Jan 9, 2026 – Dr. Mia found a lucky coin in the Vasilopita cake brought by Drs. Kranias and Drosatos to celebrate the Greek new year.

Jan 14, 2026 – Thank you to our Distinguished Lecturer Hossein Ardehali, MD, PhD (Irving J. Levinson Professor of Cardiology, University of Arizona College of Medicine) for discussing the "Role of hexokinase enzymes in HFpEF and immune function."

Jan 2026 – Dr. Heiny used her 50 years of work in the field to review "Excitation-contraction coupling in skeletal muscle" for the book "Cell physiology Source Book (fifth edition)".  Thank you Dr. Heiny!

Jan 2026 – Congratulations to Dr. Gao! The College of Medicine is celebrating Chen Gao as a Research Rising Star. A Research Rising Star show excellence in publications, funding, invited talks, and more.

Jan 2026 – Congratulations to PhD candidate Kajol Thapa! She (Drosatos lab) received a Sigma Xi graduate student grant-in-aid for her project "Role of FGF21 in physiological and pathological cardiac hypertrophy." The award comes with $2500 and will be celebrated at the Sigma Xi Spring Mixer event, Wednesday, March 4th.  Kajol will give a 10-minute presentation on her work at the Sigma Xi Fall Mixer, sometime in late September or early October.  

Jan 2026 – Congratulations to Jennifer Schurdak! The College of Medicine honored Jennifer (Perez-Tilve lab) for her 25 years of service to UC.

Jan 2026 – Congratulations to PhD alumna Dr. Nina Steele! Dr. Steele, now an Assistant Professor at UC in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, has received the Clinical Cancer Research Early Career Award from the American Association for Cancer Research. Dr. Steele was honored for her publication: “Human Pancreatic Cancer Single-Cell Atlas Reveals Association of CXCL10⁺ Fibroblasts and Basal Subtype Tumor Cells.” in 'Clinical Cancer Research'.

Jan 2026 – Congratulations to Dr. Rainer! Ivanka Rainer (Ulrich-Lai lab) successfully defended her doctoral dissertation "Altered reward processing in obesity: a potential driver of increased food seeking." Her first author paper has just been published as well: 'A larger amount of palatable food is needed to provide stress relief during Western diet-induced obesity' in "Physiology & Behavior"

Jan 2026 – Dr. Perez-Tilve and colleagues publish their hard-earned data in 'Molecular Metabolism' reporting that "Ectopic, hepatic GLP-1R agonism enhances the weight loss efficacy of GLP-1 analogues."

Jan 2026 – Dr. Tianyuan Yang, a postdoc fellow, and coworkers in the Fan lab have just published in 'Frontiers in Immunology' reporting on "Identification of MTURN as a trained immunity-related biomarker for heart failure via integrative transcriptomic machine learning analysis and experimental validation."

Jan 2026 – Exciting update from recent PhD graduate Dr. Shruti Eswar! She is now working at the Genome Institute of Singapore - Congratulations!

Jan 2026 – Dr. Timme will organize the symposium, "Leveraging computational tools to examine decision-making in alcohol use disorder", for this summer's 49th annual meeting of the Research Society on Alcohol.

Jan 2026 – Dr. JoEl Schultz led the renewal of a training grant from the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics. Thank you Dr. Schultz!