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Inspired by his special bond with a former NFL star, Rutgers New Jersey Medical School alumnus and emergency medicine physician Herman Morchel is recognized for his own comeback

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With Americans on edge about the potential spread of Ebola, it is easy to overlook another virus to which we have long been accustomed – influenza. According to estimates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flu takes anywhere from 3,000 to 48,000 lives a year in this country, depending on the severity of the disease in a given flu season. David Cennimo, an infectious disease physician and assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School,says getting an annual flu shot is far more important than many people realize.

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When Tom Stratton was a college sophomore in 2004, his indie-rock band, Socratic, did a show in Los Angeles, and a record company offered them a contract that night. He left school, played drums and guitar on tour in Asia and Australia and throughout the U.S., recorded albums, and now – 10 years later – is still earning high praise for his work, though not as a musician. Tom Stratton has become a very talented biomedical scientist conducting top-level pharmaceutical research in a lab at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

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Rutgers University students study the way stories are told to better understand the truth behind the messages.

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A paper being published today outlines developments in a system launched last year to allow pharmaceutical firms to share their clinical trials data for new drugs with outside investigators. Brian Strom, a co-author and the chair of the system's advisory committee, discusses data sharing's potential impact.

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Every 20 years the MCAT undergoes a comprehensive review and overhaul. The latest changes in the test, which take effect next April, will include a new section that reflects a growing sense within the medical profession that doctors who are conscious of important issues in the humanities – including the social sciences – may be better physicians than those who are not, especially with a patient population that is ever more diverse.

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An international conference hosted by Rutgers Institute for Research on Women shows how inmates are reclaiming their identity and expressing their humanity through art.

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New research led by Victor Shengkan Jin of Rutgers University shows promising evidence that a modified form of the drug niclosamide – now used to eliminate intestinal parasites – may hold the key to battling type 2 diabetes at its source.

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In the first months of life, when babies begin to distinguish sounds that make up language from all the other sounds in the world, they can be trained to more effectively recognize which sounds “might” be language, accelerating the development of the brain maps which are critical to language acquisition and processing, according to new by April Benasich and colleagues of Rutgers University-Newark -- published in the October 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

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An interprofessional study co-led by Jeannette Rogowski of Rutgers School of Public Health and Eileen Lake of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, has found that greater nurse understaffing and worse practice environments at hospitals with higher concentrations of black patients contributed to adverse outcomes for very low birth weight infants.

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Rutgers' School of Engineering and Rutgers Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences are joint recipients of a $2 million 2014 BEST grant from NIH. Once upon a time, students seeking advanced degrees in the biomedical sciences generally expected to find careers in academia, and their mentors expected them to do so. No longer. Fewer than half of those students now end up in academia. So NIH created the BEST grant, just awarded to Rutgers and six other universities, aimed at broadening the perspectives of advanced science students to include thoughts of working in private industry, as well as added skills to enable them to do so.

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Sairaman Nagarajan, a Rutgers School of Public Health graduate student, uses his medical training and cultural background to educate New Jersey’s South Asian communities on diet and lifestyle changes

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With school underway and flu season not far behind, vaccinations are on people’s minds again, or at least they should be – according to experts such as George DiFerdinando Jr. who keep track of how disease spreads and the best ways to prevent it. Rutgers Today asked DiFerdinando what people need to know this fall about several dangerous disease -- meningitis, influenza and shingles -- and the vaccines designed to prevent them.

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As the NJ Hopeline moves into its second year, the state’s suicide prevention hotline operated by Rutgers counts its success one call at a time.

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Sometimes when people get upsetting news – such as a failing exam grade or a negative job review – they decide instantly to do better the next time. In other situations that are equally disappointing, the same people may feel inclined to just give up. How can similar setbacks produce such different reactions? It may come down to how much control we feel we have over what happened, according to new research from Rutgers University-Newark. The study, published in the journal Neuron, also finds that when these setbacks occur, the level of control we perceive may even determine which of two distinct parts of the brain will handle the crisis.

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Gary Aston-Jones, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, has been selected to lead Rutgers University’s Brain Health Institute, as Rutgers enhances its stature as one of the leading premier sites for basic and clinical research into the causes of – and new treatments for – brain and neural disorders. Most recently, Aston-Jones was the William E. Murray SmartState Endowed Chair of Neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina, as well as the director of the Neuroscience Institute and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience for the last eight years.

