We would like to congratulate MD/PhD candidates Anthony “Tony” Pettinato, Feria Ladha, and Rachel Cohn for their publication in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation. As members of the Hinson laboratory at Jax, students Pettinato, Ladha, and Cohn leverage powerful genetic research techniques to study cardiac dysfunction. Their paper “Development of a Cardiac Sarcomere Functional Genomics Platform to Enable Scalable Interrogation of Human TNNT2 Variants” provides a better understanding of how mutations in cardiac muscle proteins can lead to heart disease and failure. Beyond their study of the titular protein Troponin, these experiments illustrate a novel platform of single cell functional assays that can be used to study new drug candidates for heart disease or test patient-specific defects in a host of cardiac proteins.

For further information, see their full publication here

The UConn Health MD/PhD training program would like to congratulate Alexandra “Allie” Goetjen for winning a Diversity Award from the 35^th Annual MD/PhD National Student Conference. The award was given in recognition of Allie’s “commitment to diversity in science” as well as her “passion for scientific achievement”. Allie is a second time winner of this award, which she previously received in 2017. While she admits that “things [did] look a bit different” with the virtual format of this year’s conference, she remains elated to be recognized for her work and dedication at a national level. As a first generation college student and eldest of 3 siblings, she applied for this award to demonstrate to her family and others that “anything is possible despite the challenges we may face in life”.

Allie is in the 6^th and final year of her graduate phase of training and conducts research with Dr. Jonathan Covault in the department of Psychiatry. Here, she is studying how mutations in the gene GABRA2 increase the risk of developing alcohol use disorder. As a testament to her scientific efforts, Allie was awarded a prestigious F30 predoctoral fellowship by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for which she is “beyond grateful”. Outside of her laboratory work, she volunteers as a Counselor with the Crisis Text Line where she has served over 1,000 individuals in crisis situations. Allie also values her time as a student advisory board member for UConn Health’s Psychiatry Interest Group. After graduation, she aims to pursue a career as a physician scientist in the field of addiction psychiatry. In this role, she envisions leading a behavioral genetics lab and following her clinical passion of addiction counseling.

From strokes to spinal cord injuries, neuronal damage presents a significant burden of morbidity and mortality throughout the world. Though such neuronal damage has conventionally been viewed as irreversible, MD/PhD candidate Bruce Rheaume is working to shift this paradigm. Rheaume, a member of Ephraim Trakhtenberg’s lab in the department of neuroscience, uses a model of optic nerve damage to better understand the regenerative capacity of the nervous system. While investigating why certain neurons can heal after optic nerve injury while others do not, he identified and characterized novel cell populations in the eye using single cell technologies. This work, published in Nature Communications [1], serves as a basis for better understanding cellular diversity in the central nervous system while also pointing to new targets for regenerative therapies. As a testament to the importance of his work, this paper has been cited nearly 100 times since publication.

Bruce hopes to combine his unique perspectives from both laboratory and medical training to pursue a career as physician scientist specializing in cardiology. Additionally, as one UConn Health’s “Biomedical Science Graduate Student Mentorship Award” winners for 2019, he hopes to continue advising and fostering the growth of budding clinicians and scientists.

Citation:

1. Rheaume, B. A., Jereen, A., Bolisetty, M., Sajid, M. S., Yang, Y., Renna, K., … & Trakhtenberg, E. F. (2018). Single cell transcriptome profiling of retinal ganglion cells identifies cellular subtypes. Nature communications, 9(1), 1-17.