On December 22, 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming February 11 of each year as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, with the goal of highlighting the important contributions of women to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Here at NIH, a dedicated group of scientists known as the Women Scientist Advisors (WSA) is working not only to recognize the role of women in the biomedical sciences but to expand it as well.
At the start of his third term in 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s blood pressure was an alarmingly high 188/105—or, more accurately, alarming by today’s standards. But back then, nobody knew that high blood pressure was related in any way to cardiovascular disease (CVD). As a result, the nation was completely blind-sided when Roosevelt died of a stroke four years later.
The link between hypertension and CVD is now common knowledge due to a research program launched in 1948 called the Framingham Heart Study, now in its 70th year. To kick off American Heart Month this February, the Framingham Study’s current director, IRP Senior Investigator Daniel Levy, M.D., gave a lecture on February 1, titled “Unraveling the Mysteries of Cardiovascular Disease: Lessons from NHLBI’s Framingham Heart Study.”
Joanne Compo, a sophomore at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, spent the summer of 2017 working in the lab of NIH IRP Distinguished Investigator Dr. Kenneth Fischbeck. She helped create a quality of life questionnaire for patients with Kennedy’s disease, a neuromuscular disorder that causes muscles to weaken over time due to the death of motor neurons responsible for movement. Such a questionnaire could help affected individuals get diagnosed more quickly and shed light on which interventions improve their lives the most.
We’ve had a few changes on our Board of Scientific Directors in the past year, so I thought I’d give you an update. Each NIH Institute or Center (IC) with an intramural program has a scientific director (SD). The NCI, NIAID, NLM, and NIEHS are programmatically diverse and require additional leaders with SD functions. So, although 24 ICs have principal SDs, there are actually 30 people who function as scientific directors.
These SDs are responsible for the intramural budgets of their institutes. Most run their own labs. They also have numerous other responsibilities.
Jason Mazique, who is currently a freshman at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, spent his 2017 summer working in the lab of NIH IRP Senior Investigator Dr. Harish Pant. During his time at the NIH, Mazique investigated how a particular protein affects neurons in the brain, with implications for neurological conditions like ALS and Alzheimer’s disease
Of NIH’s campuses around the country, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina is the largest outside of main campus. NIEHS Science Days, now in its 15th year, celebrates the institute’s research achievements during a two-day event held every November.
Francia Fang, who is currently a junior at Duke University, spent her 2017 summer working in the lab of NIH IRP Senior Investigator Dr. Zhengping Zhuang. During her time at the NIH, Fang investigated how genes influence the development of brain tumors and also shadowed doctors as they met with brain cancer patients.
The video above, featuring Fang, is the first in a series of profiles highlighting IRP summer interns who worked in NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) intramural labs this past summer.
There are many ways to categorize the research performed at the NIH Intramural Research Program: biomedical or behavioral; computational, basic, translational, or clinical; excellent or outstanding; wow or double-wow; and so on. When we launched the irp.nih.gov website, we utilized the concept of scientific focus areas, or SFAs, and identified 21 such SFAs at the IRP, from biomedical engineering & biophysics to virology.
We thought the 21 SFAs did a rather nice job of summing up all the diverse science in the IRP. Then along comes RNA biology. It's not as if the field is new; some 30 Nobel Prizes have been won involving RNA over the decades. But the field has had a renaissance in recent years with discoveries such as that of noncoding RNA (ncRNA) functioning in genome defense and chromosome inactivation. Newly revealed classes of RNAs and their remarkable functions are poised to revolutionize molecular biology, with profound implications for clinical sciences.
For September's Office of NIH History blog entry, Archivist Barbara Harkins picked out a few of her favorite photos to highlight from the collection—a difficult task when limited to only eight! We hope you enjoy these images, and please let us know which ones are your favorites in the comments.
This page was last updated on Friday, January 14, 2022
