Author: Elizabethe Holland Durando

The School of Medicine’s 2014 commencement speaker will be Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Value and Innovation in Health Care at the Brookings Institution. Several other commencement speakers also have been announced.

Each year, Allyson Zazulia, MD, associate professor of neurology and radiology, hosts a review modeled after the game show ‘Jeopardy.’ The session helps medical students prepare for an exam on diseases of the nervous system. Shown, from left, are students Tracey Godbold and Sravya Vajapeyajula participating in the game.

The 10th Annual Washington University Postdoc Scientific Symposium will be held Thursday, April 3, to recognize and showcase the important contributions of postdocs to scientific enterprise at the university. Registration is open through March 27.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon signed legislation Wednesday, March 19, on the Medical Campus to increase the affordability and accessibility of oral chemotherapy medications. ​

Children with a rare genetic disorder that causes missing and malformed teeth, sparse hair and the inability to perspire are born without a protein thought to be key to such development. A clinical trial now underway at the School of Medicine aims to see if the void can be filled with a replacement protein. Shown are Sarah and Robert Yaroch and their son Andrew, who is participating in the trial.

Babies born prematurely are surviving in increasing numbers, but many withstand complications of early birth only to suffer late-onset sepsis — life-threatening bloodstream infections that strike after infants reach 72 hours of age. The causes of late-onset sepsis have not been clear. But now, researchers at the School of Medicine led by Phillip I. Tarr, MD, and Barbara B. Warner, MD, have discovered that preterm babies’ guts harbor infectious microbes that can cause this condition.

Gammon Earhart, PhD, a professor in the Program in Physical Therapy at the School of Medicine, works to restore movement to patients with Parkinson’s disease. Arguably her most significant contributions as a researcher have been her studies demonstrating the benefits of tango dancing on patients with Parkinson’s. Freedom of movement, it turns out, has become a theme of sorts for Earhart — professionally and personally.

A new cyclotron recently was installed at the East Building on the School of Medicine campus. The unit, in the works for more than a decade, is a particle accelerator that will produce radioactive compounds, many of which are used with positron emission tomography (PET) scanners to detect specific types of cancers.

Tia Drake, executive director of Graduate Medical Education (GME) at the School of Medicine, has been honored with the GME Institutional Coordinator Excellence Award.

St. Louis County families soon will have improved, convenient access to top-notch health-care services for their children with a St. Louis Children’s Hospital and Washington University Physicians medical office building in west St. Louis County.