A new,Yale-led study suggests that arange of respiratory viral infections—including COVID-19 and influenza—may be preventable or treatable with ageneric antibiotic that is delivered to the nasal passageway.A team led by Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki and former Yale researcher Charles Dela Cruz successfully tested the effectiveness of neomycin,a common antibiotic,to prevent or treat respiratory viral infections in animal models when given to the animals via the nose.The team then found that the same nasal approach—this time applying the over-the-counter ointment Neosporin—also triggers aswift immune response by interferon-stimulated genes(ISGs)in the noses of healthy humans.The findings were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.“This is an exciting finding,that acheap over-the-counter antibiotic ointment can stimulate the human body to activate an antiviral response,”said Iwasaki,the Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and professor of dermatology at Yale School of Medicine and co-senior author of the new study.“Our work supports both preventative and therapeutic actions of neomycin against viral diseases in animal models,and shows effective blocking of infection and transmission,”said Iwasaki,who is also professor of molecular,cellular,and developmental biology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences,professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health,and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.Respiratory viruses affect millions of people each year.The global COVID-19 pandemic,caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2,has led to 774.5 million cases worldwide as of February 2024,with global mortality of 6.9 million people.Influenza viruses account for up to 5million cases of severe illness and 500,000 deaths annually worldwide.Currently,most therapies used to fight respiratory viral infections—including antivirals,monoclonal antibodies,and convalescent plasma therapy—are delivered intravenously or orally.They focus on stopping the progression of existing infections.A nasal-centered therapy has amuch better chance of stopping infections before they can spread to the lower respiratory tract and cause severe diseases,the researchers said. 查看详细>>

Last year,eligible graduate and professional school students voted in aNational Labor Relations Board election to form agraduate worker union,known as Local 33–UNITE HERE.On December 8,2023,after nine months of good-faith bargaining,the union and university reached atentative agreement on afive-year contract.Union members have now voted to ratify the contract,which is now in place and effective through July 31,2028.This new contract reflects negotiations between Local 33–UNITE HERE and Yale that were conducted with collegiality and respect.Throughout the election and negotiation processes,the university has been guided by its commitment to the educational and research mission and to the well-being and success of all its students and graduate workers.This new contract affirms the significant role of graduate workers at Yale and includes meaningful increases in compensation,benefit enhancements,and provisions to ensure positive and safe working conditions.The university will now begin implementing the contract’s provisions,working with faculty,staff,and graduate worker partners across campus.I anticipate that many questions will arise during this process.Early in the new year,we will provide information to help the community fully understand the contract’s terms,details on where to direct questions about the contract,and updates on resources to support faculty as they address the contract’s financial and operational impacts.I seek your patience and engagement as we navigate this important transition together. 查看详细>>

Crystal Feimster,an associate professor in the departments of African American Studies and History and the programs of American Studies and Women’s,Gender,and Sexuality Studies,has been appointed the next Head of Pierson College,Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis announced at an event in the college last night.Feimster will succeed Stephen Davis,the Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies and aprofessor of history,who has been Pierson’s head for 10 years.College heads serve as the chief administrative officer and presiding faculty member within the residential colleges,and help nurture the social,cultural,and educational life there,a role that has become acherished Yale tradition.A native of North Carolina,Feimster is ahistorian of 19th-and 20th-century African-American history,U.S.women’s history,and the American South.She will begin afive-year term at Pierson on July 1.“As ascholar who has worked hard to establish aplace of prominence in my field of academic specialization,I remain deeply committed to the pursuit of the kind of high-level,high-impact research that is only possible at an institution such as Yale,”Feimster said.“Indeed,one of my goals as an educator has always been to connect undergraduates to this work in meaningful ways.At the same time,I strongly believe in the mission of the residential colleges.This is where the possibilities of university life can be most fully realized.“I am excited by the prospect of being able to introduce new generations of Yale students to those possibilities,and the unparalleled opportunities for growth and learning that await them here.”Feimster earned her Ph.D.in history from Princeton University and abachelor’s degree in history and women’s studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.“Her research on racial and sexual violence bridges the fields of social and political history to shed light on long-obscured aspects of the American past,”Lewis said.“Exploring absences and asymmetries of evidence in the archival record,she draws on the resources of gender studies,critical race theory,literary scholarship,and psychoanalysis to analyze some of the most elusive and traumatic facets of human experience.”Feimster is the author of the prizewinning book“Southern Horrors:Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching”and dozens of articles and book chapters.She has also published essays in The New York Times,the Chronicle of Higher Education,and Slate.She is currently completing two book projects,“Truth Be Told:The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana”and“Uncivil:Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.”Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,the Institute for Advanced Study,and other organizations.She teaches popular courses on topics including the civil rights movement,African-American women’s history,critical race theory,and the women’s liberation movement.In recognition of her dedication to undergraduate and graduate teaching,Feimster has received several awards,including the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching(2013),the Provost Teaching Award(2014),the Berkeley College Faculty Mentoring Prize(2015),the Afro-American Cultural Center’s Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and Mentoring(2017),and the Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities(2018). 查看详细>>

