National Academy of Medicine President Dzau, Phillips to give keynote addresses at 2019 Commencement
Dr. Victor Dzau, President of the National Academy of Medicine, and Dr. Margaret Phillips, UTSW Chair of Biochemistry, will deliver the keynote addresses at Commencement exercises for the UT Southwestern Medical School and the UT Southwestern Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, respectively.
The Medical School will hold Commencement exercises Tuesday, May 7, beginning at 7 p.m. in the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center for 211 graduating members of the Class of 2019. The traditional Hooding Ceremony for the graduates will take place on campus at 12:30 p.m. that day in the Tom and Lula Gooch Auditorium. Dr. Reeni Abraham, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, will be the Hooding speaker.
Class of 2019 Medical School graduates are the first students to complete the revised curriculum, which allows medical students to step into hospitals and clinics earlier in their educational journey and better trains students to be knowledgeable, confident, and forward-looking physicians. This year’s class includes 26 students graduating with distinction, an Olympic level athlete, a former F-16 pilot for the Air Force, an advocate for foster children, one who danced with a team on America’s Got Talent, and one who launched a group to reach out to disadvantaged elementary school students to motivate them to pursue careers in medicine.
Ceremonies for the 93 graduates of the Graduate School will be in the Gooch Auditorium beginning at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 23.
The 2019 Graduate School Class includes students who began the UT Southwestern chapter of the Association for Neuropsychology Students in Training, co-founded the Graduate Student/Postdoc Wellness Committee, co-founded the UTSW Science Policy, Education, and Communication group (SPEaC), founded the Clinical Psychology Student Research Committee, served as the Consulting Club’s first female President, created the CoNNECT (Cultivating Narrative for Effective Communication) course for science writing and communication in the Graduate School, founded the Biotechnology Club, and co-developed a graduate student peer mentoring program for writing grants and fellowships.
Dr. Daniel K. Podolsky, President of UT Southwestern, will confer degrees on all of the graduates.
Dr. Dzau
In addition to serving as President of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), Dr. Dzau is Vice Chair of the National Research Council, Chancellor Emeritus and James B. Duke Professor of Medicine at Duke University, and past President and CEO of the Duke University Health System.
Previously, Dr. Dzau was the Hershey Professor of Theory and Practice of Medicine and Chairman of Medicine at Harvard Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, as well as Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Stanford University.
He is an internationally acclaimed leader and scientist whose work has improved health care in the United States and globally. His seminal work in cardiovascular medicine and genetics laid the foundation for the development of the class of lifesaving drugs known as ACE inhibitors, used globally to treat hypertension and heart failure. Dr. Dzau pioneered gene therapy for vascular disease and was the first to introduce DNA decoy molecules to block transcriptions in humans in vivo.
Dr. Dzau has led efforts in innovation to improve health, including the development of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute, the Duke Global Health Institute, and the Duke Institute for Health Innovation. He has served as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), chaired the NIH Cardiovascular Disease Advisory Committee, and currently chairs the NIH Cardiovascular Stem Cell Biology and Translational Consortia.
Since arriving at the National Academies, Dr. Dzau has designed and led important initiatives such as the Commission on a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future; the Human Genome Editing Initiative; and Vital Directions for Health and Health Care.
Dr. Phillips
Dr. Phillips is a leading authority on drug development for the treatment of parasitic diseases. During her UT Southwestern tenure, Dr. Phillips has conducted groundbreaking research that recently yielded a treatment that kills drug-resistant malaria parasites and is now in phase two clinical development. Her research focuses on identifying and characterizing vulnerable metabolic pathways in parasitic protozoa with the goal of developing new drugs for malaria and for another neglected tropical disease, African sleeping sickness. The new drug – DSM265 – kills drug-resistant malaria parasites in the blood and liver by targeting their ability to replicate.
While the disease was eradicated in the United States in 1951, malaria remains one of the world’s major infectious disease killers. Transmitted through mosquitoes, it claims nearly 450,000 lives worldwide each year.
Dr. Phillips has worked closely with colleagues in the Department of Biochemistry using high-throughput screening and chemical optimization to develop a new and highly potent antimalarial compound, now in clinical trials, as well as other antiparasitic agents. In 2010, her research team won the Medicines for Malaria Venture’s Project of the Year award for their efforts to discover DSM265.
She earned her Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from the University of California, Davis, in 1981 and her Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry from the University of California, San Francisco, in 1988. Dr. Phillips has published 108 articles in scientific journals and 23 book chapters or review articles. She currently serves as an associate editor of the journal PLOS Pathogens.