School Notes: School of Medicine
November/December 2012

Alumnus returns to chair pediatrics

George Lister, a 1973 graduate of the School of Medicine and a member of its pediatrics faculty from 1988 to 2003, has returned to campus as chair of the Department of Pediatrics. He will also serve as chief of pediatrics at Yale–New Haven Hospital and physician-in-chief at Yale–New Haven Children’s Hospital. Lister returns to Yale from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, where he served as chair and professor of pediatrics and associate dean of education since leaving Yale in 2003.

RNA biologist receives twin honors

The School of Medicine’s Joan A. Steitz has been awarded two major prizes that recognize outstanding achievements of women scientists. Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, was awarded the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize of Rockefeller University for her more than four decades of research on how messenger RNA is fashioned in order to make proteins from the instructions in DNA, a process crucial to all life. She was also named winner of the 2012 Vanderbilt Prize in Biomedical Science, created by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine “to honor and recognize a woman scientist of national reputation who has a stellar record of research accomplishments and is known for her mentorship of women in science.”

Two doctoral students are named HHMI fellows

Two Yale doctoral students have received fellowships through a new initiative of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Sashka Dimitrievska, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Alice Qinhua Zhou, in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, will each receive a $43,000 award, which is given to 50 international graduate students named fellows each year. Dimitrievska, a native of Canada, is working with Laura E. Niklason, professor of anesthesiology and of biomedical engineering, in studying aspects of engineered blood vessels. Zhou, a native of China, is working with Corey S. O’Hern, associate professor of mechanical engineering and of physics, and Lynne J. Regan, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and of chemistry, in a study to predict and redesign protein-protein interactions.