Community Engagement

Twenty years ago, a small local chapter of the American Lung Association took on the daring task of bringing an Airways Clinical Research Center (ACRC) to Vermont. On February 28, clinicians, patients, donors, staff and board members gathered to celebrate two decades of lung disease treatment research in the only ACRC in a rural area - the Vermont Lung Center at UVM's ACRC, part of the nation’s largest not-for-profit network of clinical research centers dedicated to asthma and COPD treatment.

Dozens of preceptors, as well as leaders and staff from the Larner College of Medicine and its Longitudinal Integrated Clerkship (LIC) partner Hudson Headwaters Health Network (HHHN), gathered at the historic Queensbury Hotel in Glens Falls, N.Y. for dinner and community project presentations by Class of 2020 medical students Dylon Gookin, Isabella Kratzer, Chad Serels and Collin York on February 20.

The 18th annual Cultural Awareness Conference at the University of Vermont on February 20, 2019 focused on “Opioid Use Disorder: What is Our Role in Building a Humanistic Response?”

The University of Vermont Board of Trustees announced today that Suresh Garimella, Ph.D., will become the University’s 27th president. His appointment will be effective July 1, 2019.

Now 15 years old, the Public Health Projects course at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine has yielded well over 200 projects in partnership with the United Way of Northwest Vermont, dozens of community collaborators and more than 100 professional publications. On January 23, members of the Class of 2021 showcased their work at a Poster Session & Community Celebration.

UVM's 2019 MLK Celebration and Learning Series included a Health Equity Lecture at the College of Medicine featuring Herman A. Taylor, Jr., M.D., director, Cardiovascular Research Institute, at the Morehouse School of Medicine, on January 23.

The NIH announced December 3, 2018 that enrollment for the landmark Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study is now complete and, in early 2019, scientists will have access to baseline data from all ABCD Study participants. There are over 11,874 youth, ages 9-10, participating in the study at 21 research sites around the country, including the University of Vermont (UVM).

Eight students from the Larner College of Medicine at UVM have been selected to complete one-year-long Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships at Hudson Headwaters Health Network in Queensbury, N.Y., and the new pilot program at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin, Vt.

An innovative initiative that will use a public health approach to inform opioid prescribing policies will be launched in northern New England thanks to a new $339,000 grant to the Northern New England Clinical and Translational Research (NNE-CTR) Network from the National Institutes of Health.

Vaccinations have begun in a first-in-human trial of an experimental live, attenuated Zika virus vaccine developed by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. The trial will enroll a total of 28 healthy, non-pregnant adults ages 18 to 50 at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Immunization Research in Baltimore, Md., and at the Vaccine Testing Center at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont in Burlington.