As tents went up on the Quad and in the Kresge courtyard, a finch built her nest in a Gordon Hall windowsill. With a similar sense of expectation, the faculty and staff of HMS, HSDM and HSPH now watch as our graduates embark on their careers.
Congratulations to the Class of 2009!
IMMUNOLOGY: How Flu Does Its Dirty Work
Before they trigger any sneezing, flu viruses need to breach the immune system’s intricate defenses. The central question is, how? Researcher Michaela Gack and colleagues have found an answer for influenza A, the most common and virulent type of flu. According to the study, which appears in the May 21 Cell Host and Microbe, the virus breaks into cells, disables its early warning system and blocks the immune response before it even gets started.
ADMINISTRATION: New Faculty Invigorate Strategic Initiatives
Recruits to the Medical School over the past year bring extraordinary expertise to the Quad and advance priorities of the strategic plan. Two of these faculty members are immunologists Diane Mathis and Christophe Benoist.
LEADERSHIP: Physician-humanitarian Next Global Health Chair
Paul Farmer (right) will head the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, assuming the reins from Jim Yong Kim, who will now be president of Dartmouth College.
BIOENGINEERING: Disorderly Conduct
New work from HSPH researchers suggests that cells in an advancing sheet team up in what looks like a global tug-of-war to drag the entire sheet forward. The discovery, published online May 3 in Nature Physics, is based on measurements of the actual forces cells exert on a surface in order to move. Novel technology from the lab of principal investigator Jeffrey Fredberg (left) made such measurements possible for the first time. The study, whose first author is Xavier Trepat, provides insight into how cells collaborate and spread during development, wound healing and cancer and opens the door for biologists to directly examine how physical forces influence intercellular signaling.
BIOMECHANICS: Blood Stem Cells Grow with the Flow
When the heart first beats in a tiny embryo, the shear stress of pulsing blood stimulates the first definitive blood stem cells to emerge within vessels, report two teams of HMS researchers. This newfound biomechanical insight answers a century-old question and may help scientists develop more and better blood stem cells for therapy and research. The papers from the labs of (left to right) Leonard Zon, George Daley, and Guillermo García-Cardeña were published online May 13 in Nature and in the May 15 issue of Cell.