School of Medicine

A week of Homecoming activities at West Virginia University culminated with the crowning of Douglas Ernest, Jr. and Kendra Lobban, as the 2018 king and queen.

Five accomplished young women from the Honors College have been endorsed by West Virginia University to compete for three prestigious awards: the Rhodes, Marshall and Mitchell scholarships.

Candidates for West Virginia University’s 2018 Homecoming court have been selected.

Diabetics are at least twice as likely as nondiabetics to die of heart disease. They’re also at a greater risk of heart attack. With a two-year, $53,000 fellowship from the American Heart Association, Quincy Hathaway, a doctoral candidate in the West Virginia University School of Medicine, is examining how a certain protein, called PNPase, influences mitochondria’s performance in heart cells.

Two West Virginia University School of Medicine researchers have received $2.38 million from the National Institutes of Health to build a one-of-a-kind pre-clinical imaging system that integrates PET-scan technology with a magnet-based imaging system that’s akin to MRI.

A West Virginia University graduate student is studying how certain cells affect the development of this part of the brain, and therefore, how they could affect how quickly and accurately the brain processes sounds.

West Virginia University researcher Robert Bossarte has received a $13.3-million award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to compare three treatment strategies for rural depressed patients: antidepressants alone; antidepressants combined with unguided cognitive behavior therapy provided online; and antidepressants combined with guided online cognitive behavior therapy.

The Office of the Provost at West Virginia University welcomed its fourth class of Academic Leadership Fellows this summer, giving nine tenured faculty members the opportunity to strengthen their leadership skills and gain direct experience in academic administration.

A dermatologist may distinguish a mole from a tumor based on a glance, the way a cook can tell parsley from cilantro by sniffing it. But medical students don’t have enough experience to make such intuitive diagnoses. Michael Kolodney, who chairs West Virginia University’s Department of Dermatology, has developed a smartphone app to cultivate that intuition in medical students sooner.

Four students pursuing doctoral degrees at West Virginia University are receiving funding through the Ruby Scholars Graduate Fellowship Program. The seventh class of fellows includes Hannah Clipp, Michelle Frankot, Dylan Linville and Lakyn Sanders.