CONTACT: Ron Hartung, College of Medicine
(850) 645-9205; Ronald.Hartung@med.fsu.edu
 

By Ron Hartung
March 2013
 

UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCHER EARNS PRESTIGIOUS NATIONAL SCHOLARSHIP
 

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Medical students aren’t the only ones who excel in the Florida State University College of Medicine. There are graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, even undergraduates — such as Elizabeth Ogunrinde, who has earned national recognition.
 

Ogunrinde, a student in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry who also does research at the medical school, is one of only 15 college juniors nationwide to receive a UNCF-Merck Undergraduate Science Research Scholarship. When she got the news by phone, she was walking from her biochemistry class over to the med school.
 

“I said, ‘Wow, thank you!’” recalled Ogunrinde (pronounced o-GUR-in-day), 19, from Deltona, Fla. “I said ‘Thank you’ about a million times.”
 

She had good reason to be thankful: The award provides up to $25,000 toward tuition, room and board, and fees. In addition, each recipient will be mentored by a Merck scientist and may receive a stipend of at least $5,000 for an internship at Merck the summer after junior year.
 

“It’s a huge benefit and relief,” Ogunrinde said. “I think it will definitely let me focus on my research. And it will take some of the financial burden off my parents.”
 

UNCF stands for United Negro College Fund. The scholarship is designed to help African-American undergraduates further their science education and potentially pursue science and engineering careers. The scholarship criteria were grades, demonstrated interest in a scientific education and career, and ability to perform in a lab or engineering environment.
 

“She thinks clearly and solves problem well,” Richard Nowakowski, chair of the College of Medicine’s Department of Biomedical Sciences, wrote in a letter recommending Ogunrinde for the scholarship. “She is not deterred by the setbacks that often occur in research. She has a brilliant mind and a maturity that is far beyond what is expected of those her age.”
 

Since August, Ogunrinde’s lab work has involved comparing hippocampus tissue from normal mice with tissue from mice that have a mutation for Alzheimer’s disease. “We’re hoping that we’ll be able to find biomarkers that someday, in humans, will indicate whether someone already has or is developing Alzheimer’s,” she said.
 

Both of her parents are nurses, and in 11th grade she started volunteering at the local hospital, so she’d love a clinical career. On the other hand, she was in 10th grade when she fell in love with science. She hopes to pursue an M.D./Ph.D. major.
 

“I don’t want to give up either one,” she said, “so I’ll just do both of them.”
 

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Visit the UNCF website for more scholarship details.

CONTACT: Doug Carlson           
(850) 694-3735; doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

-or-

Samantha Olenick
(407) 303-8212; Samantha.kearns-olenick@flhosp.org

March 20, 2013

FLORIDA HOSPITAL AND FLORIDA STATE ANNOUNCE MAJOR GIFT
TO SUPPORT MEDICAL EDUCATION IN ORLANDO

ORLANDO, Fla. — Florida Hospital today announced a $2 million gift to support the Florida State University College of Medicine’s educational program in Orlando.

The gift will establish the Florida Hospital Endowed Fund for Medical Education to help the College of Medicine support its faculty of more than 550 experienced physicians from the Orlando medical community.

“A medical school with our unique, community-based curricular design requires outstanding, dedicated clinical partners if excellence in educating the next generation of Florida’s physicians is to be assured,” said Dr. Michael Muszynski, dean of the medical school’s Orlando Regional Campus.

“The teaching model offered by Florida State University’s College of Medicine is an excellent and highly effective approach to growing Florida’s much needed future physician population,” said Lars Houmann, president and CEO of Florida Hospital.  “From a resource and efficacy standpoint, the community-based clinical training approach directly aligns with the requirements of a 21st century health care model.”

Third- and fourth-year students at the FSU College of Medicine’s Orlando campus – celebrating its 10th anniversary this year – receive their clinical training in community settings across the area. They work directly with local physicians in a one-on-one apprenticeship-style model. The approach is meant to give students more involvement on the frontlines of the health-care delivery system where the vast majority of patients seek care.

Instead of operating a teaching hospital or academic medical center the FSU College of Medicine partners with hospitals, medical centers, health clinics and physician offices throughout the state.
It ensures students a chance to work directly with the most experienced physicians in the community and gets them more involved in patient care.

Florida Hospital supported the creation of the FSU College of Medicine during the legislative process and became one of its affiliates in 2002, just before the Orlando campus welcomed its first group of students.

