The UAB Department of Pathology is excited to announce our chief residents for the 2021-22 academic year.
This year we have added a third Chief position. As a Residency Program we are undergoing a transition of leadership. Many changes are forthcoming over the next year in response to not only this leadership transition, but also virtual recruitment, curriculum shifts, and a focus on outreach both at the UAB Medical School and via social media. With this in mind, a Chief Resident of Education and Outreach was established to help with oversight in the aforementioned areas. Effective February 1, 2021, the chief residents are:
Raima Memon, M.D. –Chief Resident of Anatomic Pathology
Each year the School of Medicine recognizes faculty members in their class of James A. Pittman Jr., M.D., Scholars. This year Blake "Eason" Hildreth, Assistant Professor, Molecular & Cellular Pathology, has been named of one of 10 faculty in the 2021 cohort.
The Pittman Scholars program recognizes the impacts of junior faculty and supports the recruitment and retention of highly competitive scientists and physician-scientists. The program is named for the late James A. Pittman, Jr., M.D., longtime dean of the School of Medicine from 1973 to 1992. Pittman is considered a principal architect of the School for his ability to recruit top scientists and physicians to UAB.
"I am extremely honored to not only receive the nomination and support to become a Pittman Scholar by Drs. George Netto, Ralph Sanderson, Yabing Chen, and Rakesh Patel, but to then be chosen to be a Pittman Scholar," Hildreth says. "I am extremely familiar with the prestige of this award and excellence of those before me that have received this award."
The UAB Department of Pathology is excited to welcome Carrie Smith Knight, M.D., to the department as Assistant Professor of Anatomic Pathology. She will cover the Community Pathology Practice Program in Montgomery, effective Monday, February 1.
Dr. Knight joins UAB from Troy University Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences where she has taught since 2015. Knight also practiced pathology at Pathology Associates, PC, in Huntsville, Alabama. She is board certified in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology and holds a subspecialty certification in Cytopathology. After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Medicine in 2001, she completed her pathology residency and fellowships in both GI and hepatic pathology, and cyptopathology, here at UAB.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Knight back to UAB Pathology as a faculty member.
Two of our faculty, Lalita Shevde-Samant, Ph.D., and Rajeev Samant, Ph.D., Ph.D., both professors in the Division of Molecular & Cellular Pathology and senior scientists, cancer cell biology with the O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, have collaborated on research on hypoxia that was recently publised in Cell iScience.
"Essentially, tumor growth leads to a central cellular mass where cells get less oxygen (hypoxia)," Rajeev Samant explains. "These cells either die or learn to survive by recruiting new blood vessels to feed them. Our study reveals a very novel mechanism of how these tumor cells learn to survive. From a fundamental science perspective, our report is one of the first to introduce the concept that the machinery (ribosomes) that makes proteins in a cell is not the same in every cell. These ribosomes do change in tumors based on factors such as hypoxi,a and become very specific for executing their tasks to help the tumor cells."
The article, titled, "Hypoxia re-programs 2'-O-Me modifications on ribosomal RNA," was published online on December 29, 2020 and in print in the January issue of Cell iScience.
Image from the article in Cell iScience
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