Briefs
Collaborative center created
The Baylor College of Medicine division of cardiothoracic surgery has partnered with The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and The University of Texas Medical School at Houston to research thoracic aortic disease with an $11.6 million, five-year inter-institutional grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute that will create the Specialized Center for Clinically Oriented Research in Thoracic Aortic Aneurysms and Dissections. The program will be directed by Diana Milewicz, M.D., professor and director of the division of medical genetics at the UT Medical School at Houston, and co-directed by Joseph Coselli, M.D., professor and chief of cardiothoracic surgery at BCM, and Dr. Hazim Safi, professor and chair of the department of cardiothoracic vascular surgery at the UT Medical School at Houston.
The research funded by the grant will focus on identifying genetic determinants and biomarkers associated with aortic dissections. The grant includes three projects and six related "cores" to support the research activity.
FASEB summer research conference honors Brinkley
A summer research conference sponsored by the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology honored Bill Brinkley, Ph.D., senior vice president and dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, and his pioneering work as the "father of the field of mitotic spindle assembly."
The conference, "Mitosis; Spindle Assembly and Function," took place at Indian Wells, Calif., and featured more than 125 participants from the United States and other countries. The highlight of the celebration was a special "Roast and Toast Evening" that featured comments and personal accounts of friends, students and trainees who worked or trained in Brinkley's laboratory over a 45-year period. BCM faculty and students who presented research at the meeting included Dr. Li-Yuan Yu-Lee, professor, Department of Medicine; Dr. Yasuhiro Kurasawa, postdoctoral student, Department of Medicine; Dr. Rebecca MacCorkle, postdoctoral associate, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, and graduate students Kimberly Weiderhold, Scott Slattery and Denae Nash, all in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.
