The first class of medical students at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine-Bowling Green Campus took their first steps in their medical education by participating in the campus' inaugural White Coat Ceremony.

Thirty students participated in the event held Friday, Aug. 3 at Van Meter Hall on the campus of Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. In addition, earlier in the day, 136 students received white coats in a ceremony at the UK College of Medicine's Lexington campus at the UK Singletary Center for the Arts.

Dr. Greg Davis is a teacher — of students, of peers, of listeners and of juries. The many hats he wears have taken him around the world and back to his beloved Kentucky, all in service to the Hippocratic Oath and his chosen profession of forensic pathology.

There's a joke that pathologists are asocial, more comfortable with a microscope than with people. This is certainly not true of Davis, whose intellectual skill and facility with others make him an ideal teacher in all walks of life. 

Dr. M. Paul Murphy, a faculty member within the Department of Molecular & Cellular Biochemistry and the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, contributed his thoughts on the “amyloid hypothesis” in the July 25, 2018 issue of Nature.

The amyloid hypothesis states that the accumulation of amyloid-βin the brain is the main cause of Alzheimer’s. This is primarily based on the correlation between clumps of amyloid-β in the brain and the neurodegenerative processes observed in Alzheimer’s disease.

Addiction doesn’t make any sense and purely punitive approaches to ending addiction will not work, Dr. John Sanders, the medical director for hospice and palliative medicine at St. Claire HealthCare in Morehead, told a group of Morgan County health care professionals on July 18.

Sixty community members took part in free Naloxone training offered on July 17 at the Mary Breckinridge ARH Hospital in Hyden.

Training participants also received two doses of Naloxone to use if they encounter someone suffering from an opioid overdose.

The training and Naloxone distribution — provided by the Kentucky Department for Public Health and the Kentucky Pharmacists Association’s Naloxone Dispensing Program — is just one of the community outreach events planned as part of the Kentucky Office of Rural Health (KORH)-led Critical Access Substance Abuse Project (CASAP).

The American Association for Thoracic Surgery (AATS) awarded Dr. Tessa London a scholarship to participate in the James L. Cox Fellowship in atrial fibrillation surgery. She is one of only seven surgeons selected to participate in this fellowship training in 2018.

At the University for Kentucky, understanding and addressing the health needs of the people of the Commonwealth is the goal of many faculty, staff, clinicians and researchers. As a step toward improving health equity, the University of Kentucky Center for Health Equity Transformation (CHET) was established and recently approved by the UK Board of Trustees. 

Ten researchers from institutions across the U.S. have been selected to participate in the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Advocacy Training Program, a rigorous six-month program aiming to produce the next generation of science advocates. Among those chosen is Aria Byrd, a doctoral candidate in the University of Kentucky College of Medicine and researcher in the Fillmore Brainson Lab. 

According to the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research (http://www.brimr.org/default.htm), with just under $11,000,000 in NIH research funding, the Department of Molecular & Cellular Biochemistry is ranked 19th among biochemistry departments in medical schools in the United States.