Dr. MacRae Linton
Awards roll in for several VUMC staffers
Dr. Andrew Gaffney
Stephen Altmin, VMS III
Several members of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center staff have recently been named winners of national awards.
€ Dr. MacRae F. Linton, assistant professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, has won the American Heart Association's Irvin H. Page Young Investigator award for his research into arteriosclerosis.
The Page Award is offered to researchers who have been studying arteriosclerosis for fewer than 12 years and who have already published some findings from those studies.
Linton is examining the role of apolipoprotein (apoE) secretion by the macrophage in the early stages of arteriosclerosis. In animal models Linton has shown that apoE secretion by the macrophage plays a protective role in early arteriosclerosis.
Bone marrow transplantation in animal models showed that apoE deficient mice developed 11 times more athersclerosis than mice with apoE bone marrow.
€ Dr. Francis A. Gaffney, professor of Medicine, was one of five people recently inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in New Mexico.
Gaffney flew on the space shuttle Columbia in June, 1991 with a catheter inserted in his veins within an inch of his heart to study how the human body adapts to conditions of weightlessness and then readapts to normal gravity.
Gaffney is now engaged in research in the division of Cardiology, some of which was gathered during his mission five years ago.
€ Stephen Altmin, VMS III, has been awarded a Fulbright grant to study public health and HIV epidemiology in Sydney, Australia. Altmin is one of approximately 1,600 U.S. grantees who will travel abroad for the 1996-97 academic year under the Fulbright Program.
Altmin's interests lie in studying health care in developing nations and he has spent time examining health care systems in Katmandu, Nepal, and in remote regions of Bolivia.
€ Todd A. Verdoorn, Ph.D., assistant professor of Pharmacology, and Melissa P. Clark, assistant professor of Medicine, recieved Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers.
The awards recognize the promise of future success in scientific or engineering research and the potential for eventual leadership in their areas. Recipients of the award recieve $500,000 over a five year period to further their research interests.