The Lewis Katz School of Medicine (Katz) Distinguished Lecture Series, a new initiative developed by Erica Golemis, PhD, Senior Associate Dean of Research, launched this month with a presentation by Li Gan, PhD, one of the world’s foremost thought leaders on neurodegeneration.
The series will continue monthly through the end of the academic year. The next installment will feature Charles Venditti, MD, PhD, Chief of the Metabolic Medicine Branch at the National Institutes of Health. It will be held on March 13, at 4 PM, in the Medical Education and Research Building (MERB) auditorium and livestreamed on Zoom.
“A lecture series of this caliber grants us the opportunity to share the impactful research being done here at Katz with some of the most brilliant minds working in biomedical sciences today,” says Amy J. Goldberg, MD, FACS, The Marjorie Joy Katz Dean. “It’s also a chance for our students and faculty to learn from them, and be inspired by them.”
Dr. Gan’s lecture was titled “Innate Immunity and Neurodegeneration: Challenges and Opportunities.” Her research bridges the fields of neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation, clarifying novel and cutting-edge mechanisms that cause or precipitate brain pathologies, such as those involved in Alzheimer’s disease and dementias, says Silvia Fossati, PhD, Director of and Associate Professor at the Alzheimer’s Center at Temple and Associate Professor of Cardiovascular Sciences and Neural Sciences, as well as at the Lemole Center for Integrated Lymphatics and Vascular Research. Dr. Fossati served as the inaugural lecture’s host.
Front-row seats to cutting-edge science
To establish a field of potential lecturers for these initial presentations, Dr. Golemis solicited suggestions from program leaders and center directors across Katz. The first four lectures in the series are hosted by faculty members who nominated, then invited the lecturers. Dr. Golemis says the faculty are now nominating candidates for the 2025-2026 academic year.
This series is intended to yield multiple benefits, Dr. Golemis says. For one, bringing world-class experts to the Katz North Philadelphia campus will assist faculty in growing or nurturing their professional networks. The primary objective is to expose Katz students and faculty to groundbreaking research.
“This is an opportunity for the entire research establishment to hear directly from the people who are doing cutting-edge science in multiple disciplines,” Dr. Golemis says. “The expectation is that it will inspire first-rate work among the faculty, as well as the trainees and staff.”
Dr. Fossati agrees with the prospect. She also believes the series could introduce these leading scientists not only to Katz’s own innovative research, but also the progressive ways it’s being conducted and applied.
“The Katz School of Medicine is quite unique because it’s home to so many elite researchers who are striving to include the communities we serve—which, in many cases, are home to underserved minorities—in their research so that we can use it to help them,” she says.
Nathaniel W. Snyder, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor at the Aging + Cardiovascular Discovery Center, is studying the compartmentalization of metabolism at both the cellular and physiological levels. He nominated and invited Dr. Venditti, the next featured lecturer, because of his pioneering research on metabolic disorders.
Using a translational research approach, Dr. Venditti and his colleagues have published a number of papers that connect the pathophysiology of diseases that involve metabolism to mitochondrial dysfunction and prove the efficacy of gene therapy as a treatment for both methylmalonic acidemia and propionic acidemia.
This approach is why Dr. Snyder believes Dr. Venditti’s lecture will have broad appeal.
“He investigates gene therapies and novel therapies to try to target these diseases, a paradigm being applied by a number of other research groups at Temple,” Dr. Snyder says.
Generating interest throughout the various research labs and graduate medical education and biomedical sciences graduate programs is a key function of the lecture series, Dr. Snyder says.
“Bringing in speakers with widely varied expertise, whose work spans multiple disciplines, is really important,” he says, “At Temple, we have some very strong research programs where there isn’t usually much overlap among their themes. Regardless of our fields, this series can act as a reminder of our common interest in basic science and mechanistic studies and enable us to grow together, as an institution.”
Dr. Golemis describes this effect as “encouraging not only deeper expertise in researchers’ core disciplines, but also helping seed cross-disciplinary interactions among peers.”
Katz, after all, “a tight-knit community, and it fosters a highly collaborative environment,” says John Elrod, PhD, FISHR, the W. W. Smith Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine and Director of and Professor at the Aging + Cardiovascular Discovery Center.
Dr. Elrod will be hosting lectures by Jared Rutter, PhD, and Jeffrey Molkentin, PhD, April 10 and May 1, respectively. (Dr. Rutter’s lecture will be held in the Wendy and Solomon Luo, MD, Auditorium.)
Dr. Elrod describes Dr. Rutter as “one of the most talented and impactful scientists in the world.” He adds, “His work is changing the way we think about metabolism, which is one of the most rapidly evolving fields in biology and medicine.”
While Dr. Molkentin is among the most cited cardiovascular researchers in the world, his discoveries, Dr. Elrod says, have impacted numerous fields, including transcriptional control, cell signaling, calcium transport, mitochondrial biology, muscular dystrophy, fibroblast biology, cardiac hypertrophy, and, most recently, cell fate and cardiac regeneration.
“The extensiveness of his research program,” Dr. Elrod says, “has resulted in his lab being a breeding ground for the next generation of scientists, many of whom are becoming leaders in their respective fields,” including Dr. Elrod himself.
Dr. Golemis says her office is planning to record each of the lectures in the series—contingent upon the lecturers’ consent—and then making them available on an internal website.
Improving connectivity and resources
The lecture series is one of a host of new and ongoing initiatives for the research program that are designed to “improve connectivity and resources across the school,” Dr. Golemis says.
The most significant undertaking is the construction of new research core facilities, a project that’s strongly supported by Dr. Golemis, Dean Goldberg, and the Temple University Office of the Vice President for Research.
Dr. Golemis is also developing a monthly compilation of publications that include Katz faculty which she plans to distribute by email across the school “so everybody can see what their colleagues are working on as another way of finding out what people here are doing, who might be good to collaborate with, and who is skilled in various experimental techniques and research areas.”
As another means to that end, Laurie Kilpatrick, PhD, Associate Dean of Research, has been developing a hub called Collab Connect, which is meant to facilitate collaborations across the Katz School and Temple University.
Additionally, Dean Goldberg has established a biobank for human specimens, under the direction of Glenn Gerhard, MD, to support clinical research. And she’s assisting clinical and translational researchers with securing protected time to foster their ability to take part in bench-to-bedside research projects.
These and other planned enhancements will combine to elevate Katz’s capacity to perform innovative, high-impact research, Dr. Golemis says.
“The ultimate goal,” she says, “is to empower more researchers—basic, translational, or clinical—to publish papers that are influential across various research fields, to make breakthroughs that suggest new, better therapies, and to run more practice-changing clinical trials.”