March 30, 2021
Faculty in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences continue to develop novel courses designed to increase cultural awareness and knowledge of food systems here in central Pennsylvania and throughout the world. Two of these courses will be offered in the fall 2021 semester.
March 24, 2021
Through short content lectures and interaction with embedded online tools, students and other users can develop a better understanding of how pandemics are studied, modeled, prepared for and mitigated.
March 17, 2021
A team led by researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences has developed a diagnostic test that can identify virulent forms of the swine bacterial pathogen Streptococcus equi subspecies zooepidemicus — often referred to as "Strep zoo" — which can cause severe illness and death in pigs, other animals and rarely people.
March 8, 2021
Brooke Migdal, a senior majoring in veterinary and biomedical sciences, plans to attend veterinary school and work with marine animals.
March 8, 2021
Faculty in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences are using immersive technology to enhance learning.
March 1, 2021
Researchers found that that the optimal timeframe for donating convalescent plasma for use in COVID-19 immunotherapy is within 60 days of the onset of symptoms.
February 9, 2021
The Society of Toxicology has named Tombros Early Career Professor Andrew Patterson of Penn State as the recipient of its 2021 Achievement Award, recognizing his significant contributions to the field of toxicology within 15 years of obtaining the highest earned degree.
February 9, 2021
CLIA certification is underway to support University Park campus testing, ability to send results directly to individuals
February 2, 2021
Congratulations to two of our Pathobiology Graduate students, Juhi Arora and Fenghua Qian, for being chosen to receive the Grier Scholarship for 2020! In order to be considered for the award, students must be a Ph. D. candidate in Pathobiology, and must have passed the qualifying examination for the Ph.D. no later than July 1 and the award does come with a monetary prize. Congrats to you both again!
January 20, 2021
Hailey Reiss, an immunology and infectious disease major from Quakertown. A graduate of Quakertown Community High School, Reiss was the summer scholar at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Allentown, where she performed statistical analysis and reviewed and presented data. Hailey is advised by VBS faculty member Dr. Pamela Hankey-Giblin.
January 6, 2021
Kristin Passero (Hall Lab PhD student) and Dr. Molly Hall organized the session "What about the environment? Leveraging multi-omic datasets to characterize the environment’s role in human health" for the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) with environmental health research experts Dr. Chirag Patel (Harvard Medical School), Dr. Arjun Manrai (Harvard Medical School), Dr. Kimberly McAllister (National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences), and Dr. Shefali Setia Verma (University of Pennsylvania). Kristin and organizers published an introduction to the session and gave an introductory talk as well: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811232701_0029. Hall Lab MD/PhD student, Morris Aguilar, also gave a talk on his metabolomics research which is published here: https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789811232701_0030
December 18, 2020
A world leader in the field of metabolomics, Andrew D. Patterson, PhD, has been awarded the 2021 SOT Achievement Award for his leadership, vision, service, and dedication to the field of toxicology. Dr. Patterson has established himself as a prestigious investigator at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, where he holds multiple positions, including Professor of molecular toxicology and Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. He is the Tombros Early Career Professor and Huck Endowed Chair, as well as the Penn State Cancer Institute Metabolomics Shared Resource Director. Dr. Patterson received his PhD in genetics in 2006 through a graduate partnership program between George Washington University and the National Cancer Institute. He then undertook a postdoctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Metabolism at the National Cancer Institute, during which he focused on the development and refinement of metabolomics approaches to determine how toxicants and other environmental exposures influence the metabolome. At a time when this field was just emerging, Dr. Patterson’s work furthered metabolomics as an invaluable tool for understanding drug metabolism and promoted the development and identification of translational biomarkers for ionizing radiation exposure, toxicity, diabetes, and cancer. Dr. Patterson’s research illustrates the connection between toxicology and medicine in ways that have clear implications for the development of therapeutics and for public health measures to address risk factors associated with nongenetic metabolic diseases and their associated chronic disease manifestations. His laboratory has become a world leader in metabolomics research and is a major resource for numerous laboratories within and outside the United States that are trying to incorporate this approach into their science. Dr. Patterson’s current research interests are focused on understanding the host-metabolite-microbiota axis—specifically how the manipulation of gut bacteria affects host metabolites and how these host/bacterial co-metabolites interact with host nuclear receptors and modulate toxicity and cancer. In addition to his research, Dr. Patterson’s service in the field of toxicology is exemplified by his long list of advisees and mentees. Dr. Patterson has mentored nearly 50 young researchers, from undergraduate students to junior faculty. Many postdoctoral fellows under his mentorship have progressed to academic and industry careers, and he has trained graduate students who have earned PhDs with an emphasis on metabolomics and toxicology. Since Dr. Patterson joined SOT in 2012, his laboratory has presented research findings every year at the SOT Annual Meeting, including poster presentations and a Platform Session. He also has served on the Editorial Board of Toxicological Sciences (ToxSci) and currently serves as an Associate Editor of ToxSci and Environmental Health Perspectives. In addition to participation within SOT, Dr. Patterson also is a member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and the American Chemical Society and is an Editorial Board member of several high-impact journals. Congratulations Andrew!
