President William F. Owen, Jr., has scheduled Town Hall meetings to discuss the result of his environmental scan. On April 17, the Newark campus meeting will be held at 3:30 p.m. in the Oral Health Pavilion at New Jersey Dental School; on April 21, a meeting will be held in New Brunswick at 3:30 p.m. in Room 1302 of the Clinical Academic Building; on April 23 a meeting will be held on the Stratford campus at 10 a.m. in the Academic Center’s Multipurpose Room.
Dr. Mark Granick, professor and chief of plastic surgery at UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School, has embarked on a mission to provide open access to vital information on plastic surgery via the Internet. In conjunction with associates Dr. Stephen Milner at Johns Hopkins University and Dr. John Kucan at the University of Illinois, he created ePlasty, the first open access journal of plastic surgery to promote the free exchange of information at an international level.
Information on plastic surgery has typically been limited to books and subscription only medical journals, making access to updated and timely literature limited for physicians in Third World countries. Dr. Granick believes ePlasty will revolutionize how his colleagues, particularly those in countries with minimal resources, will obtain current information about plastic surgery.
Dr. William Wadsworth, professor of pathology, and Dr. Gauri Kulkarni and Dr. Haichang Li, researchers, all at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, have co-authored an article that shows how neuronal connections are made. The article appeared in the April 2 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
The article suggests that an important molecular link between different processes is needed to wire the nervous system. Understanding the molecular pathways that control nervous system development could provide new insights into disorders that affect the wiring of the nervous system and could also prove useful for developing therapeutic agents to treat nerves damaged by injuries or disease.
The Science, Medicine & Related Topics (SMART) Program at UMDNJ recently offered 135 pre-college students and a group of 50 inner city males a thought provoking and an inspiring glimpse of the life of a physiatrist. Dr. Todd Stitik, professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation and director, Occupational/ Musculoskeletal Medicine, sent an encouraging message to all youth who attended and were interested in pursuing a health related field and were also interested in sports.
Tobacco dependence kills more people than many classic medical diseases and should be considered a chronic illness on the same level as diseases such as asthma, depression and diabetes, according to researchers from UMDNJ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and the Tobacco Dependence Program at the UMDNJ School of Public Health.
Dr. Michael Steinberg, medical director of the Tobacco Dependence Program and lead author of the article, wrote that the chronic, relapsing nature of tobacco dependence and the structural and functional changes smoking causes in the brain should lead health care and insurance providers to treat tobacco dependence as an illness that requires effective treatment for as long as the condition exists. The article appears in the April 1 edition of The Annals of Internal Medicine.
