Page 2 - IBP In Focus Newsletter

2 IN FOCUS t ISSUE 2021-2022
t GRADUATE PROGRAM UPDATES
IBP Graduate Program Highlights 2021
The IBP Graduate Program is undergoing some changes in regard to its curriculum. Due to the change of the Medical School to move away from classical teaching towards theme- based education, the Medical Physiology course is no longer going to be offered to our graduate students. The Graduate Program Steering Committee Director of Education provid- ed what would be the best solution, and we all agreed that Principles of Physiology is the best course for our graduate students going forward. Our graduate students will be having enhancements that go beyond what the undergraduate stu- dents in that course get offered to deepen the knowledge our graduate students gain from Principles of Physiology. To ac- commodate this change, we had to move some things around, since Principles of Physiology is taught in the Fall semester. We also changed the required courses in the Spring Semes- ter. Our first year graduate students can now choose 2 out of the following 4 courses that are offered in the Spring semes- ter; Stress Physiology, Physiology of Inflammation in Disease, Muscle Physiology, Systems and Computational Physiology. This change in the curriculum will also be reflected in the writ- ten preliminary exam that is taken at the end of year 1. We welcome feedback about these changes from our graduate students and the faculty that teach these courses.
The past year resulted in two newly minted PhDs, Alexie Larson who successfully defended her thesis “Satellite cell maintenance and strength recovery after injury: the impact of estradiol signaling”. Alexie’s latest paper was recently published in the American Journal of Physiology. Alexie is
Dr. Jop van Berlo,
Director of Graduate Studies
currently working as an Imaging and
Detection Technical Sales Specialist
at Thermo Fisher Scientific. Brandon
Wagner successfully defended his
thesis “Physiological consequences of
increased phosphorylation-dependent
activation of guanylyl cyclase-a and -b” in March 2022. Bran- don published 3 first author manuscripts on the topic of his thesis. Brandon is currently working as a scientist in antibody development at Bio-Techne.
Successes included new grants awarded to Seokwon Jo (F31) and Fanta Barrow (AHA), who also won the Frieda M. Kunze fellowship which she had to decline, and she won the early career investigator award through the AASLD foundation.
This year we welcomed 6 new graduate students, Brian Akha- phong, Babatunde Anidu, Katherine Fallon, Nicholas Go- mez, Tracy Her and Eunice Oribamise, who are introduced elsewhere in this newsletter. This successful recruitment could not have been accomplished without the help of our students and faculty, so a heartfelt thank you to you. For the coming recruitment season, we again will rely on you to mo- tivate undergraduate students to apply to our graduate pro- gram. So, reach out to your students and colleagues to apply by December 1st.