Congratulations to Dr. Jim Johnson, Professor in Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, and the team of faculty (see below) he led for being awarded 1^st place in the 2013 UAB Health System Innovation Awards – Impact Category.  We are very proud and appreciative of everything Dr. Johnson and his team has done to make our Department, and this project, so successful.

The clinical Faculty included in this initiative were:

Michael A. Steinman, MD will present "Medication prescribing for older adults: A tale of manging complexity" on Monday, July 1, 2013 in CH19 207 at 8:00am.  Dr. Steinman, a candidate for Director, Division of Gerontology, Geriatrics & Palliative Care, is currently Associate Professr of Medicine in Residence, Step 2, Division of Geriatrics, Department of Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine.

The June 2013 Research Spotlight features two first co-authors:

Mr Jagirdar holds a M Sc in Biotechnology and M S in Cellular and Molecular Biology. He has developed his career through research as Research assistant/Associate during 2004-2012 in part at University of Michigan. During his time at UAB Mr Jagirdar was instrumental in augmenting pleural research with an emphasis on dissecting the role of the pleural mesothelial compartment in the etiology of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. Mr Jagirdar left UAb in Dec 2011 and now runs Geneclick.org, a non profit Bioinformatics & Computational Biology service.

 Dr. Jason Zolak received his B.S. degree in neurobiology and physiology from the University of Maryland, and his medical degree from the University of Virginia. He completed a surgery internship, followed by an internal medicine residency at UAB in 2010. He will complete his fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine in June of 2013. Dr. Zolak has a clinical interest in pleural disease and malignancy. In conjunction with Dr. Veena Antony, he has investigated the role of pleural mesothelial cells in fibrogenic lung injury. They have demonstrated the novel finding that pleural mesothelial cells undergo differentiation with acquisition of mesenchymal phenotypic characteristics and migrate into the lung parenchyma in fibrogenic lung injury. They have further elucidated a potentially protective role for the induction of heme oxygenase-1 in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. They continue to investigate the role of pleural-based therapies for parenchymal diseases.

Anthony B. Purcell, Assistant Vice President and Chief, UAB Police Department will present "Leaders and leadership: What do people see when they see you coming?" on Friday, May 17, 2013 at 10:00 a.m. in Margaret Cameron Spain Auditorium.  The Department of Medicine Leadership Development Seminar Series is open to all Medicine employees.

PPT file for presentation details

Mr. Hao Li received his M.S. degree from the Institute of Medicinal Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Medical Science in 2005. He joined the Graduate Program in Microbiology at UAB in 2008 and has carried out his graduate study in Dr. John Mountz laboratory at UAB since 2008.  Mr. Li initially studied the role of IL-23 in the regulation of autoimmune disease in the BXD2 mouse model of systemic autoimmunity.  These mice develop spontaneous germinal centers (GCs) in the spleen that are highly dependent of interleukin (IL)-17.  Mr. Li made the novel and unexpected finding that IL-23 was necessary to maintain the integrity of marginal zone barrier that prevents follicular entry of apoptotic self-antigens in BXD2 mice.  This initial work led to his present findings of a novel mechanism of autoimmunity in which “leaks” in the marginal zone barrier enable entry of apoptotic Ags into the follicle Mr. Li currently studies the molecular mechanisms regulating the interactions of marginal zone macrophages and marginal zone B cells in maintaining the tolerogenic function of these cells to apoptotic self-antigens.