Senior Scientist Seminar Series
Spotlighting the Research and Career Paths of Dell Med Scientists
Research improves thousands, if not millions, of peoples’ lives at a time. Join Dell Med’s Health Transformation Research Institute for the Senior Scientist Seminar Series (S4) to learn about the impressive career paths and impactful scientific contributions of Dell Med and UT faculty.
S4 is aimed at trainees, faculty, healthcare workers and the UT community at large to learn from experienced clinician-scientists.
Save the Dates, noon-1pm CST
October 12, 2023 - Beth Lippard, PhD, presents "Of Mice and (Wo)Men:
Bench to Bedside Tales from the Accidental Clinical Scientist."
December 7, 2023 - Claudia Lucchinetti, MD presents "My Academic Journey: From Bedside to Bench and Back."
February 22, 2024 - Lorie Harper, MD MSCI, presents "Failing Up: In the Middle of an Academic Medicine Career".
April 4, 2024 - Jason McLellan, PhD, presents "An Unintentional Path to Vaccine Design".
Meet the Speakers
Beth Lippard, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Dell Medical School. Her research interests focus on the intersection of behavioral and developmental neuroscience. She studies brain-behavior relationships across development, in clinical and typically developing populations, and how genes and environmental stress influence these processes. Specifically, a focus of her research has been on understanding neural systems related to risk, onset and early disease progression in affective and alcohol use disorders. She takes a developmental approach, using longitudinal translational neuroscience paradigms, in both human and rodent models, to identify genes, neural circuitry, environmental and behavioral predictors of problem behaviors and mechanisms by which predictors translate into adult phenotypes (e.g. suicide and addiction) within and across psychiatric disorders.
Claudia Lucchinetti, MD, serves as the Dean of the Dell Medical School, Senior Vice President for Medical Affairs for The University of Texas at Austin, holds the Frank and Charmaine Denius Distinguished Dean’s Chair in Medical Leadership, and is a Professor in the Department of Neurology. As a research neurologist with specialization in neuroimmunology and experimental neuropathy, she is an internationally recognized expert in the clinical and neuropathological underpinnings of the broad spectrum of inflammatory demyelinating diseases, including multiple sclerosis, neuromyelitis optica and MOG antibody associated disease. One of her landmark studies describes four patterns of tissue damage in early multiple sclerosis; it suggested that MS lesions form differently among patient subgroups. This work markedly refined medicine’s understanding of the disease, indicating the potential for individualized therapy based on pathological subtype.
Lorie Harper, MD, MSCI, is an Associate Professor and Division Chief in Maternal-Fetal Medicine in the Department of Women's Health at Dell Medical School. She is also a clinical provider for the UT Health Austin Maternal-Fetal Medicine Clinic and a nationally recognized scientific researcher. Her main research focuses on the clinical management of obesity in pregnancy, including reducing the risk of surgical-site infections after cesarean sections in women who are obese. She also has a significant interest in gestational diabetes and pregestational diabetes in pregnancy, complications frequently seen in obesity. More recently, given the ongoing opioid epidemic in the country, Dr. Harper has expanded her research to include the management of substance use disorders in pregnancy.
Jason McLellan, PhD, is a Professor and Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry, as well as the Associate Chair for Graduate Education at UT Austin. He researches viral and bacterial proteins, and his work seeks to understand how these proteins are structured, how they function, and factors this into the development of vaccines and potential treatments for deadly pathogens. He is one of the inventors of a way to engineer a key protein in coronaviruses for use in vaccines. The technology his team developed can be found in many leading vaccines against COVID-19 (Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax).
Archive of Past Speakers
Cynthia Gyamfi-Bannerman, MD, MS, FACOG, UC San Diego. "Developing an Academic Research Career: Lessons Learned Over the Years"
Gurjit "Neeru" Khurana Hershey, MD, PhD. "Musings from an Academic Allergist: Sensibility, Serendipity, and Serenity."
George Macones, MD, MSCE. "A (Long) Career in Clinical Research."
William Matsui, MD. "Chutes, Ladders, and Cancer Translational Research"; blog post summary here.
Lauren Ancel Meyers, PhD. "Math and Computing in the Fight Against Global Pandemics."
Charles Nemeroff, MD, PhD. "Paradise Lost: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse and Neglect."
David Paydarfar, MD. "Solving the Unexpected Death of Infant K.P.: A Clinician-Scientist’s 40-Year Quest"; blog post summary accessible here.
William Schwartz, MD. "A Tale From the Neurology Clinic: The Man Who Had an Upside-Down Circadian Clock."
Kiran K Shokar, MD, MPH. "Cancer Prevention and Early Detection Research: An Adventure Through Space and Time."