Dinosaurs—and birds—wouldn’t have been able to stand on their own two feet without some radical changes to their upper thigh bones.Now,a new study by Yale paleontologists charts the evolutionary course of these leggy alterations.The findings resolve alongstanding question about dinosaur evolution and offer aprime example of how new physical features can pop up briefly during embryonic development and then give way to older,known features in adults.For the study,a research team led by Yale’s Bhart-Anjan S.Bhullar and Shiro Egawa focused on evolutionary shifts in the“femoral head”—where the upper femur connects to the hip—across awide range of dinosaurs,early reptiles and avians,and their modern-day counterparts.The study appears in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.The team also included researchers from the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry in Japan,the American Museum of Natural History,Virginia Tech,the Royal Veterinary College in England,Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,Queensland Museum,CNRS/Muséum National d‘Histoire Naturelle in France,Missouri State University,and the RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research in Japan.“We figured out the way in which the femoral head,a critical part of dinosaur anatomy,developed,”said Bhullar,associate professor of Earth&planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and an associate curator at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.“Inward-turned femoral heads are necessary for fast and effective,erect bipedal locomotion.”For years,Bhullar said,there had been two conflicting theories about how dinosaur femoral heads developed.One theory held that the femoral head simply grew an attachment,or overhang,that reoriented the legs.The other theory was that the femoral head twisted inward over time.Evidence exists for both the twisting theory,found in early dinosaurs and modern crocodiles,and the in-growth theory,found in later dinosaurs and birds.For the new study,the researchers used 3D imaging to study femoral head development in avariety of fossils and animal embryos.Bhullar’s lab at Yale is particularly known for its innovative use of CT scanning and microscopy to create 3D images of fossils.What they discovered is that evidence for both theories occurs together.“The embryonic development of this major feature changed completely—even while the feature itself remained constant in adults for quite some time,”Bhullar said.“This sort of hidden shift in development might be more common than we think in evolution,and it should serve to caution against the widely held idea that features which develop differently must have evolved separately.”Shiro Egawa,a former postdoctoral associate in Bhullar’s lab who is now apostdoctoral fellow at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry in Japan,is the study’s first author and co-corresponding author.Co-authors include Christopher Griffin,a postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Department of Earth&Planetary Sciences,and former Yale researchers João Botelho and Daniel Smith-Paredes.The research was funded,in part,by the National Science Foundation,the Japan Science Society,the Yamada Science Foundation,RIKEN,and the Zoological Society of Japan. 查看详细>>

