News & Events

By Emily Gaines Buchler

As a child, Chimsom Orakwue watched her father, a computer engineer, suffer a debilitating back injury that left him unable to work. Her family, having immigrated years earlier from Nigeria to California, couldn’t pay for the health care he needed, so her mother enrolled in nursing school, while an 8-year-old Chimsom pitched in to care for her younger siblings.

Orakwue, who will graduate from Weill Cornell Medical College on May 18 and start a residency...

Maggie Rubin always knew she wanted a career where she was working directly with people. She just wasn’t exactly sure how she would do that, oscillating between health care and education. Then she discovered the physician assistant profession while completing her undergraduate degree in human biology and society at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“I instantly knew it was the career for me,” she said. “I loved that it would let me to lean into my curiosity about the human...

Dr. James C. Lo, an associate professor of medicine and Dr. Lisa G. Roth, an associate professor of pediatrics, both from Weill Cornell Medicine, were elected members of the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) for 2023.

Election into the ASCI, which represents excellence across the breadth of academic medicine, is a milestone for...

Two highly similar molecules with essential, but often contrasting, signaling roles in most life forms exert their distinct effects through subtle differences in their bindings to their signaling partners, according to a new study led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine.

In the study, published March 27 in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, the researchers used exquisitely sensitive measurement...

While the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic seems to have passed, the effects of post-COVID conditions on public health remain. A new study led by Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators has found that the risk of long COVID and its symptoms present very differently across diverse populations and suggests that further investigation is needed to accurately define the disease and improve diagnosis and treatment. 

The...

Patients with HIV had similar treatment outcomes to patients without HIV when treated for mpox with an antiviral drug called tecovirimat, according to a study by a team of investigators from Weill Cornell Medicine, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and NewYork-Presbyterian.   

The results of the study, published May 2 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, provide preliminary evidence of...

Nearly 90 percent of patients with an aggressive subtype of non-Hodgkin lymphoma had their cancer go into remission in a small phase 2 clinical trial testing a treatment aimed at making chemotherapy more effective, according to Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian investigators.

The clinical trial, whose ...

After actively reinforcing or accepting policies that excluded Black physicians from its ranks until the civil rights era—the American Medical Association (AMA) is now working to embed health equity across the organization and in 2020 declared racism a public health threat, said Dr. Aletha Maybank, the AMA’s inaugural chief health equity officer and senior vice president.

In a celebration of Weill Cornell Medicine’s commitment to fostering inclusivity in academic medicine, the institution on April 25 honored nearly a dozen faculty, students and staff who exemplify excellence in diversity, equity and inclusion.

Members of the Weill Cornell Medicine community gathered in Griffis Faculty Club for the institution’s Celebration of Diversity, part of the fifth annual Diversity Week. This year’s event, the first hosted in person...

Women in leadership roles sometimes speak in ways that can make them appear less confident or even competent than they are, said Dr. Deborah Tannen, a distinguished university professor in the linguistics department at Georgetown University, in her keynote address on April 24 for Weill Cornell Medicine’s fifth annual ...

In July 2020, two months after George Floyd was murdered while in police custody, a group of students, faculty and staff at the Cornell Center for Health Equity gathered to search for racial allyship resources online. When they found skills-based and virtual learning opportunities were lacking, they decided to develop their own.

The center has now launched its racial allyship training course, providing...

Targeting part of an antiviral pathway triggered by the accumulation of a key pathogen shared in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia may one day offer a new therapeutic approach to deterring or delaying cognitive decline, according to preclinical research led by Weill Cornell Medicine scientists.

The study, published April 24 in Nature Neuroscience, demonstrates that inhibiting an innate immune system enzyme...

Weill Cornell Medical College student Pauline Flaum-Dunoyer is a natural storyteller and historian.

Since she was 10 years old, she has considered what it means to preserve history in a respectful way. She recalls visiting her great-uncle, a historian with expertise in the West African countries of Mali and Togo, and looking with fascination at the wooden masks on his wall. She understood then the trust that was placed in him to care for the culturally significant relics.

As a...

Weill Cornell Medicine is celebrating more than a century of excellence in medical education, scientific discovery and patient care, commemorating 125 years since its founding. What began on April 14, 1898 as Cornell University Medical College in four temporary classrooms on the grounds of Bellevue Hospital is today a state-of-the-art academic medical center located on the Upper East Side...

Dr. Natalya Chernichenko, a leading otolaryngologist who specializes in tumors of the head and neck, has been named site chief of otolaryngology at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, effective May 1. Dr. Chernichenko was also recruited to Weill Cornell Medicine as an assistant professor of clinical otolaryngology and vice chair in the Department of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery.

In her new role, Dr. Chernichenko will lead a skilled team of specialists and surgeons...

A treatment combining two antibodies against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 strongly protected high-risk people with early COVID-19 symptoms from hospitalization and death in an international Phase 2/3 clinical trial conducted in the first half of 2021 and co-led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian.

The trial, described in a paper appearing online April 18 in Annals of Internal Medicine, enrolled...

People with dementia have protein build-up in astrocytes that may trigger abnormal antiviral activity and memory loss, according to a preclinical study by a team of Weill Cornell Medicine investigators.

Dysfunction in cells called neurons, which transmit messages throughout the brain, has long been the prime suspect in dementia-related cognitive deficits. But a new study, published in Science Advances on April 19,...

Edward H. Meyer, member of Weill Cornell Medicine’s Board of Fellows and devoted benefactor, died April 11 in New York, at age 96.

A Cornell University alumnus, Meyer ’49, along with his beloved wife Sandra, was a generous and committed champion of Weill Cornell Medicine, with an enduring passion for medical research and philanthropy. Elected to the board in 2014, he served as a member of the Clinical Affairs/Physician Organization Committee, the External Relations Committee and the...

Strokes cause numerous changes in gene activity in affected small blood vessels in the brain, and these changes are potentially targetable with existing or future drugs to mitigate brain injury or improve stroke recovery, according to a study led by Weill Cornell Medicine scientists.

In the study, which appears April 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers performed a comprehensive survey...

Dr. Joel Blankson first learned about M.D.-Ph.D. programs as he was finishing college. Now a leading expert on HIV pathogenesis and a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine, he found the opportunity to create his own educational odyssey, culminating in both degrees—one in medicine, one in a laboratory science—irresistible.

“I applied to the Cornell/Rockefeller program because of the focus on...