WCMS Dean’s Dispatch

Our University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine Department of Physiology and Cell Biology is now ranked 4th in the U.S. for research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research.

The $11.74 million in research dollars secured by Dr. Sanders and his talented faculty and staff places UNR Med just behind prestigious institutions like University of Michigan ($18.8M), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ($16.4M) and Vanderbilt ($14.88M) and ahead of others like University of California San Francisco ($11M), Penn ($10.4M), Johns Hopkins ($9.38M), Yale ($8.99M), and UCLA ($9.28M).

The work deserving of celebration does not stop with Dr. Sanders and his team. We have been particularly successful in recruiting yet another outstanding group of early- and mid-career scientists who discovered Reno, the School of Medicine and the University and the opportunities we offer:

• The Department of Pharmacology added new investigators in three major research themes: Muscular Dystrophies, Cardiovascular Diseases and Human Reproduction. Peter Jones, Ph.D., his research partner and wife, Takako Jones, Ph.D., and their research team are international experts on facioscapulohumeral dystrophy. The Jones Lab has joined forces with Dean Burkin, Ph.D., an expert on other forms of muscular dystrophy, to explore new diagnostics and treatments for the muscular dystrophies, attracting substantial interest from the pharmaceutical industry.
• In Microbiology and Immunology, new faculty members are bringing substantial grant funding to study viral and bacterial pathogenesis. Cyprian Rossetto, Ph.D., secured new funding from the NIH to study herpes virus pathogenesis, while Paul Brett, Ph.D. and Mary Burtnick, Ph.D. are developing diagnostic tests and glycoconjugate vaccines with the potential to save thousands of lives.
• Within the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, new grants are supporting research on the Zika virus, led by Subhash Verma, Ph.D., and the Ebola virus, led by David AuCoin, Ph.D. Additionally, Tom Kozel, Ph.D. and Amanda Burnham-Marusich, Ph.D., are developing a point-of-care test for whooping cough.
• Department of Physiology and Cell Biology faculty members have claimed major editorial board positions, including Wei Yan, MD, Ph.D., editor-in-chief for Biology of Reproduction, and Dr. Sanders, editorial board member for Gastroenterology, and have been published in some of the nation’s highest impact scientific journals.

UNR Med is unusual if not unique in its makeup. We are possibly the most research-intensive of the nation’s community-based schools, a distinction only made possible by our innovative biomedical scientists, whose heavily-funded research informs their medical student teaching and directly contributes to our vision of A Healthy Nevada.