June Hwang came to the University in 2007, right after earning her PhD in German studies, with an emphasis in film studies, from the University of California, Berkeley. “Rochester was a place where I could pursue the work I was trained in,” says Hwang, but “also a place where I could expand my horizons, since the humanities at the University are designed to be interdisciplinary.”

Now Hwang, an associate professor of German and film and media studies, will put that background to use in her new position as director of the University’s Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.

As Hwang explains, “My work focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. I’m excited to build off the work of my predecessors in order to highlight those intersections and to bring them into a larger conversation at the University.”

Hwang, who considers northern California home, is the daughter of Korean immigrants. After receiving her BA in comparative literature from Yale University, she spent her time in the United States, Germany and Austria, including two years studying in Germany at the Universität Konstanz and another two at the Freie Universität Berlin. Learn more in her Q&A with Peter Iglinski.

Medical Center researchers are leading a new national COVID vaccine study that will evaluate a second booster dose. The study will include a current approved vaccine and new investigational vaccines that target the Beta, Delta, and Omicron variants.  The goal of the study is to determine which regime of vaccines offer the broadest immune response, which could offer protection against current and future variants.

“For the past two years, we have been playing catch-up with the virus as new variants emerge,” says Angela Branche, an associate professor of infectious diseases and co-director of the Medical Center’s Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Unit (VTEU). “COVID will continue to evolve over time, potentially leading to new variants that cause periods of higher incidence of symptomatic disease.  The goal of this study is to move from responsiveness to preparedness.”

Branche – along with Nadine Rouphael from Emory University – is co-chair of the Phase 2 clinical trial, known as the COVID-19 Variant Immunologic Landscape (COVAIL) trial. The study is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, and will recruit up to 600 volunteers at 24 sites across the U.S., including Rochester.

The approved COVID vaccines provided durable protection against severe COVID during the Omicron wave but were less effective in preventing infection and mild illness. The concern is that a new variant could build upon Omicron, other variants, or even emerge from a new branch of mutations altogether.  Omicron demonstrated that existing vaccines provide a foundation of protection, leading researchers to believe that strengthening this existing immunity, or even broadening it, could help boost protection against emerging variants and future waves of infection. Learn more.

A quantum processor semiconductor chip is shown connected to a circuit board. (University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster)

A regular computer consists of billions of transistors, called bits. Quantum computers, on the other hand, are based on quantum bits, also known as qubits, which can be made from a single electron.

A major hurdle in the quantum computer revolution is the unintended interactions between qubits and the environment, which are referred to as noise.

“Because qubits are incredibly fragile, noise makes virtually all types of modern-day qubits prone to errors,” says Elliot Connors, a graduate student in the lab of John Nichol, associate professor of physics and astronomy. Connors is the first author of a Nature Communications paper that provides a detailed picture of the noise environment with which silicon qubits must contend and sheds light on the microscopic origin of noise. Researchers will be able to use this information in the quest to eliminate noise, allowing qubits—and, therefore, quantum computers—to work more efficiently.

“Our results paint the most complete picture of noise in silicon spin qubits to date and will be essential for eventually pushing past the boundaries currently imposed by noise in these devices,” Nichol says. Learn more.

The Medical Center has joined a prestigious network of academic and clinical researchers to study the cellular and molecular interactions that lead to inflammation and autoimmune diseases. The program is a collaborative effort between the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, pharmaceutical companies, and nonprofit organizations. The Medical Center will receive more than $10 million of a $58.5 million grant supporting the Accelerating Medicines Partnership®: Autoimmune and Immune-Mediated Diseases (AMP AIM) network.

This program is divided into four disease teams: rheumatoid arthritis (RA), lupus, psoriasis/psoriatic arthritis, and Sjogren’s disease, and multiple technical cores. Jennifer Anolik, professor and interim chief of allergy/immunology & rheumatology, will serve as the principal lead for the RA team, and Christopher Ritchlin, professor of allergy/immunology & rheumatology, will lead the psoriasis/psoriatic arthritis team.

AMP AIM builds on and broadens an earlier program that the Medical Center was first named to in 2014 with Anolik as PI.

The goal of the new grant is to marshal in transformative, high-dimensional technology that has been developed in the last decade, such as transcriptomic and genomic approaches, and apply those to patient-focused research. The prior AMP grant allowed researchers to isolate single cells for target tissue such as joint and kidney for the first time for research in a “disease deconstruction” approach. The next stage of the project will incorporate “disease reconstruction”—looking spatially within tissue to determine what cells are next to each other, how they communicate, and how environmental influences affect the cells and/or the disease. Learn more.

A forum from noon to 1:30 p.m. Thursday, April 14, by the University’s Human Research Protection Program will review approaches, requirements, and best practices related to facilitating informed consent discussions.

There will be an interactive role play activity, demonstrating best practices as well as approaches to avoid.

Register here.

The University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI), in collaboration with other offices, recently launched MyChart for Recruitment, a service that allows investigators to send clinical study recruitment messages to patients using MyChart.

This tool can now be used for patients less than 12 years of age as well as people 18 and older. (It is not yet approved for recruiting adolescents.)

Learn more.

Apply now for the UR CTSI’s Population Health Research Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Over the course of one year, postdocs will develop and complete a population health research project within one of the following tracks:

• Electronic Health Record as a Resource for Research.
• National, Regional and Local Database Analytics.
• Population Health Behavior Change.

Applicants must be within three years of completing their doctoral degree and have a solid track record of published research. Apply by Monday, May 16.  Learn more.

Developmental Emergence of Neural Circuit Architecture and Function, June 9-11, at the Memorial Art Gallery, aims to generate discussion and debate on how recent advances in delineating neurodevelopmental processes across species shape our understanding of the brain, including its systems-level function and dysfunction.

More than a dozen speakers will be featured at the annual symposium of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience and the University’s Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center.

Keynote speakers include Beatriz Luna, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, and Mriganka Sur, professor of neuroscience and brain & cognitive sciences at MIT.

Registration is now open.