“We find the mission of the College of Medicine, to produce physicians who would focus upon primary care and seek to increase access for citizens who live in underserved areas, to be very compatible to our own history and mission,” said Rich Morrison, regional vice president of government and public affairs at Florida Hospital.

The College of Medicine operates other regional campuses in Daytona Beach, Fort Pierce, Pensacola, Sarasota and Tallahassee. In addition, there are rural training sites in Immokalee and Marianna.

Physicians in the Orlando medical community are responsible for teaching students who are completing required clinical rotations in family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, obstetrics-gynecology, surgery, emergency medicine, psychiatry or geriatrics and through other electives.

“Now that we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of our Orlando campus, we appreciate this generous gift as an acknowledgement of that relationship and a great help to us to support and sustain the quality leadership, faculty and programs there in the future,” said Dr. John P. Fogarty, dean of the FSU College of Medicine.

The Orlando campus started with a small group of third-year students in 2003 and now regularly has 20 third-year and 20 fourth-year students. The campus building on East Colonial Drive is a home base where a longitudinal doctoring course is taught, but students spend most of their time out in the community seeing patients and learning from their physician-teachers.

The College of Medicine graduated its first class in 2005. More than three-quarters of the college’s 567 alumni are completing residency or fellowship training. Of the 81 alumni physicians now practicing in Florida, 70 percent are providing primary care.

Currently, 13 alumni are practicing in the Orlando area and 37 are completing residencies or fellowships in Orlando. Additionally, 13 members (12 percent) of the 113-member Class of 2013 have matched with residency programs in Orlando, including five at Florida Hospital. Those students are scheduled to graduate in May and begin their residency training in July.

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CONTACT: Doug Carlson
(850) 645-1255; doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

By Doug Carlson
April 2013

RESEARCHER OFFERS CLUES ON THE ORIGINS OF LIFE
Three-year study offers new evidence about where scientists should be looking

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A structural biologist at the Florida State University College of Medicine has made discoveries that could lead scientists a step closer to understanding how life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago.
 

Professor Michael Blaber and his team produced data supporting the idea that 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 billion years ago were capable of forming foldable proteins in a high-salt (halophile) environment. Such proteins would have been capable of providing metabolic activity for the first living organisms to emerge on the planet between 3.5 and 3.9 billion years ago.

The results of Blaber’s three-year study, which was built around investigative techniques that took more than 17 years to develop, are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
 

The first living organisms would have been microscopic, cell-like organizations capable of replicating and adapting to environmental conditions — a humble beginning to life on Earth.

“The current paradigm on the emergence of life is that RNA came first and in a high-temperature environment,” Blaber said. “The data we are generating are much more in favor of a protein-first view in a halophile environment.”
 

The widely accepted view among scientists is that RNA, found in all living cells, would have likely represented the first molecules of life, hypothesizing an “RNA-first” view of the origin of living systems from non-living molecules. Blaber’s results indicate that the set of amino acids produced by simple chemical processes contains the requisite information to produce complex folded proteins, which supports an opposing “protein-first” view.
 

Another prevailing view holds that a high-temperature (thermophile) environment, such as deep-ocean thermal vents, may have been the breeding ground for the origin of life.

“The halophile, or salt-loving, environment has typically been considered one that life adapted into, not started in,” Blaber said. “Our study of the prebiotic amino acids and protein design and folding suggests the opposite.”
 

Without the ability to fold, proteins would not be able to form the precise structures essential for functions that sustain life as we know it. Folding allows proteins to take on a globular shape through which they can interact with other proteins, perform specific chemical reactions, and adapt to enable organisms to exploit a given environment.
 

“There are numerous niches that life can evolve into,” Blaber said. “For example, extremophiles are organisms that exist in high temperatures, high acidity, extreme cold, extreme pressure and extreme salt and so on. For life to exist in such environments it is essential that proteins are able to adapt in those conditions. In other words, they have to be able to fold.”
 

Comet and meteorite fragments, like those that recently struck in the Urals region of Russia, have provided evidence regarding the arrival of amino acids on Earth. Such fragments predate the earth and would have been responsible for delivering a set of 10 prebiotic (before life) amino acids, whose origins are in the formation of our solar system.
 

Today the human body uses 20 common amino acids to make all its proteins. Ten of those emerged through biosynthetic pathways — the way living systems evolve. Ten — the prebiotic set — can be made by chemical reactions without requiring any living system or biosynthetic pathway.
 

