School Notes: School of Medicine
May/June 2012

Center to study rare genetic diseases

For complex diseases like cancer and diabetes, there’s no way to predict whether a person will develop the illness during his or her lifetime. But for so-called Mandelian disorders, a mutation in a single gene is the direct and clear-cut cause of disease. The inheritance patterns of Mandelian disorders are straightforward, but discovering the genes responsible for these inherited diseases is not always easy. The fewer patients with a disease, the harder that disease is to study, because of limited funding and limited genetic samples to compare. Now, a four-year, $11.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health has established the Center for Mandelian Genomics at Yale, providing researchers with the resources to tackle the genetics of these rare disorders. The principal investigators at the new center include Richard P. Lifton, chair and Sterling Professor of Genetics; Murat Günel ’94Grd, the Nixdorff-German Professor of Neurosurgery and professor of genetics and neurobiology; Shrikant Mane, senior research scientist in genetics; and Mark Gerstein, the Albert L. Williams Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and codirector of the Yale Computational Biology and Informatics Program.

Urology department names leader

In January, Dean Robert J. Alpern and Marna P. Borgstrom, president and CEO of the Yale–New Haven Health System, announced the appointment of Peter G. Schulam as chair of the Department of Urology at the School of Medicine and chief of the urology department at Yale–New Haven Hospital. Urology, which had been organized as a section within the Department of Surgery since the section’s founding by Clyde L. Deming in 1921, has recently been elevated to department status by the Yale Corporation. Schulam, a native New Havener, comes to the School of Medicine from the Ronald Reagan Medical Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was vice chair of urology, chief of the division of endo-urology and minimally invasive surgery, and director of both the kidney stone treatment center and the surgical living kidney donor program.