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.
When I first came to The Children’s Inn in June of 2016, I had no idea what it would mean to me. The next several months, though, certainly ended up being some of the most transformational months of my life. I first came to The Inn as a 19-year-old who had somehow managed to finish his first year of college, even while dealing with a harsh genetic disease known as sickle cell anemia. After staying at The Inn for nearly five months, I left as a man, entering his second year of college, having been healed from the disease that once shaped his life.
My blog usually celebrates biomedical advances made possible by NIH-supported research. But every August, I like to try something different and highlight an aspect of the scientific world that might not make headlines. This year, I’d like to take a moment to pay tribute to just a few of the many NIH family members around the country who, without pay or fanfare, freely give of themselves to make a difference in their communities. I’d like to start by recognizing my wife Diane Baker, a genetic counselor who has always found time during her busy career to volunteer.
It’s the middle of summer and you should get outside! This month I'm sharing some landscape photos of the National Institutes of Health main campus from our History Office collection to inspire you to get outside to play, like this one of the playground at the Children’s Inn.
When Taezia was 4 years old, an MRI showed a myriad of tumors crowding her organs and wrapping themselves around her spine. Without emergency surgery, Taezia would lose her ability to walk and become paralyzed from the neck down. Doctors knew they couldn’t remove the entire tumor, but their goal was to “debulk” it enough to preserve Taezia’s ability to walk and move around.
This page was last updated on Friday, January 14, 2022