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A new Rutgers study indicates that a specialized yoga program is beneficial to everyday living for those with multiple sclerosis. After an eight-week trial, the Rutgers School of Health Related Professions found that participants had better balance, fine motor coordination, an improved quality of life and a decrease in pain and fatigue.

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For members of minority groups, maintaining a healthy weight can be especially difficult according to new research led by Luis Rivera, an experimental social psychologist at Rutgers University-Newark. Rivera says it is common for minorities in the United States to endure negative stereotypes, pervasive messages that suggest those groups are inferior, and that these attitudes can prevent people from doing what is needed to care for their health.

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As the out-of-control Ebola epidemic continues, an infectious disease physician and a medical historian -- both at Rutgers University -- discuss the risk for Americans, lessons from medical history, and treating people already at risk.

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Watching her granddaughter’s fatal suffering from a rare disease turned Rutgers employee Cheryl Daniels into an advocate for a change in mandatory newborn screening laws.

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Students engage their creativity by exploring art and writing through an innovative partnership between Rutgers Zimmerli Art Museum and K-12 schools

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In newly published research in the journal Neuron, Michael Cole of Rutgers has determined that the underlying brain architecture of a person at rest is basically the same as that of a person performing a variety of tasks. This is important to the study of mental illness, says Cole, because it is easier to analyze a brain at rest.

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On the Fourth of July 75 years ago, legendary first baseman Lou Gehrig – afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS – stepped to the microphone at Yankee Stadium and said goodbye to baseball. Read our Q & A with a Rutgers ALS expert that describes both the progress and frustration in treating this fatal nerve disorder.

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In March, Rutgers Today reported on “445 Portraits of a Man,” a haunting collection of 445 photobooth images a single individual took of himself from the 1930s through the 1960s on exhibition at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Those who viewed the images learned a lot about how this man aged. What they didn’t know is who he was and why he took and kept so many photos of himself.

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Sleep deprivation can cause drivers to doze when they believe they are awake.

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In a book published this month, a Rutgers law professor examines what makes a good parent and how marriage equality improves the welfare of children of same-sex couples

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A collaborative effort between Rutgers University and the Special Olympics helps young athletes achieve their dreams

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Physician and infectious disease researcher Nila Dharan of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School discusses the deadly virus MERS and what people can do to protect themselves.

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A Rutgers med school graduate turns personal tragedy into a mission to help kids with pediatric cancer.

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Students who enroll in medical school or train for other health careers make a profound commitment. They have volunteered to hold the lives of other people in their hands. They will confront blood and pain, suffering and tragedy, and – with luck and supreme skill – participate in moments of recovery. Sometimes it takes a poet to put the swirling emotions of a health-professional-in-training into just the right words, and students working toward advanced degrees at the nine schools of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences recently confirmed that they are – indeed – poets.

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The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has selected infectious disease expert David Perlin, executive director of the Public Health Research Institute at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, to lead a major research effort aimed at developing new forms of antibiotics to regain the upper hand over deadly bacteria that have become resistant to current treatments.

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Researchers in the Center for Immunity and Inflammation at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School describe a novel hybrid invasion pathway that starts with the host cell eating the Toxoplasma parasite which, in turn, escapes to form its own vacuolar niche. This study has been published by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Faculty from Rutgers New Jersey Medical School are working to attack the problem of hospital-acquired delirium in the surgical intensive care unit. They are getting valuable assistance from Doctor of Physical Therapy students from Rutgers School of Health Related Professions, who provide physical therapy to patients. Researchers estimate that at least 45 percent of patients in intensive care develop hospital-acquired delirium, a number that can rise above 80 percent when patients have mechanical breathing assistance. Advancing age also puts patients at higher risk. Patients with delirium tend to die more frequently than others during the 12 months after they leave the hospital, and the effects of delirium often linger.

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To raise awareness among future physicians, Leonard Cole of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School has designed a new two-week elective course called “Terror Medicine.” It includes sessions taught by experts in emergency medicine, surgery, psychiatry and bioterror – areas of crucial importance in a medical response to a terror attack. And it presents examples of how dangerous times have forced health professionals’ basic instincts to change.

