Category: Successful Impact

Read the stories about the products reaching the market and helping people and the researchers behind them.

Bayh-Dole Coalition Honors Emory Professor Behind Groundbreaking HIV and Covid-19 Treatments

Posted onAuthorAsher Alt

ATLANTA, GA (August 21, 2023) — Emory University Professor Dennis Liotta has been featured in the Bayh-Dole Coalition’s new “Faces of American Innovation” report for developing chemical compounds used in life-saving medicines. The Bayh-Dole Coalition is a diverse group of innovation-oriented organizations and individuals committed to celebrating and protecting the Bayh-Dole Act, as well as informing policymakers and the public of its many benefits. On September 13, Dr. Liotta and four other leading innovators will receive the inaugural Bayh-Dole Coalition American Innovator Award in Washington, D.C. “This is a wonderful honor, and I am humbled to receive it,” said Dr. Liotta. Read More …

Mark Goodman: The Radiologist

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Mark Goodman, PhD holds the Emory University Endowed Chair in Imaging Science. He is Professor in the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology and Director of the Radiology and Imaging Sciences Radiopharmaceutical Discovery Laboratory. Goodman received his BA in chemistry from Monmouth College, Illinois, and a PhD from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale and Harvard University in radiopharmaceutical chemistry. His research is directed towards the development of new radiotracers for the study and management of treatment of myocardial disorders, Read More …

Ken Cornell: The Patient

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Ken Cornell is the general superintendent at JE Dunn Construction. He was been with JE Dunn for a little over five years and has worked in the construction industry for 38 years. He has a degree in construction engineering and has done lab and hospital construction work for the past 28 years. He is currently working on the construction of the new Health Sciences Research Building II (HSRBII).  Can you give an overview of how you got into construction, specifically the construction of medical and research facilities? I have a degree in construction engineering. That is my initial start in Read More …

Ronald Crowe: The Pharmacist

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Ronald J. Crowe, RPh/BCNP is board-certified nuclear pharmacist and graduate of University of Georgia College of Pharmacy. He has practiced nuclear pharmacy since 1990 and has worked at Emory since 1997. He has worked with both the department of radiology and the School of Medicine and Imaging Core. Still currently working as a radiopharamacist at Emory, Crowe looks forward to the construction of the new Health and Sciences Research Building (HSRB) and its implications for the work that he does. What drew you to radiology and imaging science? In Pharmacy school, I was intrigued that radiopharmacy was a new and Read More …

Evolution of an Epidemic: Taming a Killer Virus

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

AIDS—acquired immunity deficiency syndrome—was named in 1982, at the beginning of the epidemic in the U.S. It was another two years before it was known that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was the cause of this strange new disease. Death rates rose steadily and steeply over the next decade. By the mid-1990s, AIDS was the leading cause of death for Americans ages 25 to 44 and more than 250,000 people had died from AIDS or AIDS-related causes. “Some of our most creative people were taken away from us by this terrible disease,” says Emory synthetic chemist Dennis Liotta. “I became increasingly Read More …

Marianne Swanson: The Survivor

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Marianne Swanson, a senior staff nurse at Grady Health System’s Ponce Center, was born and raised in Brooklyn, in a close-knit Italian-American family and community. She lost her first husband and two of her three children to AIDS, and she is HIV positive. This is her story: Starting a family: Jeff and I were in a singing group in a Catholic Church, that was where we met. We fell in love and got married in a small Christian church in Brooklyn. We were married for about two years before I got pregnant with our first son, Jonathan. My second son Read More …

Nina Martinez: The HIV Positive Twin

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Public health analyst Nina Martinez is 35 years old and has been living with HIV for all but six weeks of her life. Her father was active duty Navy, and she’s a twin. She has HIV while her twin does not. This is her story: How it happened: My twin and I were born 12 weeks early and at that time in the mid-1980s you needed to take a lot of lab work. Because they took labs so often, we were both anemic. We required blood transfusions at 6 weeks old. I was transported to San Francisco and she remained Read More …

Dennis Liotta: The Chemist

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Synthetic chemist Dennis Liotta, PhD, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory and executive director of the Emory Institute for Drug Development, is the co-developer of an antiretroviral drug that has saved the lives of countless people living with HIV around the world. Starting out: Liotta says he was “genetically coded to be a chemist.” Not only was he naturally drawn to the field, he was able to follow the footsteps of his oldest brother, an organic chemist at Georgia Tech. “Charles was my first scientific role model,” Liotta says. “He is one of the most gifted teachers I’ve ever seen. Read More …

Raymond Schinazi: The Virologist

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Organic medicinal chemist and virologist Raymond Schinazi, PhD, the Frances Winship Walters Professor of Pediatrics at Emory and director of the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology, was born in Egypt to Italian parents. In 1962 his family was threatened by the Nasser regime and immigrated to Naples as refugees. He went to boarding school in the UK, where he was a chemistry major at Bath University, and later came to the U.S. and studied pharmacology at Yale University before beginning his career at Emory. The path to chemist: I was actually pretty good at chemistry. I wanted to by a physicist, but Read More …

