As he was welcomed recently as the inaugural speaker for the medical school’s Seminars in Investigative Medicine, Mark Jay Shlomchik, MD, PhD, did so by telling a crowd at the W.E. Upjohn M.D. Campus that his most important job as a physician and accomplished researcher has always been clear to him.
“The most important thing we can do is train the next generation of people,” he said.
With that, Dr. Shlomchik, an endowed professor and chair of the Department of Immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, presented “How Autoimmunity Gets Started and How it Causes Damage.”
A crowd that included more than 50 people turned out to listen to Dr. Shlomchik’s presentation, which was held on Wednesday, October 11, 2017, in the auditorium at the Upjohn Campus.
The work in Dr. Shlomchik’s lab at Pitt focuses on systemic autoimmune diseases, long-lived B-cell immunity and immunopathogenesis. In his lab, he and other researchers are using transgenic and knockout mouse models to address questions of how autoreactive B cells arise and what roles the cell play in mediating autoimmune disease.
Dr. Shlomchik told the crowd at the Upjohn Campus that his presentation would be “a pretty research research talk” with a focus on how the work in his lab at Pitt “has led to some greater understanding of how autoimmunity works”
Seminars in Investigative Medicine is a new research seminar series at WMed begun by Thomas L. Rothstein, MD, PhD, assistant dean for Investigative Medicine and director of the Center for Immunobiology, as a way of bringing together the community of investigators at – and outside – the medical school.
Dr. Rothstein, in introducing Dr. Shlomchik as the inaugural speaker for Seminars in Investigative Medicine, said Dr. Shlomchik was “not only a brilliant scientist, but a generous and collegial one.”
Dr. Shlomchik is part of an impressive slate of speakers who will visit WMed between now and May 2018.
On Wednesday, November 8, 2017, Michael Paul Cancro, PhD, will be at the Upjohn Campus to present “New Subsets, New Checkpoints: Expanding Roles for Tbet+ B Cells in Health and Disease from noon to 1 p.m. in TBL 2.
A free lunch will be available from 11:45 a.m. to noon and Dr. Cancro’s presentation will begin at noon. The event is free and open to the public and CME and MEDU credit (for students) is available.
Dr. Cancro is a professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. The work in Dr. Cancro’s lab at Penn is currently focused on the mechanisms of B cell homeostasis and how these impact autoimmunity and aging.
CME Credit Available for Dr. Cancro's Visit
Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine designates this live activity for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.