We would like to welcome you to the first issue of our MSTP newsletter. The students and the program leadership thought that our program deserves a newsletter to highlight the achievements of our students. We would like to thank in particular the students who spearheaded this initiative: Nuri Kim, Lillian Talbot and Tyler Guinn.
The past academic year has brought the program to new strengths. We recruited an outstanding new class of 6 students out of a pool of nearly 300 applicants. Our students in the second year of medical, passed the dreaded Step-1 exam with flying colors, well above the national average. Scientifically, our students in graduate and medical (!) school continue to excel with more than 60 publications during the last 12 months, including in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature family journals. The students in their first year of graduate school did an outstanding job organizing the Journal Clubs and the Clinical Scientist Dinners. In particular, we had a spectacular line up of speakers including Dr. Kristina M. Deligiannidis from the Feinstein Institute of Medical Research who heads the Women’s Institute of Behavioral Health, Dean Kaushansky who generously shared his time, and together with graduate student Nuri Kim, led a Journal Club discussion on platelet biogenesis; as well as our very own alumnus, Dr. Oladapo Yeku, who is now heading off to be an assistant professor at Harvard and shared some very personal advice on the physician-scientist career path. Apart from their initiative with the Journal Clubs and Clinical Scientist dinners, we would like to thank our first year graduate student class for helping interview and recruit another incoming class of students.
Finally, it was a bitter sweet moment to bid farewell to our graduating class. We are very proud of their achievements, which include multiple fellowships, high-impact publications, and many favorable commendations from the clinical preceptors. They are going to outstanding research focused fellowship programs including Johns Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Rutgers, Washington University at St Louis, and NYU. We are looking forward to working with them as our future colleagues.
We would additionally like to thank our alumni who have been helping with various aspects of this program and would like to invite other alumni to reconnect with the program and get involved in any of many ways. Our students much appreciate it. And lastly, many thanks to the staff across the university who have provided support to the program over the past year. It takes a Stony Brook village to run the program!
Rachel Kery has developed a technology that will allow her to study for the first time how failure of adult born neuronal integration underlies diseases such as PTSD, epilepsy and major depressive disorder.
With the sun setting across a stunning ocean vista the Stony Brook MSTP program gathered for our favorite event of the year-the: MSTP Graduation Dinner.
Featured Alumni: Dr. Oladapo Yeku
Dr. Oladapo Yeku, Class of 2012, received his doctorate in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology researching with our own Dr. Mike Frohman. Dr. Yeku tells us about his choice to pursue a research-oriented residency, his transition to junior faculty at MGH and some personal hobbies outside of the program
Featured MSTP Student – Bryce Schroeder
Bryce recently defended his thesis in Biomedical Engineering, where he developed optical methods for super resolution microscopy. He credits much of his success at the bench to cultivating a rich and varied personal life outside the lab.