Scientific evidence exists to support many elements in theories of abiogenesis (the emergence of life), including the time frame (around 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago) and the conditions on Earth and in its atmosphere at that time. Earth would have been made up of volcanic land masses (the beginning of the formation of continents), salty oceans and fresh-water ponds, along with a hot (around 80 degrees Celsius) and steamy atmosphere comprising carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Oxygen would have come later as a by-product of green plant life and bacteria that emerged.
 

Using a technique called top-down symmetric deconstruction, Blaber’s lab has been able to identify small peptide building blocks capable of spontaneous assembly into specific and complex protein architectures. His recent work explored whether such building blocks can be comprised of only the 10 prebiotic amino acids and still fold.
 

His team has achieved foldability in proteins down to 12 amino acids — about 80 percent of the way to proving his hypothesis.
 

If Blaber’s theory holds, scientists may refocus where they look for evidence in the quest to understand where, and how, life began.
 

“Rather than a curious niche that life evolved into, the halophile environment now may take center stage as the likely location for key aspects of abiogenesis,” he said. “Likewise, the role of the formation of proteins takes on additional importance in the earliest steps in the beginnings of life on Earth.”
 

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Co-authors on the PNAS paper are Liam M. Longo, an FSU graduate student, and Jihun Lee, a former postdoctoral researcher now at the National Institutes of Health.
 

CONTACT: Ron Hartung
(850) 645-9205; ronald.hartung@med.fsu.edu
 

By Ron Hartung
April 2013

TALLAHASSEE FAMILY GIVES $1 MILLION
TO FSU CENTER FOR BRAIN REPAIR FOR DYSTONIA RESEARCH

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida State University’s Center for Brain Repair has received a major financial gift from Tallahassee parents who know all too well how research can lead to medical relief.

Erwin and Stefanie Jackson’s gift of $1 million will establish a fund to support The Brian Jackson Dystonia Research and Discovery Program at the Center for Brain Repair, which is part of FSU’s College of Medicine. The program is named for their son, who at age 15 was diagnosed with generalized dystonia. The movement disorder causes involuntary muscle contractions, and Brian Jackson’s symptoms got so severe that he spent eight months in a wheelchair. Eventually, doctors implanted electrodes in his brain to tame the contractions.
 

“We don’t want anyone else’s child to go through what our son did,” said Erwin Jackson, a psychologist and businessman. “If this donation can give researchers the momentum they need to find a cure for dystonia, it will be the best money we ever spent.”
 

The Jackson family’s gift is part of their continuing effort to increase public awareness of this debilitating neurological disorder. As part of that effort, they and the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital Foundation organize an annual Valentine’s Day fundraiser for dystonia research to benefit the Brian Jackson dystonia program.
 

"This is exactly the kind of opportunity the College of Medicine is always looking for,” Dean John P. Fogarty said. “It's a chance to move promising research from the lab to the community, where it can make a real difference in how people live their lives. We're grateful for this generous partnership with the Jackson family."
 

Professor Pradeep Bhide directs the Center for Brain Repair in the College of Medicine’s Department of Biomedical Sciences. He left the Harvard Medical School faculty in 2011 to become the inaugural occupant of the Jim and Betty Ann Rodgers Eminent Scholar Chair in Developmental Neurosciences at Florida State. Last year, he happened to meet the Jacksons — and learned of their personal connection with a disorder that he has studied most of his career.
 

“Most other families in this situation likely would rest and rejoice in their hard-fought victory over dystonia,” Bhide said. “However, Erwin and Stefanie are working harder than ever on behalf of everyone else who is afflicted with this dreadful condition. Their dedication, commitment and enthusiasm inspire us, motivate us and keep our spirits high as we do our part in the laboratory and the clinic.”

###
 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Anna Mikulak, Association for Psychological Science
(202) 293-9300; amikulak@psychologicalscience.org
 

or Doug Carlson, FSU College of Medicine
(850) 645-1255 or (850) 694-3735; doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu
 

April 2013
 

WEIGHT GAIN LINKED WITH PERSONALITY TRAIT CHANGES
 

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — People who gain weight are more likely to give in to temptations but also are more thoughtful about their actions, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
 

To understand how fluctuations in body weight might relate to personality changes, Angelina Sutin of the Florida State University College of Medicine and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) examined data from two large-scale longitudinal studies of Baltimore residents.
 

“We know a great deal about how personality traits contribute to weight gain,” said Sutin, an assistant professor of medical humanities and social sciences. “What we don’t know is whether significant changes in weight are associated with changes in our core personality traits. Weight can be such an emotional issue — we thought that weight gain may lead to long-term changes in psychological functioning.”
 

