C. KENNETH AND DIANNE WRIGHT CENTER FOR CLINICAL AND TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH VCU BLOG

The Wright Center has named Gretchen Neigh, Ph.D., the new co-director of its Ph.D. program. Neigh is an associate professor in the VCU School of Medicine’s Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology and comes to the Wright Center with a wealth of teaching and mentoring experience, as well as research spanning across multiple systems and levels […]

Nina Exner, Ph.D., calls her job a ‘funny profession.’ Being a research data librarian means different things at different institutions, but for Exner it translates largely into data management. She helps VCU researchers comply – appropriately and ethically – with the data management plans required by the government or foundations who give them grants. The […]

The 2021 VCU Science Communication Award was awarded to Sean Koebley, Ph.D., for his presentation: “Goodbye, P-value: Practical Bayesian Statistics To Replace Frequentist Statistics.” Koebley is a postdoctoral fellow in the Physics Department at VCU where he works with Jason Reed, Ph.D., studying novel methods for detecting genetic mutations using biophysics. This talk is the third Koebley […]

The hormone prolactin has long been understood to play a vital role in breast growth and development and the production of milk during pregnancy. But a pair of recent studies conducted at VCU Massey Cancer Center finds strong evidence that prolactin also acts as a major contributor to breast cancer development and that the hormone […]

Every day, millions of people in health care, from oncologists to rehabilitation specialists to dentists, use the tools at their disposal to help patients get better. “And everyone runs into times when they say, what if?” said L. Franklin Bost, MBA. “What if I had something better? What if I could give someone better treatment? […]

How would you react if someone started a conversation by saying what was wrong with you and your family? Probably not well. And that’s exactly what health researchers often do, when they try to talk to community members, said Maghboeba Mosavel, Ph.D, an associate professor at the VCU School of Medicine’s Department of Health Behavior […]

Terrance Afer-Anderson wants to create an army of ambassadors. The Norfolk native and prostate cancer survivor wrote, produced and directed a movie, “The Black Walnut,” to bring attention to inequities in screening and mortality rates for prostate cancer in the Black community. “I tell men scared of the invasiveness of a prostate cancer screening, ‘You […]

With COVID-19 affecting the lungs of patients and survivors, lung research and science has never been more important. To help guide national review of that science, Wright Center Associate Director Patrick Nana-Sinkam, M.D., has joined the Scientific Advisory Committee of the American Lung Association. Founded in 1904, the oldest voluntary health organization in the country, […]

Emily Zimmerman, Ph.D., M.S., MPH, wrote the book on community engaged research – literally. Released in March, “Researching Health Together: Engaging Patients and Stakeholders, From Topic Identification to Policy Change” features a collection of experiences from researchers across the country, sharing how and why their projects are designed to engage the community. The Wright Center […]

One faculty, one post-doc, one recent undergraduate: Three new people with diverse backgrounds joined those earning their Master’s in Clinical and Translational Science at the Wright Center this month. Calvin Kiani, M.D., is a new junior faculty member in Internal Medicine at VCU and is a School of Medicine Rising Scholar. He will do clinical […]