George Painter: The Corporate Partner

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

George Painter, PhD, is the chief executive officer of DRIVE, a not-for-profit company wholly owned by Emory University but with the independence to run like a biotechnology company. He recalls his career and its intersection with the innovations in Dennis Liotta’s lab, where critical HIV antiretroviral drugs were created. Meeting Dennis Liotta: Dennis came to Emory in 1976. I was a senior graduate student, and he was a young assistant professor, so he was here (at Emory) all hours of the day and night as was I, so we became acquainted. But really, the reason I kept coming and going from Read More …

Jeff Lennox: The HIV Physician

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Jeff Lennox, MD, is an Emory professor of medicine, Emory chief of internal medicine at Grady Memorial Hospital and the former medical director of the infectious disease program at the Ponce de Leon Center. “At Grady, we see patients from every continent except Antarctica, so we take care of patients with a wide variety of infectious diseases,” he says.” In addition, Grady has one of the largest populations of HIV-infected patients in the United States.” Here, Lennox tells how he came to specialize in infectious disease and HIV.  A new disease: As a medical student, I was fascinated with bacteria Read More …

What Does Mixing Math, Physics, Computers, and Imagination Give You? A Pioneer in Radiation Oncology.

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Ian R. Crocker, MD, FACR, is a radiation oncologist specializing in brain and eye tumors, who worked at Winship Cancer Institute for over 30 years. Throughout his career, Crocker was an active member of multiple innovation and research teams that sought to develop new medical technologies and methods to improve treatment outcomes and patient care. Some of his most notable successes include his co-invention of the BetaCath system to prevent the re-narrowing of arteries after an angioplasty and his involvement in the Emory start-up, Velocity Medical Solutions, which produced new, widely used imaging software to improve cancer treatment. Now retired Read More …

Lessons from Baseball: Applying Passion and Competitive Drive to Radiation Oncology

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Tim Fox worked at Emory University as an Associate Professor & Director of Medical Physics from 1994 to 2014. In 2005 he and three of his Emory colleagues created the Emory start-up, Velocity Medical Solutions, which built and sold a multimodal medical imaging software. Velocity was later acquired by Varian Medical Systems and in 2014, Fox left Emory to accept a full-time position as the Associate Vice President of Imaging Informatics at Varian. Fox grew up playing baseball and now applies that same passion and drive to his entrepreneurial endeavors Just like the famous line from the baseball movie, Field Read More …

Treating Anxiety Disorders: Balancing the Real World and the Virtual World

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Barbara Olasov Rothbaum, PhD, is the Associate Vice Chair of Clinical Research in Emory School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, and director of Emory’s Veterans Program and Emory’s Trauma & Anxiety Recovery Program. Dr. Rothbaum specializes in treatment of anxiety disorders, with a focus on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). With over 200 scientific publications, Rothbaum has changed the field of PTSD and was a forerunner in the use of virtual reality in treatment of anxiety disorders. What initially drew you to the field of psychiatry? I went to UNC-Chapel Hill Read More …

Inventor Becomes Patient: My Tool Was Like a Trusted Friend Telling Me What Was Wrong

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Ernest V. Garcia, PhD, or better known as Ernie, is an endowed professor in cardiac imaging and the director of Emory’s Nuclear Cardiology R&D Laboratory. He specializes in medical imaging and bioinformatics, particularly quantitative analysis of cardiac images. Ernie has received numerous awards and honors but to highlight a few he was named a Medical Imaging Industry Top 10 Nuclear Medicine Researcher by the Medical Imaging Magazine and was named to the Council of Distinguished Investigators of the Academy of Radiology Research. What lead you to pursue cardiac imaging as part of your profession? I was trained as a scientist, Read More …

The Magic of Science and How TMS Saved Me

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

I used to hate magic shows. Nothing frustrated me more than trying to figure out how the guy removes the beautiful woman from the box on stage, only to wow the audience moments later by revealing her—in the flesh—sitting in the theatre’s balcony with a big smile on her face. Magicians will never tell you their secrets, they will never disclose how the rabbit got in the hat, much less how he pulled the poor thing out of it. The stock answer, if ever asked, is a smug, “It’s just magic!” Many years ago I attended a magic show where Read More …

It Started in My Basement, Now it Improves Patients Lives

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

Charles M. Epstein, MD, or “Chip” as he’s been known since childhood, is a professor of neurology specializing in epilepsy and the founder of  the Laboratory for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). He is also a co-inventor for the technology that is utilized by Emory partner Neuronetics, Inc in their NeuroStar TMS Therapy® for treating depression. Neuronetics has safely administered more than 10,000 NeuroStar TMS Therapy® treatments with clinically significant results: among patients studied, 54 percent responded to the therapy and 33 percent found their depression in remission. Neurostar wasn’t the first technology you were involved with. Could you tell us Read More …

Case Managers’ Reflect on Their Time with TMS

Posted onAuthorLinda Kesselring

OTT’s first disclosure from Charles “Chip” Epstein, MD related to his work with an iron core stimulation coil was received in the spring of 1995, with a second disclosure related to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) coming along in late 1997. These were not only the early days for the technology but also the early days of our budding Tech Transfer office. The technology looked promising since it was both the first magnetic stimulator to utilize an iron core design which enabled improvements in power efficiency, heat generation, focal stimulation, and costs. Recognizing these benefits, OTT decided to pursue patent protection Read More …