Alison Gilchrest,who for over adecade has led national and international initiatives to promote collaboration in the field of cultural heritage conservation,has been appointed as the new director of Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage(IPCH),effective today.The appointment was announced by Susan Gibbons,vice provost for collections&scholarly communication and chief of staff to the president.Gilchrest joined IPCH in January 2020 as its inaugural director of applied research and outreach.In that role she has facilitated research,training,and professional development collaborations between the institute and other cultural heritage institutions,focusing on building Yale’s relationships on the African continent.She came to Yale from the Andrew W.Mellon Foundation,where she oversaw the largest private grantmaking program for cultural heritage in the United States.“Alison is agifted leader in the cultural heritage domain and will draw on her expansive knowledge of museums,conservation,heritage science,and philanthropic partnerships as we evolve the IPCH,”said Gibbons.As Gilchrest begins her directorship,IPCH is poised to assume an expanded identity and mission as the collaborative interdisciplinary hub of preservation and conservation treatment,research,and programs.Strengthening the identity and impact of conservation is one of several initiatives underway within the university designed to reflect amore intentional approach to cross-collection collaboration. 查看详细>>

Pregnant people who contract COVID-19 have an increased risk of disease severity and death,yet only 31%of pregnant people in the United States had received vaccines as of September 2021.One barrier to vaccine acceptance is the concern that vaccination might disrupt pregnancy.A Yale co-led study,which looked at more than 40,000 pregnant individuals,adds new evidence supporting the safety of COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy.The study found COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy was not associated with preterm birth or small-for-gestational-age(SGA)when comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated pregnant people.The trimester when the vaccination was received and the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses received were also not associated with increased risk of preterm birth or SGA,the researchers found.The findings were reported Jan.4 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC). 查看详细>>

Yale researchers have identified acellular spy that tricks certain immune cells into helping potentially deadly skin cancer to reproduce.The discovery,reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,may offer new treatment pathways for people who are most at risk for skin cancer,such as transplant patients and fair-skinned individuals.The new study is the culmination of afive-year research effort by the lab of Dr.Michael Girardi,a professor and vice chair of dermatology at Yale School of Medicine.The first author of the study is Julia Lewis,a research associate in Girardi’s lab.The driving force behind skin cancers such as squamous cell carcinoma is ultraviolet(UV)light from the sun.UV energy causes mutations in skin cells and those mutated cells proliferate before eventually growing into skin cancer.But they get help from an unlikely source.For the study,Girardi’s team used genetic expression profiling,cell isolation,and preclinical models of skin cancer development in the lab to reveal that specific immune cells—and growth factors they produce—stimulate mutated cancer precursor cells to reproduce.“All of this happens microscopically,before any visible tumor is apparent on the skin,”Girardi said.“These are very early events in the development of skin cancer.”Girardi said that during chronic UV exposure to the skin,Langerhans cells,a type of immune cell found in the epidermis,stimulate other immune cells to produce the growth factors including interleukin-22.Normally,interleukin-22 helps to repair damaged skin;but in this instance,it gives precursor cancer cells safe harbor to multiply.Importantly,Girardi’s team discovered that all of the immune cells involved in the process expressed aprotein called RORγt.The researchers found that when they applied an RORγt inhibitor to the skin’s surface,it greatly reduced the growth of the mutated cells.“We think this opens the door to the possibility of using similar inhibitors to prevent skin cancer from developing on people with sun-damaged skin,particularly those individuals at greatest risk,including fair-skinned people,those with apersonal or family history of skin cancer,and those with immune suppression because they’re the recipient of an organ transplant,”Girardi said.Co-authors of the paper are Patrick Monico,Fatima Mirza,Suzanne Xu,Sara Yumeen,Jack Turban,and Anjela Galan,all of Yale.The research was supported by agrant from the National Institutes of Health. 查看详细>>

