Graduate and Postdoctoral Training

Vermont is among the top ten states in per capita research funding in the U.S., according to a State of Research at the College presentation delivered by Larner College of Medicine Senior Associate Dean for Research Gordon Jensen, M.D., Ph.D., at the Dean’s Excellence in Research Awards event held November 13, 2017. The last of three 2017 Celebrating Excellence in Research events held at the College on November 10 and 13, 2017, the awards ceremony recognized the accomplishments of faculty, residents, medical students, graduate students and postdoctoral trainees.

Cells grown in a petri dish behave differently than cells that reside in a human being or animal. In order to help bridge the divide between these two worlds and gain a better understanding of what causes disease, Patrick Mullen works in both, comparing results he sees in the lab of Christopher Francklyn, Ph.D., an expert in protein synthesis enzymes, with animal studies conducted in the lab of Alicia Ebert, Ph.D., a biology professor known for her work with zebrafish.

Nearly 25 years ago, University of Vermont faculty hatched a novel idea: empower undergraduate students to take a step forward in their career pursuits by dipping into master’s-level courses — accelerating the pace at which they could obtain a degree.

Sometimes new insight comes from simply crunching the numbers. In Robin Leopold’s case, lots of numbers. For his fourth-year scholarly project, the soon-to-be graduate of the UVM Larner College of Medicine decided to dig into the data regarding the number of women who receive annual mammograms despite a diagnosis of an advanced non-breast malignancy.

Think of the immune system as the shepherd, and bacteria as the sheep, says Dimitry Krementsov, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Immunobiology at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont.

The University of Vermont Graduate College will be hosting a University Scholar lecture by Ira M. Bernstein, M.D.'83, John Van Sicklen Maeck Professor and chair of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the Larner College of Medicine, on Wednesday, February 8, 2017 at 4:00 p.m. in Waterman Memorial Lounge. Bernstein will be discussing “Pregnancy and Preeclampsia: Insights into Women’s Health.”

UVM Vaccine Testing Center researcher E. Ross Colgate, M.P.H., spent two years working in Bangladesh trying to understand why a rotavirus vaccine that prevents the majority of cases in the U.S. works only 40 to 60 percent of the time in Bangladeshi infants. Finding an answer could save hundreds of thousands of lives given rotavirus’ status as the leading cause of diarrhea in young children worldwide, among whom diarrhea is the second leading cause of death.

How do you carefully remove all of the cells from a lung, and then repopulate that ‘scaffold’ with stem cells from a new host? As a summer research fellow in the lab of Professor of Medicine Daniel Weiss, M.D., Ph.D., medical student Chris Bernard ‘19 spent several months testing and re-testing processes and procedures, inching ever closer to an answer to that question.

The Robert Larner, M.D. College of Medicine at The University of Vermont will offer a new online Certificate of Graduate Study in Health Care Management and Policy starting in January.

The UVM Medical Alumni Association (MAA) is hosting the 2016 Graduate Student Research Showcase Program on Tuesday, October 18, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

ABC22/Fox44 aired a news segment promoting the M.S. Society of New England’s Sat., April 2 Vermont WALK M.S. Reporter Staci DaSilva interviewed multiple sclerosis researcher Dimitry Krementsov, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine, for the story. View a video clip of the interview here.

Winooski, Vt.-based BioTek Instruments announced August 31, 2016 that University of Vermont graduate student Christopher Ziegler is the recipient of the 2016 Norman R. Alpert Research Prize.

Innovation in healthcare begins and ends with the patient,” says University of Vermont medical student Alexander Marchese ’19, who adds that “although technologies are developed in the lab, they are often conceived in the clinic and can only be fully appreciated once they reach the patient.”

The University of Vermont is launching a new graduate certificate program in fall 2016 that features a concise, six-course immersion in the quantitative sciences of public health used for analyzing diseases and health-related conditions.

University of Vermont Cellular, Molecular and Biomedical Sciences graduate student Jessica Sheehe has come to know all of the quirks of a protein called PKG: She’s responsible for expressing and purifying PKG in the lab and ensuring that the billions of insect cells tricked into producing this protein remain healthy.