Announcements

NOTE: In support of the Office of Personnel Management guidance to strengthen our efforts to protect the federal workforce and to ensure continuity of operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, most lectures and events are being held virtually or have been cancelled or postponed. Please check event details to determine status.

NIH DATA SCIENCE TOWN HALL

  • Thursday, July 23, 2020, 12:00-1:00 p.m.
  • Subscribe to the NIH Data Science Town Hall LISTSERV

The NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) hosts a monthly town hall to share updates on the wide range of activities supporting the implementation of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science. The meeting is open to all NIH employees and contractors interested in learning about NIH’s data science activities, and ODSS will host Mark Hahnel, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Figshare, as a special guest speaker for the July meeting. NIH will conclude a one-year pilot of the NIH Figshare instance in mid-July, and ODSS has invited Hahnel to share his perspective on the pilot project, how researchers can use generalist data repositories to better store and share their data, and the future of data sharing. The meeting will conclude with a Q&A session. Hahnel founded Figshare, a generalist data repository, in 2012 and is an advocate for open data and open research.

To receive the Webex meeting invitation and other updates from ODSS, please subscribe to the town hall LISTSERV. To learn more about biomedical data repositories, visit the ODSS website. Additional comments or questions should be emailed to ODSS at datascience@nih.gov.

Note: town halls every month on the 4th Thursday. Sign up for LISTSERV for info.

BEHIND THE MASK

The NIH has been on the forefront of researching, combating, and providing information about COVID-19 that emerged in late 2019. For all of us at NIH, the virus has impacted our lives in several ways including how so many of us perform our jobs. The Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum is launching a campus-wide initiative to encourage NIH government employees, contractors, trainees, and volunteers to submit documentation about their professional and personal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

While official records will be preserved according to federal regulations, there are no such provisions in place to ensure that personal reactions will be captured that give a more collective account about NIH and its response to the virus. Your contribution will be the primary source material future historians will use to understand how NIH fared and adapted at this critical time.

Please take the time to tell your story!

COVID-19 VIRTUAL LECTURE SERIES

The COVID-19 SIG and the Office of Intramural Research have organized a virtual lecture series for Wednesday afternoons. All are welcome to watch the live videocasts or the archived ones (they will be archived a day after the talk). The following talks have been given or are scheduled:

  • Wednesday, July 8: “Lessons Learned: Management and Treatment during COVID-19 Pandemic,” by Judith Aberg, M.D., Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
  • Wednesday, July 15: “Nucleic Acid Delivery Systems for RNA Therapy and Gene Editing,” by Dan Anderson, Ph.D., Professor, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT
  • Wednesday, July 22: Title TBA [pathology], by Stefania Pittaluga and David Kleiner, NCI CCR
  • Wednesday, July 29: Title TBA [antiviral immune response], by Alessandro Sette, La Jolla Institute for Immunology

No lectures in August; series to resume in the Fall.

  • More to be scheduled.

NLM HISTORY OF MEDICINE TALKS

For list of talks in 2020, visit https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/lectures/index.html

Wednesday, September 9: 4th Annual Michael E. DeBakey Lecture in the History of Medicine (Rescheduled)

DeBakey in Baghdad and Beirut: The Internationalization of Surgical Education, 1945–1970

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. ET—This program will be live-streamed globally, and archived, by NIH VideoCasting.

Sara Farhan, Ph.D.—2019 NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellow in the History of Medicine, Assistant Professor of History, Department of International Studies, American University of Sharjah

The techniques of medical education in the fields of surgery underscore the universality of the medical profession and the internationalization of its pedagogies. This presentation examines the field of surgery in the medical schools of Baghdad and Beirut as comparative transnational microcosms for the study of the development of pedagogical approaches of surgical education. Pointedly, this presentation focuses on the centrality of Dr. Michael Elias DeBakey in this internationalization process. In the aftermath of World War II, DeBakey became vernacularized in surgical canon. Medical students in the Middle East studied DeBakey’s techniques and the intricacies of his inventions while instructors employed his pedagogies. In examining DeBakey’s influence on curricular development in the Middle East, the complexities and richness of cross-cultural exchange in the realm of medical education and the trajectory of the pedagogy of surgical education can help us understand the processes of the internationalization of the medical profession.

Thursday, September 24: 12th Annual Cassedy Lecture in the History of Medicine; “Savages cry easily and are afraid of the dark”: What It Means to Talk about Race and African American Health

2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. ET—This program will be live-streamed globally, and archived, by NIH VideoCasting.

Naa Oyo A. Kwate, PhD—Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of Human Ecology, Rutgers University, and recipient of a 2018 NLM G13 Award for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health/Publications for Race and the Transformation of the Food Environment: Fast food, African Americans, and the Color Line, 1955–1995

This talk examines the impact of racism on African American health, looking at pervasive inequities that drive higher rates of morbidity and death in the United States. Where once explicitly racist theories of African American bodies and minds dominated public and scientific discourse, contemporary understandings of racial inequities in health tend to use less incendiary language, but still conceive of poor health as fundamentally a problem of individuals. Such framing centers health behaviors including diet and visits to the doctor, and leaves the role of social structures uninterrogated. This talk explores the deeply entrenched effects of racism on African American health through institutional policies and practices that defeat socioeconomic opportunity and cause overexposure to harms; stereotypes; day-to-day encounters with racism; and other aspects of American social life.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON LECTURE SERIES

The WALS talks have been rescheduled and will resume in the fall. For information, go to https://oir.nih.gov/wals/current-lecture-season.

NO RESEARCH FESTIVAL THIS YEAR

NIH cannot hold the NIH Research Festival as scheduled in September. You can probably guess why. The Office of Intramural Research (OIR) contemplated the idea of holding a virtual festival. But those two words—“virtual” and “festival”— don’t seem to pair well. The whole point of the annual Research Festival is to get everyone out of the labs and offices to meet each other, talk some science, and have some fun. The plan is to hold the Festival in spring 2021. There’s no date yet, but the OIR will keep you posted.

SYMPOSIUM ON NIH RESEARCH ON COVID-19

  • Mid-September 2020

The COVID-19 Scientific Interest Group is planning a symposium in September, on or around the time in mid-September when the Research Festival would have happened. This symposium will feature NIH research on COVID-19, with considerable input from NIH fellows. The plan should be finalized by August.

REMOTE MINI SYMPOSIUM WITH TWO NIHERS RECENTLY ELECTED TO NAS

  • Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Two colleagues recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences, John Schiller and Rob Tycko, have agreed to a remote mini-symposium on Tuesday, July 21. So save the date. It’s great to keep alive this tradition of celebrating NAS elections each year. For a full list of NIHers who are members of the NAS, visit https://irp.nih.gov/about-us/honors/the-national-academy-of-sciences.

This page was last updated on Wednesday, March 23, 2022

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