In the News
Featuring the most current honors, awards, and publications featuring or authored by UT Southwestern’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences and its faculty, graduate students, postdocs, and alumni.
U.S. News and World Report: 2011 Best Graduate Schools
UT Southwestern Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences:
#20 in Biological Sciences
Specialty Rankings:
- # 9 in Immunology
- #10 in Genetics and Development/Cancer Biology
- #11 in Biological Chemistry/Molecular Biophysics
Science Watch 2010
Faculty in the News
April 24, 2013 - Nobel Laureate and director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at UT Southwestern, Dr. Bruce A. Beutler, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Beutler is nationally recognized for his work in unlocking the mysteries of innate immunity.
March 8, 2013 - Eric Olson, Ph.D., chairman of the department of molecular biology and member of the Genetics and Development and Integrative Biology graduate programs, is the 2013 recipient of the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. Dr. Olson is being recognized for his work in identifying key genetic pathways in the formation of the heart and other muscles. Read more
Feb. 7, 2013 - Reported online in Nature, Dr. Beth Levine, member of the Cancer Biology and Molecular Microbiology graduate programs, Director of the Center for Autophagy Research and senior author, along with colleagues from multiple institutions, synthesized a peptide that induced autophagy in mice. Mice treated with this peptide, Tat-beclin 1, were resistant to several infectious diseases. Read more
Feb. 5, 2013 - Dr. Phil Scherer, member of the Cell Regulation and Integrative Biology graduate programs and Director of the Touchstone Center for Diabetes Research, and colleagues at UT Southwestern published a report in the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation in which the blocking of endotrophin secretion by fat cells in mice not only reduced tumor growth, but also prevented the cancer from metastasizing to other parts of the body. Read more
Dec. 20, 2012 - Dr. Hesham Sadek, member of the Genetics and Development graduate program (pictured, center), along with current and former colleagues at UT Southwestern, reported finding a key gene for regenerating cells in mice after a heart attack in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academay of Sciences.
Dec. 11, 2012 - Dr. Lora Hooper, member of and former Chair of the Immunology graduate program and member of the Microbiology graduate program, and Dr. Youxing Jiang, member of the Molecular Biophysics and Neuroscience graduate programs, have been honored by The Academy of Medicine, Engineering, and Science of Texas as recipients of the 2013 O'Donnell Award in Medicine and 2013 O'Donnell Award in Science, respectively.
Graduate Students in the News
April 22, 2013 - Sze "Mandy" Wong, graduate student in the Cancer Biology program, along with mentor Dr. Woodring Wright, member of the Cancer Biology program and professor of cell biology, and colleagues at UTSW, demonstrated the ability to shift the splicing of the telomerase gene to produce less active telomerase, thus identifying a potential new approach for cancer therapy. The findings were published in the April 4th issue of Cell Reports.
April 17, 2013 - Two former graduate students from the Genetics and Development graduate program, Drs. Ahmed Mahmoud and Fatih Kocabas, , and one current postdoctoral researcher in the department of Internal Medicine, are co-first authors of a Nature online paper published in April that identified the previously unknown function of a key gene, Meis1, in mammalian heart development. The study shows that Meis1 is responsible for controlling a mouse mammalian newborn heart's ability to regenerate. Senior author of the paper is Dr. Hesham Sadek, member of the Genetics and Development graduate program and assistant professor of internal medicine.
April 4, 2013 - In the April 4th issue of Nature, Nikolay Burnaevskiy (pictured left), a graduate student in the Molecular Microbology program, along with his mentor, Dr. Neal Alto, assistant professor of microbiology (senior author; pictured right) and colleagues at UT Southwestern and the University of Cincinnati, identify the bacterial toxin, IpaJ, as a fat-snipping protease that disables the immune system's communication infrastructure by cutting off functionally essential fatty acids from proteins.Feb. 15, 2013 - In Science, Jiaxi Wu, a student in the Genetics and Development graduate program, with mentor Zhijiang "James" Chen, Ph.D., professor of molecular biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and fellow colleagues at UT Southwestern, describe a novel cell signaling pathway in human cells that makes use of a naturally occurring compound, cyclic GMP-AMP (cGAMP) known to exist only in bacterial cells until now. In a paper co-published in the same issue of Science by Dr. Lijun Sun, assistant professor of molecular biology and colleagues at UT Southwestern, a new sensor of innate immunity, cyclic cGMP-AMP synthase (cGAS), was identified as the trigger for this newly identified pathway.
Postdocs in the News
April 4, 2013 - Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Georgia Konstantinidou, working in the laboratory of Dr. Pier Paolo Scaglioni, member of the Cancer Biology program, identified specific downstream factors involved in formation of KRAS-mutant tumors in mouse models of non-small cell lung cancer. The team's findings were published in the April edition of Cancer Discovery.
March 5, 2013 - Published in Cell and online, Dr. Wei Mo (pictured left), a postdoctoral scholar working in the laboratory of Luis Parada, Ph.D., member of the Cancer Biology and Neuroscience graduate programs and senior author (pictured right), successfully blocked tumor development in a mouse model of a an incurable human cancer.
Feb. 24, 2013 - Dr. Lei Ding, a former postdoctoral scholar working in the laboratory of Sean Morrison, Ph.D., member of the Cancer Biology and Genetics and Development graduate programs, identified an environment within bone marrow, known as an osteoblastic niche, that allows blood-forming stem cells known as early lymphoid progenitor cells, to thrive. Early lymphoid progenitor cells are responsible for producing T cells and B cells. These findings were published in Nature. Read more
Dec. 17, 2012 - In a recent Nature Medicine article, lead author Dr. Christine Kusminski, postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Dr. Phillip Scherer, member of the Cell Regulation and Integrative Biology graduate programs, reports the successful manipulation of the MitoNEET protein in mice that allows the mice to remain metabolically healthy. Researchers at UT Southwestern, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of Utah School of Medicine and Merck Research Laboratories participated in this multi-center study.