Medicine & Health

Washington University in St. Louis has been awarded a grant from the Amgen Foundation that will provide hands-on laboratory experience to undergraduate students through the Amgen Scholars Program. This marks the fifth year that Washington University is participating in the program.

Cats and humans have shared the same households for at least 9,000 years, but we still know very little about how our feline friends became domesticated. An analysis of the cat genome by School of Medicine researchers reveals some surprising clues. Pictured is a blue Abyssinian cat.

Allyson R. Zazulia, MD, is the new associate dean for continuing medical education (CME) at the School of Medicine. In her new role, Zazulia will oversee and administer learning opportunities for practicing physicians. This includes maintaining accreditation and developing new CME programs.

Washington University’s Bear Cub grant program helps researchers make the leap from bench scientists to budding entrepreneurs. The application deadline is Nov. 30.

Today’s freshmen students have a 50 percent chance of living to see their 100th birthdays. They are in the middle of a demographic revolution that will shape every aspect of their lives. A new interdisciplinary course for freshmen introduced this fall, “When I’m Sixty-Four: Transforming Your Future,” aims to prepare students for this aging revolution and to encourage them to examine their present and future lives in more detail.

A new center at the School of Medicine aims to tackle the challenges of feeding the world’s rapidly expanding population and improving global health by linking efforts to develop more nutritious foods with discoveries gleaned from the gut microbiome.

Improved communication among health-care providers during shift changes reduced injuries due to medical errors by 30 percent, according to a multicenter study. The research involved St. Louis Children’s Hospital and eight other academic medical centers. Pictured is study co-author F. Sessions Cole, MD, and attending physician Amanda Emke, MD.

Efforts at Washington University and Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children’s hospitals to safely coordinate a response to the Ebola virus have been underway for several months. Among those efforts are suggested steps for faculty, staff and students traveling to and from Ebola-stricken countries.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has boosted funding for the first large-scale clinical trial aimed at identifying drugs to stop or slow Alzheimer’s disease in people who are destined to get it. The trial is led by Randall Bateman, MD.

John N. Constantino, MD, the Blanche F. Ittelson Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the School of Medicine, has received the 2014 Irving Phillips Award for Prevention from the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.