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According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the estimated prevalence of autism among 8-year-olds in New Jersey rose in the latest reporting year, 2010, to nearly 22 children per thousand, or approximately one child in 45. That figure represents the “highest ever reported for a single site” since the CDC started closely monitoring 11 U.S. states in 2000. Walter Zahorodny, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, has compiled New Jersey’s numbers from the start – and seen them more than double in a decade.

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Cancer patients throughout New Jersey will have greater access to the latest generation of clinical trials, including several never offered before, as part of a research program funded by a $4.25 million federal grant whose two leading recipients include Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey. The five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute will allow Rutgers to pool resources and expertise with the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center to develop clinical trials, and have access to additional clinical trials as part of a network of cancer centers throughout the nation

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For more than three decades, James Tepper of Rutgers University and his colleagues have added to understanding of the brain and its innermost workings by mapping the circuitry of the brain, much as explorers on ships added methodically to long-incomplete maps of the New World, a primary reason why the National Institutes of Health awarded Tepper a five-year, $3.4 million grant to delve ever more deeply into the circuitry and function of the striatum -- in hopes of new knowledge that can lead to Parkinson's disease breakthroughs.

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Everyday doctors and health care workers are faced with ethical questions about patient care. They need to decide if doctors should place limits on therapies that cause pain and suffering and determine what to do when patients cannot make decisions for themselves and family members refuse to intervene. Francis Barchi, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work and wife of Rutgers President Robert Barchi, and Eric Singer, a urologic surgeon, are leading a new initiative that is bringing Rutgers undergraduate students to the table and encouraging them to learn about how bioethics affects more than just medicine.

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Although long recognized as an essential defense against the lung-invading fungus Asperfillus fumigatus, Neutrophils actually require a little help from fellow immune cells, according to a study by Amariliz Rivera, her colleagues at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

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The nucleoside adenosine—a tiny chemical structure made up of a simple base linked to a sugar—is critical for the regulation of bodily functions ranging from blood flow to tissue repair to sleep. Now, researchers at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School show that adenosine is essential in promoting the development of a type of immune response that helps oust gut-infecting worms.

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A researcher at the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey seeks to understand the mindset of indoor tanners and encourage them to reduce or change behavior.

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Alexey Ryazanov of Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, who first identified the eEF2K enzyme a quarter century ago, has published new research in Developmental Cell adding evidence that inhibition of eEF2K would enhance the benefits chemo and radiation therapy by sharply reducing death of healthy cells and accompanying side effects.

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Researchers led by Luis Ulloa of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School have found physical evidence that electroacupuncture may reduce inflammation that causes sepsis death. While investigating acupuncture mechanisms, they also have determined that fenoldopam, a dopamine receptor agonist, also shows promise as a pharmaceutical sepsis treatment.

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It has been twenty years since federal law made Nutrition Facts a required part of food packages. The Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for the design and content of Nutrition Facts, says knowledge about nutrition has advanced in the past two decades, and that label changes to reflect the new information may be on the way.

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Scientists have known for more than 40 years that the synthetic pesticide DDT is harmful to bird habitats and a threat to the environment. Now researchers at Rutgers University, writing in JAMA Neurology, say exposure to DDT – banned in the United States since 1972 but still used as a pesticide in other countries – may also increase the risk and severity of Alzheimer’s disease in some people, particularly those over the age of 60.

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With funding sources for research and development more scarce than in the past, would-be developers of a promising new cancer drug find they need to develop a sophisticated business plan as they seek to raise capital. Rutgers graduate student Sourav Sinha is leading a team entered in the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge. Their goal is to take a drug that shows promise in the lab against HER-3-positive breast cancer and move its development and testing forward.

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Fungal infections take more than 1.3 million lives each year worldwide, nearly as many as tuberculosis, in addition to contributing to blindness, asthma and other major health problems. David Perlin of Rutgers University's Public Health Research Institute has made it his mission to reduce the death toll and severe disability that fungi can cause.

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Study shows that eating plenty of tomatoes and tomato-based products, even for a short period, helped protect at-risk postmenopausal women

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Two existing drugs – one the active ingredient in an anti-fungal medication and the other now used to control iron levels in the blood – both show promise as potential treatments for cervical cancer, according to newly published research by scientists at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. The same two drugs also showed potential efficacy recently against cells infected with HIV.

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Healthy Helpings … and a Few Tasty Transgressions, published by the School of Public Health’s student organization, offers more than 100 recipes to raise funds for local and national causes.