Each year the Medical School celebrates the outstanding research that is being done at the University of Minnesota.   On November 7, 2016 Dr. Bruce Blazar and Dr. Kristin Hogquist and seven other faculty members were honored at the 2016 Dean's Distinguished Research Lectureship (DDRL) celebration at Best Buy Theater in Northrop Auditorium with all faculty, staff, graduate students, residents, fellows, and students invited to attend. The DDRL honors up to two outstanding faculty members who are selected to share their research stories which detail the state of the science when they entered the field, changes that emerged due to their work, and plans or predictions for the future of medicine and basic science research.  Department Heads nominate two faculty members, one from their department and one from elsewhere in the Medical School and the nominees that represent best of the best research faculty in the basic and clinical sciences are awarded. Dr. Bruce Blazar and Dr. Kristin Hogquist are the 2016 Distinguished Lectureship award honorees.   Both Dr. Blazar and Dr. Hogquist delivered presentations detailing the story of their research.

Dr. Hogquist's lecture was entitled "Why do we need a thymus?" She described her research on the thymus, what the ancient Greek physician Galen called the "organ of mystery," and how the thymus selects and "educates" T lymphocyctes in their early development. Dr. Blazar's lecture was "Restoring Immune balance after Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation" which has been his passion for the last 35 years.

Last year Hogquist was inducted into the AHC Academy for Excellence in Health Research for her many important contributions to understanding T-cell immunology.

If you missed the event, you can watch the WebEx here

Also recognized, are the faculty members who meet the publication criteria to be added to the Medical School Wall of Scholarship. Faculty listed on the Wall of Scholarship must have a primary appointment in our Medical School and be current faculty members. For work to be featured, the faculty member must have first or last author credits on a publication that has been cited at least 1,000 times as indicated by two of three major citation indices (Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science). The 2016 Wall of Scholarship honorees are listed below:

• Daniel R. Bond, Ph.D., Microbiology & Immunology
• Karen H. Ashe, M.D., Ph.D., Neurology
• James P. Cleary, Ph.D., Neurology
• Alfonso Araque, Ph.D., Neuroscience
• Apostolos P. Georgopoulos, M.D., Ph.D., Neuroscience
• Michael K. Georgieff, M.D., Pediatrics
• Henry Buchwald, M.D., Ph.D., Surgery