Melissa Glim

Melissa Glim, M.P.H., is a science writer and healthcare communications professional working with NIH’s Intramural Research Program to promote the innovative research being done at the NIH’s 27 Institutes and Centers and the scientists who are making it happen. Melissa has written about topics from Alzheimer’s disease to women’s health, covering basic science to patient education to policy and advocacy.

She supports a variety of clients from government, non-profit, and industry in strategic communications planning and implementation, coalition and partnership building, stakeholder education and outreach, and health and science writing and materials development. She has developed and led grassroots programs for Hadassah and the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship, spoken on stem cell research and cancer survivorship advocacy at numerous conferences, created a web-based advocacy training program, and contributed a chapter to the Oncology Nursing Society’s textbook, Cancer Rehabilitation and Survivorship: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Personalized Care. Melissa has won three National Health Information awards for her articles. She received her Master of Public Health in Community Health Education from Hunter College School of Public Health and her Bachelor of Science in Science Communication from Cornell University.

In her spare time, Melissa loves making hats and jewelry, swing dancing, and writing the occasional children’s book, although most of the time, she’s waiting upon her beloved fox terrier, Tilly.

Posts By This Author

Examining the Roots of Opioid Use Disorder

IRP Researchers Are Peering Into the Brain to Learn Why Opioid Drugs Are So Hard to Quit

oxycodone pills and pill bottle

The ancient Egyptians, despite their significant anatomical knowledge, thought the heart was the seat of intelligence. Over the millennia, that view changed as philosophers and scientists alike came to appreciate the extraordinary role of the brain. It is partly thanks to them that we celebrate Brain Awareness Week every March. In honor of this observance, we took the opportunity to talk with IRP senior investigator Yihong Yang, Ph.D., and postdoctoral fellow Ida Fredriksson, Ph.D., Pharm.D., about their investigation into how cravings for opioids build during a period of prolonged abstinence, often leading to relapse.

Sugar Molecule Could Resolve Rare Diseases

IRP Research Hastens Development of First Treatment for Genetic Muscle Condition

cartoon highlighting one person in a crowd

An old medical adage warns doctors that when they hear hoofbeats, they should first think of horses, not zebras. After all, when someone comes into the hospital with a cough, the most likely explanation is something mundane like the flu. However, some patients truly are medical zebras, affected by a disease that afflicts very few others.

IRP senior investigator Marjan Huizing, Ph.D., has learned quite a bit about those zebras since arriving at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) as a postdoctoral fellow in 1998. To help commemorate Rare Disease Day today, Dr. Huizing spoke with the “I Am Intramural” blog about her research on an array of ailments linked to a small sugar molecule called sialic acid, some of which are extremely rare.

Helping Aging Hearts Get Their Groove Back

IRP Researchers Discover ‘Coupled-Clock’ That Controls Heart Rhythms

heart rate monitor

Like so much about our lives, our hearts slow down as we age. While this slowing is natural, a heartbeat that is too sluggish can lead to heart failure, irregular heartbeats known as arrhythmias, and other problems. IRP senior investigator Edward G. Lakatta, M.D., has changed the paradigm in our understanding of how our hearts keep the beat across our life spans — and what happens when they don’t.

Creating Cutting-Edge Cancer Vaccines

IRP Research Identifies a Tantalizing Target for Cancer Immunotherapy

person getting vaccine injection

February 4 is World Cancer Day, a time to mark international efforts to prevent, detect, and treat cancer. Immunotherapy, one of the most significant advances in treating cancer, was pioneered here at NIH more than 30 years ago. Today, IRP senior investigator Claudia M. Palena, Ph.D., is pushing cancer immunotherapy forward with the discovery of a novel target for cancer vaccines.

IRP’s Bruce Tromberg Elected to National Academy of Medicine

Advances in Bioengineering Drive Life-Saving Medicine

Dr. Bruce Tromberg

“To discover new things, you need new ways to see them,” says Bruce J. Tromberg, Ph.D., Director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). That’s why he has spent the past 30 years of his career improving and inventing tools to help doctors and scientists conduct cutting-edge biomedical research and apply their findings to the task of saving lives. This past October, Dr. Tromberg was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) for his contributions to the fields of biophotonics and biomedical optics, as well as his leadership in the biomedical engineering and imaging community.