The diagnosis of mental illnesses such as major depression,schizophrenia,or anxiety disorder is typically based on coarse groupings of symptoms.These symptoms,however,vary widely among individuals as do the brain circuits that cause them.This complexity explains why drug treatments work for some patients,but not others.Now Yale researchers have developed anovel framework for“computational psychiatry”that blends neuroimaging,pharmacology,biophysical modeling,and neural gene expression that maps these variations in individual symptoms to specific neural circuits.The findings,reported in tandem papers published in the journal eLife,promise to help create more targeted therapies for individual patients.The two studies were led,respectively,by Alan Anticevic and John Murray,associate professors of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine.In one study,a team led by Anticevic and Jie Lisa Ji,a Ph.D.student at Yale,used advanced statistical approaches to identify precise sets of symptoms that describe specific patients more accurately than traditional coarse diagnoses of mental illness,which do not account for individual variation of symptoms or the neural biology which causes them.The researchers found that these refined symptom signatures revealed precise neural circuits that more precisely captured variation across hundreds of patients diagnosed with psychotic disorders.For instance,they found patients diagnosed with schizophrenia exhibited adiverse array of neural circuitry,the network of neurons which carry out brain function,that could be linked to specific symptoms of individual patients.“This study shows the promise of computational psychiatry for personalized patient selection and treatment design using human brain imaging technology,”Anticevic said.In the related study,led by Murray and Ph.D.student Joshua Burt,researchers simulated the effects of drugs on brain circuits.They used anew neuroimaging technology which incorporates acomputational model that includes data on patterns of neural gene expression.Specifically,the team studied the effects of LSD,a well-known hallucinogen known to alter consciousness and perception.Murray and colleagues were able to map personalized brain and psychological effects induced by LSD.Understanding the neural effects of such substances can advance the treatment of mental illness,the researchers said.LSD is of particular interest to researchers because it can mimic symptoms of psychosis found in diseases like schizophrenia.It also activates aserotonin receptor which is amajor target of antidepressants.“We can develop amechanistic view of how drugs alter brain function in specific regions and use that information to understand the brains of individual patients,”said Murray.By linking personalized brain patterns to symptoms and simulating the effect of drugs on the human brain,these technologies can not only help clinicians to predict which drugs might best help patients but spur development of new drugs tailored to individuals,the authors say. 查看详细>>

In recent years,scientists have discovered that non-immune system cells are surprisingly well armed to combat infection.Yale researchers have found aparticularly powerful weapon in these cells’arsenal—a protein that acts like adetergent to wipe out invading pathogens much like the way that Ajax cleans dirty dishes or sanitizes akitchen countertop.This intracellular cleanser,the researchers say,dissolves membranes of invading bacteria that have replicated in the cytosol,the watery interior of cells.Importantly,the detergent-like immune protein does not harm the membranes of organelles belonging to the host cell,they report July 16 in the journal Science.It could also protect against deadly viruses,fungi,and parasites,the authors suggest.“How non-immune cells defend against infection is arelatively under-studied area,especially since they lack some of the major defense proteins found in professional immune cells,”said senior author John MacMicking,an associate professor of microbial pathogenesis and of immunobiology at Yale and investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.“In this case,humans make their own antibiotic in the form aprotein that acts like adetergent.”Scientists used to think cells that make up human tissues and organs relied solely on the immune system for protection.The immune system responds to pathogens in waves.When it first detects harmful invaders it launches ageneralized assault and then records the pathogens’specific molecular signatures in order to produce antibodies to protect the organism against future attacks.However,antibodies are less effective against pathogens that have already penetrated the interior of cells,which is when the cell’s own defenses are engaged.For the study,a team at the Systems Biology Institute on Yale’s West Campus—led by MacMicking and Ryan Gaudet,a postdoctoral associate in his laboratory—screened about 20,000 human genes looking for those that play arole in intracellular defenses.Cells that have been activated by interferon,the immune system’s early warning signal,express aparticular set of proteins within the interior of the cells.One of those proteins,APOL3,binds to and destroys the inner membrane of virulent bacteria like salmonella and kills them.The protein works together with asecond immune protein,GBP1,which can pierce the outer layer allowing APOL3 to deliver the fatal blow,the researchers found. 查看详细>>

Two months ago,Yale economist Pinelopi Goldberg wasn’t working on anything related to global health.But like many scholars,she has recently shifted her research focus to questions bearing on the COVID-19 pandemic.The former chief economist at the World Bank Group is now studying policy responses to the crisis in developing countries and collaborating with colleagues at Yale’s Center for Economic Growth to collect data on COVID-19’s effects on low-income populations.Goldberg,the Elihu Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,recently spoke to YaleNews about contrasts between rich and poor nations,the risks of lockdowns,and scholarship in atime of crisis. 查看详细>>