December 15, 2020
Congratulations to McKayla Nicol who won first place for the 2020 CIDD Best Student Paper, McKayla is a Pathobiology Grad student in Dr. Girish Kirimanjeswara's lab in the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences: Nicol, M.J., Brubaker, T.R., Honish, B.J., et al. Antibacterial effects of low-temperature plasma generated by atmospheric-pressure plasma jet are mediated by reactive oxygen species. Sci Rep 10, 3066 (2020).
December 7, 2020
Penn State senior A’dryanna Jenkins earned a 2021 Marshall Scholarship, allowing her to pursue graduate studies in pathology at Cambridge University for one year. Jenkins, of Easton, Pennsylvania, is an immunology and infectious diseases major in the College of Agricultural Sciences and a Schreyer Scholar. After graduating, she plans to pursue a combined MD/PhD degree and work as a physician-scientist in academia and government. She will use the Marshall Scholarship to join the Roychoudhuri Laboratory in Cambridge University’s Department of Pathology.
November 23, 2020
Funding from the National Institutes of Health will enable Margherita Cantorna, distinguished professor of molecular immunology and nutrition in the College of Agricultural Sciences, to study whether vitamin D supplementation could help people ward off or reduce symptoms caused by COVID-19.
October 29, 2020
October 27, 2020
Dr. Troy Sutton, Assistant Professor, has received funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID/NIH) to determine how long immunity to COVID-19 lasts after an initial infection. Specifically, Dr. Sutton’s research group will use animal models to determine how antibody levels change over time, and the relationship between decreasing levels of antibodies and susceptibility to re-infection. Using a similar approach, he will also explore how long vaccine induced immunity is protective, and working with Emory University, the findings in animal models will be compared to antibody responses in humans.
October 26, 2020
Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences and Maharashtra Animal and Fisheries Sciences University (MAFSU) have now a Memorandum of Understanding in place to develop an international program in areas related to One Health, Food Safety and Diagnostic Medicine. MAFSU was formed on December 3, 2000 with its operational center at Nagpur. The University comprises of five veterinary colleges, two colleges of fishery sciences, and one college of dairy technology. Since 2003, Penn State faculty including Dr. Bhushan Jayarao and Professor Emeritus Channa Reddy have worked with MAFSU faculty and students on several different occasions, including training MAFSU faculty at ADL, providing research and extension programming support in diagnostic medicine, and dairy production. This is a beneficial relationship for both the Department and the College of Ag, and we congratulate and thank everyone involved who made this endeavor official last week!
October 20, 2020
Despite the state's first confirmed case of COVID-19 in a domestic cat, veterinary experts say residents should not be concerned about contracting the virus from pets and other domesticated animals. However, people with suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19 should take precautions to protect the health of their pets.
October 20, 2020
Nina De Luna is an IID honors student in Dr. Girish Kirimanjeswara's lab. She has been accepted in the NIH STEP-UP program called Year Round Research Program. The STEP-UP Program is a federally funded program managed and supported by the Office of Minority Health Research Coordination (OMHRC) in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney (NIDDK) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The overall goal of STEP-UP is to build and sustain a biomedical, behavioral, clinical and social science research pipeline focused on NIDDK’s core mission areas of diabetes, endocrinology and metabolic diseases; digestive diseases and nutrition; kidney, urologic and hematologic diseases.
October 17, 2020
Some of VBSC's graduate students had a blast at Way Fruit Farm in Port Matilda on Friday 10/16/20. We were missing a few but a great time was had by all who attended shopping, apple picking and going on hayrides. We hope to have similar outings each month. Look for emails on future adventures!
October 14, 2020
Dr. Margherita Cantorna recently received a Competitive Revision Supplement to her NIH R01 award to “Vitamin D fluctuations and the mucosal immune response” to generate some preliminary data on the effects of vitamin D on host resistance to COVID-19 infection in mice and hamsters. Drs. Girish Kirimanjeswara and Troy Sutton are Co-Investigators.
October 6, 2020
A researcher in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences is part of a team of scientists working to develop a unique COVID-19 vaccine that uses a bovine adenovirus as a safe and effective delivery vehicle.
October 3, 2020
Former Blue drum major Jimmie Frisbee was featured on The Penn State Alumni Association’s Football letter Live Event on Thursday 10/01/2020. An immunology and infectious diseases graduate in the College of Agricultural Sciences, Frisbee's roots run deep in the band with his parents, grandfather and uncle all wearing the Blue Band blues.
September 28, 2020
With COVID-19 continuing to spread around the world bringing sickness and death, a little-noticed development at Penn State’s Animal Diagnostic Laboratory takes on added significance.
September 26, 2020
September 14, 2020
Retinoid signaling in intestinal epithelial cells is essential for early survival from gastrointestinal infection.
September 13, 2020
Funded by @usdagov they applied filtering approaches to identify numerous genetic interactions related to cardiac-related outcomes as potential targets for therapy. The approaches described offer ways to detect epistasis in the complex traits and to improve precision medicine capability.
September 11, 2020
Leaders from Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences and Office of Physical Plant, HOK architectural firm, and Turner Construction Co. on Sept. 11 held a "topping out" ceremony to mark the halfway point of construction of the Animal, Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences Building on the University Park campus.
September 9, 2020
A grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will enable Penn State researchers to study the potential for SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, to infect and spread among livestock.