The studies, NIH’s Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA) and the Baltimore Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) study, included more than 1,900 people in total, of all ages and socioeconomic levels. Data about participants’ personality traits and their body weight were collected at two time points separated by nearly a decade. In one study, a clinician measured participants’ weight at the two time points; in the other study, the participants reported their weight at baseline and had it measured by a clinician at follow-up.
 

Sutin and colleagues found that participants who had at least a 10 percent increase in body weight showed an increase in impulsiveness — with a greater tendency to give in to temptations — compared to those whose weight was stable. The data don’t reveal whether increased impulsiveness was a cause or an effect of gaining weight, but they do suggest an intimate relationship between a person’s physiology and his or her psychology.
 

In a surprising twist, people who gained weight also reported an increase in deliberation, with a greater tendency to think through their decisions. Deliberation tends to increase for everyone in adulthood, but the increase was almost double for participants who gained weight compared to those whose weight stayed the same.
 

“If mind and body are intertwined, then if one changes the other should change too,” she said. “That’s what our findings suggest.”
 

Sutin and colleagues speculate that this increase in deliberation could be the result of negative feedback from family or friends — people are likely to think twice about grabbing a second slice of cake if they feel that everyone is watching them take it.
 

These findings suggest that even though people who gain weight are more conscious of their decision-making, they may still have difficulty resisting temptations.
 

“The inability to control cravings may reinforce a vicious cycle that weakens the self-control muscle,” the researchers note. “Yielding to temptation today may reduce the ability to resist cravings tomorrow. Thus, individuals who gain weight may have increased risk for additional weight gain through changes in their personality.”
 

Co-authors are National Institute on Aging researchers Paul Costa, Wayne Chan, Yuri Milaneschi, Alan Zonderman, Luigi Ferrucci, and Antonio Terracciano, also an associate professor of geriatrics at Florida State University College of Medicine; and William Eaton of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
 

The research was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Aging and a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article " I Know Not To, but I Can’t Help It: Weight Gain and Changes in Impulsivity-Related Personality Traits" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Anna Mikulak at (202) 293-9300 or amikulak@psychologicalscience.org.

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Doug Carlson, FSU College of Medicine
(850) 645-1255 or (850) 694-3735; doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

May 15, 2013

FSU COLLEGE OF MEDICINE TO GRADUATE 113 NEW PHYSICIANS
 

The Florida State University College of Medicine will graduate its ninth class of students at a commencement ceremony Saturday. Dr. Robert Watson, a professor in the college’s Department of Clinical Sciences, will deliver the commencement address.

At the ceremony, 113 students will receive Doctor of Medicine degrees and 13 students will receive Master of Science Bridge to Clinical Medicine degrees.

The commencement ceremony will be held:

 
SATURDAY, MAY 18
 
10 A.M.
 
RUBY DIAMOND CONCERT HALL
 
WESTCOTT BUILDING

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
 
TALLAHASSEE, FLA.

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Contact: Doug Carlson
(850) 645-1255 or (850) 694-3735
Doug.carlson@med.fsu.edu

-or-

Mary Briggs
(239) 454-8765 or (239) 851-0136
Mary.briggs@leememorial.org

May 23, 2013

FAMILY MEDICINE RESIDENCY PROGRAM RECEIVES FULL ACCREDITATION

FORT MYERS – The Florida State University College of Medicine and Lee Memorial Health System received news that their family medicine residency program has received full accreditation for the maximum initial interval of three years.

“This is exciting news and something we had been anticipating. With this announcement we can begin interviewing fourth-year medical students this fall in order to choose the top candidates to become our first class of residents,” said Gary Goforth, M.D., director of the Florida State University College of Medicine Family Medicine Residency Program at Lee Memorial Health System.

The program, expected to produce six new family medicine physicians a year, will be the first residency program in Southwest Florida approved by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Educate (ACGME). Among the fastest-growing regions in the state, the area needs more physicians to take care of a population that grew by more than 40 percent in Lee County between 2000 and 2010.

The Family Medicine Residency Program is intended to help combat a growing shortage of primary care physicians. Numerous studies have shown that most physicians end up practicing near where they completed residency or fellowship training.

Residency program faculty physicians already are seeing patients in the Family Medicine Center at Lee Memorial Hospital to build the patient base needed for the arrival of the first class of residents in 2014.

The announcement came during the May 20-22 meeting of the family medicine review committee of the ACGME, the sanctioning body of graduate medical education in the U.S. and Canada.

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