T.H. Chan School of Medicine at UMass Chan Awarded a 2023 American College of Gastroenterology Visiting Professorship

The T.H. Chan School of Medicine has been awarded a 2023 American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Edgar Achkar Visiting Professorship. The ACG Edgar Achkar Visiting Professorship Award is an annual award given to a handful of GI fellowship training programs across the country after review of submitted applications. The “goal is to enable programs to have high quality visiting professors to bolster the training program by providing lectures or grand rounds, small group discussions, panel discussions and/or one-on-one visits with trainees and faculty”. The award signifies recognition of the GI fellowship as a high caliber program and the division as a leader in the community gastrointestinal care. 

Krunal Patel, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology was instrumental in the Chan School of Medicine receiving this award. "[Dr. Patel] worked exceptionally hard to make this happen! I think this is going to be great and should be a good program for the division and department," said Christopher Marshall, MD, Clinical Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology.

Congratulations!

Mireya Wessolossky Discusses Possible Uptick of Monkeypox as College Campuses Prepare for the Return of Students

Mireya Wessolossky, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Clinician in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Immunology was recently interviewed by Spectrum News 1 about the concern that there may be an uptick in monkeypox cases as college students return to campus. Dr. Wessolossky said students should be aware of the risk factors as they head back to school.

"We understand things are very tight knit socially in college and dorms and that’s exactly the condition that is prone to spreading this infection from one person to another because this disease spreads by contact of skin to skin or mucosa to mucosa,” said Dr. Wessolossky.

Jonathan Cheah Featured on UMass Memorial's Health Watch 

Jonathan Cheah, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Clinician in the Division of Rheumatology was recently featured on UMMH's Health Watch, where he discussed osteoporosis, a disease that effects about 54 million Americans.

Filiz Korkmaz of the Quinton Lab Receives K99 Funding to Study the Innate Immune Response to Pneumonia in the Lung

Congratulations to Filiz Korkmaz, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Lee Quinton's lab, for receiving NIH K99 funding for her project, "Establishing Mechanisms of LOX-1-Dependent Immune Regulation During Pneumonia." 

As a post-doctoral fellow in the Quinton lab, Filiz studies the innate immune response in the lung to pneumonia. She is particularly interested in the role of LOX-1 (lectin-like oxidized low-density lipoprotein receptor-1), a C-type lectin scavenger receptor that they have shown is induced in the lung during pneumonia and is uniquely protective against infection-related lung injury. LOX-1 is highly expressed on both resident alveolar macrophages and in recruited airspace neutrophils. Whether and how LOX-1 promotes resolution of infection in the lung via resident and recruited leukocytes is not known and is the subject of the proposed studies, where effects of LOX-1 signaling will be investigated at the transcriptional, metabolic and phenotypic level.

Filiz earned her BS in Microbiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her PhD in Cellular, Molecular & Biomedical Sciences at the University of Vermont. She began her post-doctoral fellowship in Immunobiology at Boston University in 2018 under the mentorship of Lee Quinton, PhD. In 2021 the Quinton lab moved to UMass Chan, where Filiz is now continuing her post-doctoral research.