neuroscience reference lists”, now in press at Nature Neuroscience (2020; Preprint available here https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.01002). Dr. Bassett’s laboratory has proven to be an excellent training ground for new scientists. Eleven graduate students or postdocs for whom Dr. Bassett has served as either primary or secondary mentor have been placed in faculty positions. Eleven graduate students have received their PhDs and have been placed in prestigious postdoc fellowships including positions at Princeton University, University College London, and University of California San Francisco.
The International Biomedical Research Alliance introduced two new recognition awards designed to honor the achievements of alumni and newly-graduated students of the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. The ceremony to honor the winners was held during the 2020 NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Workshop June 15th-18th.
The 2020 Outstanding Recent Graduate Award was bestowed upon Dr. Jakob Seidlitz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Founder of Cooperative Open Science Network (COSciN), aiming to bridge the gap between academia and industry. The Outstanding Recent Graduate Award recognizes the noteworthy and distinctive achievements of an individual who has graduated from the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars program within the last two years. The honoree embodies the values of scientific innovation and collaboration leading to seminal biomedical discoveries at an early stage in their career.
Dr. Seidlitz was also the recipient of the 2018 IBRA Innovation Award for novel solutions in biology or medicine for discoveries of unusual importance, application, or magnitude that make use of new or unusual methods, paradigms or approaches to solve important problems in biology or medicine. Dr. Seidlitz’s work focused on adolescence — a time of major physical, chemical, and biological changes, as well as a common period of onset for various brain-related disorders. It is crucial to develop methods that help achieve a full understanding of normative neurodevelopment, allowing better characterization of aberrant neurodevelopment. His work is focused on providing such an understanding through the use of brain networks generated from multimodal neuroimaging. He is looking at new ways to integrate multiple MRI contrasts in order to create a brain network “fingerprint” for an individual. In theory, these methods will be more robust to capturing an individual’s neurobiological profile, and thus more sensitive to inter-individual differences in behavior, cognition, and psychopathology. Dr. Seidlitz’s work was published in Neuron, with a related publication co-lead by another OxCam student in Science.
“I was delighted and humbled to receive the inaugural Outstanding Recent Graduate Award. My PhD, and the work being recognized herein, is representative of what makes the OxCam program so unique – the support and freedom to pursue curious and collaborative science. A big thanks to the directors and staff for this recognition, and for making the program what it was for me and what it is today,” remarked Dr. Seidlitz.
Dr. Seidlitz’s postdoctoral fellowship finds him collaborating with another NIH OxCam alumnus, Dr. Aaron Alexander-Bloch. Under a T32 training grant at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, they are working on imaging-genetic and imaging-transcriptomic methods and applications with a focus on development and neuropsychiatric disease. A graduate of the University of Rochester, Dr. Seidlitz received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2019 as a Scholar in the prestigious NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program under Dr. Armin Raznahan (NIMH/(NIH) and Prof. Ed Bullmore (Cambridge).
First awarded in 2016, the International Biomedical Research Alliance’s Innovation Award recognizes novel solutions in biology or medicine and acknowledges discoveries of unusual importance, application, or magnitude that make use of new or unusual methods, paradigms, or approaches to solve important problems in biology or medicine. This year, the Innovation Award was graciously sponsored by BioHealth Innovation Inc. and presented to Michael Metrick. A graduate of James Madison University, Michael is working toward completion of his PhD in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program. The Scholars Program is a novel, dual-mentored, and international collaboration between the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, respectively, in the United Kingdom. The Scholars Program’s elite students conduct their own biomedical research project in an average completion time of 4.2 years. Michael is in the MD/PhD track and his MD is in progress at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Michael is mentored by Prof. Byron Caughey at the NIH’s National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana and Prof. Michele Vendruscolo at the University of Cambridge.
“I couldn’t believe it when I heard my name announced at the 2020 NIH Global Doctoral Partnerships Research Workshop Awards Ceremony,” Michael stated. “It wasn’t until I received messages from my peers congratulating me that it sunk in! My thesis project is basic science oriented and draws on many fundamental chemical and physical principles to better understand biology. It means a lot to me to have this sort of basic science work recognized. I hope it also encourages others who might feel overshadowed by the more abundant biological and translational type of work. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to conduct this work in labs that allowed me to freely pursue my ideas, which I recognize as a rare privilege that I’m trying to make the most of. Thank you, BioHealth Innovation, for sponsoring this award.”
Recently, the self-propagating nature of prions has been leveraged to develop ultrasensitive biomarker assays (called RT-QuIC) that allow accurate antemortem diagnosis of prion diseases. By exploiting these advances, Michael has adapted the RT-QuIC to study tauopathies and synucleinopathies. He proposed and executed systematic analyses of multiple factors that control the performance of multiple types of RT-QuIC assays for pathological aggregates of tau and α-synuclein in biospecimens. This work markedly improved the analytical sensitivities and specificities of key assays, including those for Alzheimer’s, Pick’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, and chronic wasting disease in cervids. Michael innovated the use of FTIR spectroscopy of tau RT-QuIC products to differentiate distinct disease-associated conformers, or strains, of tau aggregates. As a result of this work, Michael has developed an additional project, which is focused on dissecting the physical underpinnings of how amyloid proteins aggregate to form distinct conformations that give rise to different diseases. “We’re hoping that this methodology can accelerate this analysis by several months’ time, which can allow us to more quickly identify and analyze different small molecule inhibitors of the tau amyloid aggregation process in vitro,” said Michael.
Richard Bendis, BioHealth Innovation Inc.’s Founder, President and CEO stated “Michael is the type of talented early career scientist that our regional ecosystem needs. We were proud to sponsor this year’s Innovation Award for a deserving student in the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program.”
About BioHealth Innovation, Inc.
BioHealth Innovation, Inc., is a regional innovation intermediary which supports the transformation of research projects into new business opportunities in partnership with the region’s rich assets, institutions, and entrepreneurial community. BHI achieves this goal by being a catalytic partner in the economic development ecosystem. Learn more at www.biohealthinnovation.org.
About NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program
Created in 2001, the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program is a collaboration between the NIH and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to revolutionize the way in which the most talented biomedical PhD and MD/PhD students are trained. Participants in the program receive accelerated training and work on their own collaborative research project to address critical biomedical research problems. Trainees graduate in an average of 4.2 years with a PhD degree. To learn more visit www.oxcam.gpp.nih.go
About the International Biomedical Research Alliance
Founded in 2005, The Alliance’s mission is to support the NIH Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program and associated global PhD and MD/PhD training programs based in the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, America’s largest biomedical research organization. Our goal is to assure the financial viability and scientific excellence of the Scholars Program by supplementing government funding. The Alliance supports events, awards, and career developed initiatives designed to enrich the Scholars Program and broaden the perspectives of its students as they train to become the next leaders in biomedical research. For more information, please visit www.biomedalliance.org.
