News in Brief

Rosa Lee, MD, who led the implementation of a new mission-driven curriculum at the City University of New York School of Medicine, joined VP&S in August as senior associate dean for curricular affairs. She will help develop a curriculum that ensures a student-centered approach to learning and builds on inclusivity and anti-racism efforts that reflect societal and patient needs as well as strong scientific foundations.

Jean-Marie Alves-Bradford, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at CUMC and the inaugural director of psychiatry’s Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, has joined the VP&S Office of Education as the first associate dean for medical school professionalism in the learning environment. She will lead VP&S efforts to design and implement training programs for departments, clerkships, and courses related to student mistreatment issues.

An essay by Paul Lewis’24 earned honorable mention in a contest sponsored by the American Medical Student Association and the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation. Future physicians were invited to submit essays about how they built, lost, or restored trust in a health care setting.

VP&S scientists have joined a regional consortium of academic and industry partners to accelerate the development of new drugs that target SARS-CoV-2, other coronaviruses, and viruses that could lead to future pandemics. The new consortium, called the Metropolitan AntiViral Drug Accelerator, is funded by a five-year, $108 million grant from the Antiviral Drug Discovery Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern program of the NIH. The consortium includes researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Rutgers University, Merck & Co., the Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and Aligos Therapeutics. VP&S participants are David Ho, MD, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center and a leading COVID-19 researcher; Stephen Goff, PhD, the Higgins Professor of Microbiology & Immunology; Alejandro Chavez, MD, assistant professor of pathology & cell biology; and Lawrence Shapiro, PhD, professor of biochemistry & molecular biophysics.