IRP’s Eugene Koonin Elected to National Academy of Medicine

Scientist Decoded DNA to Build a Genomic Tree of Life

Dr. Eugene Koonin

In 1973, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote a now-famous essay that declared, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” That sentiment has served as the guiding principle for the career of IRP senior investigator Eugene V. Koonin, Ph.D., who was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) in October 2022 for his contributions to the field of evolutionary biology.

Dr. Koonin’s pioneering efforts to identify clusters of similar genes found in different organisms passed down by a common ancestor — known as ‘homologous’ genes — has helped to unlock the secrets encoded in DNA and create a foundation for the systematic study of how genes evolve and function. His lab at the National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) uses a combination of genomic sequencing and mathematical modeling to compare genes across species and determine how they work and where they came from. From this information, his team can develop a systematic framework to show the relationship between genes as they evolved. It’s like drawing the tree of life, but on a genomic scale.

Predicting Risks and Benefits for Lung Cancer Screening

IRP Researchers Refine Tools to Maximize the Benefit from Life-Saving Tests

patient getting a CT scan

Eleven years ago, IRP senior investigator Hormuzd Katki, Ph.D., had a bit of an eureka moment during a press event announcing the results of the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial, which demonstrated that annual screenings cut the risks of dying from lung cancer in heavy smokers by 20 percent.

“It struck me as I read the trial results that not only was this a very important trial, but that it was possible that different people will have different benefits from lung cancer screening,” Dr. Katki remembers. “Even within this group of very high-risk smokers who were part of the trial, you can identify some people who get much more benefit than other people, and that has implications for who should be offered this kind of screening.”

Simple Blood Test May Thwart a Complicated Cancer

Signs of Past Viral Exposure Predict Liver Cancer Risk

vials containing blood samples

The liver has a difficult but important job. It serves as the central processing plant for all the food, drinks, and drugs we take in, separating and breaking them down into usable nutrients and toxic wastes that need to be removed from the body. It’s no surprise, then, that diseases affecting the liver can have life-threatening consequences. In particular, infections like hepatitis B and C and liver damage caused by alcohol, drugs, or fatty liver disease can all lead to liver cancer. Unfortunately, even though the presence of these conditions are harbingers of possible liver cancer, the disease often passes unnoticed until it is at an advanced, less treatable stage.

IRP senior investigator Xin Wei Wang, Ph.D., and his NIH research team are developing ways to detect liver cancers much earlier, when existing treatments are much more likely to stop their growth. In honor of Liver Cancer Awareness Month this October, I talked to Dr. Wang about his research and the novel blood test his lab has developed to predict liver cancer risk.

A Year of Honors for IRP Cancer Researchers

Four NIH Scientists Received Prestigious Recognition in 2022

clockwise from top-left: Dr. Michael Lichten, Dr. Susan Lea, Dr. Kandice Tanner, and Dr. Deborah Morrison

The complexities of cancer, which is actually a collection of many diseases, has made conquering it an enormous challenge. Fortunately, researchers in the NIH Intramural Research Program are up to the task. This year, four IRP investigators in NIH’s National Cancer Institute (NCI) have been recognized for their groundbreaking contributions to answering fundamental questions about the disease and the immune system’s response to similar threats.

Bringing Out the Big Guns Against Blood Cancer

IRP Research Shows Benefits of More Intensive Treatments for Certain Patients

woman receiving chemotherapy treatment

Fate can be cruel, especially when it comes to a rare, highly fatal blood cancer called acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Even when months of intensive chemotherapy appear to cause a complete remission of the disease — meaning doctors cannot detect any remaining cancer cells in a patient’s body — roughly half of those patients see the cancer return within two years, or even as soon as six months. Sadly, most of them don’t survive their second bout with the disease.

As a medical student, IRP senior investigator Christopher Hourigan, M.D., D.Phil., thought this outcome was unfair. More than that, he thought it indicated that the standard ways doctors determined if an AML patient was in remission were inadequate, and that remission might not even be the right goal. That’s why he has focused his career on finding ways to detect, prevent, and treat AML recurrence, known in his field as ‘relapse’.

“I was a scientist before I became a doctor, and it was really eye-opening to me, when I started to practice medicine, how difficult some of the treatment decisions were and how limited the information available was to inform those decisions,” Dr. Hourigan says.

This page was last updated on Wednesday, March 15, 2023