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	Huda Zoghbi named to National Academy of Sciences
	Teleconference initiative
	Snack bar temptations derail middle school diets

Huda Zoghbi named to National Academy of Sciences

Huda Y. Zoghbi, MD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a professor in the departments of pediatrics, neurology, neuroscience and molecular and human genetics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Zoghbi’s work with pediatric neurological diseases has resulted in major advancements in the field. She was a co-discoverer of the gene that causes spinocerebellar ataxia type 1, an inherited late-onset neurodegenerative disease, and also discovered the MECP2 gene that causes Rett syndrome. In addition, she has identified Math 1, a gene that governs the development of inner-ear hair cells essential for hearing.

Born in Beirut, Zoghbi began her medical training at the American University of Beirut. Because of the war in Lebanon, she transferred to Nashville’s Meharry Medical College and graduated in 1979. Moving to Houston, she completed her pediatric residency as well as an additional residency in pediatric neurology at Baylor. She did a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular genetics and joined the Baylor faculty in 1988. She also serves as director of the BCM Mental Retardation and Development Disabilities Research Center.

Named to the Institute of Medicine in 2000, Zoghbi has received many honors, including the Sidney Carter Award from the Academy of Neurology, the Javits Award from the National Institutes of Health and the E. Mead Johnson Award for Pediatric Research - the nation’s most distinguished pediatric research award.

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Teleconference initiative

Baylor College of Medicine residents training at Ben Taub General Hospital can now participate in meetings at Texas Children's Hospital without traveling across the Texas Medical Center thanks to a new teleconferencing initiative.

The collaborative program was made possible through the efforts of Martin Lorin, MD, director of House Staff Education for the BCM department of pediatrics. Another use of the technology will be to allow physicians at Ben Taub and Texas Children's to interact on particular patient cases, particularly in emergency situations.

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Snack bar temptations derail middle school diets

For many middle-school students, daily access to snack bars that offer little more than pizza and fries is a temptation too great to resist.

"It's unrealistic to expect middle-school children to exercise that kind of will power," said Karen Cullen, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and a behavioral nutrition researcher at the USDA/ARS Children’s Nutrition Research Center at Baylor.

"Kids, just like adults, prefer the taste of sweets and fat. Knowing how to balance highly desirable but low-nutrition foods with more healthy ones is learned and takes maturity."

Cullen followed 594 fourth and fifth graders over a two-year period for a study designed to learn how access to snack bars affects children's diets. She found that after transitioning to middle school, students' lunchtime consumption of healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, and milk dropped by one-third or more. At the same time, she found they were eating 68 percent more fatty vegetables like French fries and chips and 62 percent more sweetened beverages like soda and sweetened teas.

The results were reported in the American Journal of Public Health.

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