David Muller, MD
Dear students,
We continue to make incremental progress in addressing racism and bias on our campus and in our clinical environments. Below is a list of major initiatives and events since our last update: (more…)
From left: Michael L. Marin, MD, FACS; Arthur H. Aufses, Jr., MD; Harriet Aufses; and Kenneth L. Davis, MD
Arthur H. Aufses, Jr., MD, one of Mount Sinai’s most respected physicians, celebrated his 90th birthday with nearly 250 colleagues, family, and friends on Monday, February 8, at the Harmonie Club in Manhattan.
Dr. Aufses served as Chair of the Department of Surgery for 22 years,retiring from that position in 1996, and he currently holds appointments as Professor of Surgery, and of Population Health Science and Policy, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He also is Chairman Emeritus of The Ruth J. & Maxwell Hauser and Harriet & Arthur H. Aufses, Jr., MD Department of Surgery. (more…)
Medical student Yotam Arens learns more about the life of patient Juan Sanabria.
Medical students from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai performed special patient rounds on Tuesday, February 16, as part of The Gold Humanism Honor Society’s (GHHS) annual “Solidarity Day for Compassionate Care.” This national program encourages hospital staff and medical school students to develop more caring, compassionate relationships with patients. Twenty students visited 12 patients in The Mount Sinai Hospital Palliative Care Unit and Kravis Children’s Hospital at Mount Sinai, practicing “Tell Me More” interactions. The students conversed with patients about topics unrelated to their diagnoses, developing compassionate communication skills they can use in future patient interactions. Created by GHHS chapter members at the Icahn School of Medicine in 2014, dozens of GHHS chapters nationwide use the “Tell Me More” program.
At the John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Monrovia, Liberia, health officials, doctors, residents, and medical students gathered for grand rounds on the importance of research that were presented by Mount Sinai’s OBGYN team.
After suspending travel to Liberia during the largest outbreak of Ebola in history, faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai resumed their teaching trips to the West African country last fall, with renewed efforts to improve women’s health.
Led by Ann Marie Beddoe, MD, Assistant Professor, Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Science, members of the Mount Sinai community have undertaken several initiatives in Liberia since they began working there in 2008. They are helping to train the country’s first residents in obstetrics and gynecology and have applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health to help build a cancer center. They have also trained nurses to conduct human papillomavirus (HPV) screenings and counsel patients. (more…)
The MEGENA tool has 3D spheres that help uncover precise network clusters associated with disease progression.
Two new Big Data analysis tools that help pinpoint specific genes that are actively involved in disease progression were recently made available to the public by scientists in the Multiscale Network Modeling Laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The team, led by Bin Zhang, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, published the pair of algorithm-based tools online in November 2015 in PLoS Computational Biology and in Scientific Reports, a Nature publication. The open-source tools are available to all researchers who wish to gain a better understanding of disease mechanisms in order to develop more effective drugs and create individualized treatments. (more…)
The Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory’s Executive Director, Lisa Edelmann, PhD, left, and Director, Ruth Kornreich, PhD
The Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory in January introduced a new panel of comprehensive pan-ethnic carrier screening tests for 281 genetic disorders, the largest currently available. Mount Sinai’s NextStep Carrier Screening also includes the most comprehensive panel of tests for 96 diseases found in the Ashkenazi Jewish population and is the first of its kind to address the largely overlooked needs of the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish populations.
“Building on years of in-house genetic research and technology adaptation in our clinical laboratory, we created tests that not only expand the number of diseases screened, but also increase the breadth of coverage, to improve carrier detection rates and provide more accurate residual risk estimates to patients,” says Lisa Edelmann, PhD, Executive Director of the Mount Sinai Genetic Testing Laboratory within the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences. (more…)