Leadership

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President: Adrian Rivera-Reyes
Vice President: Jamie DeNizio
Treasurer: Liana Vaccari
Secretary: Ian McLaughlin
Discussion Group Coordinator: Annie Chen
Advocacy Coordinator: Shaun O'Brien
NSPG Liaison: Tierra Moore

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Communicating about an Epidemic in the Digital Age

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**Link for live streaming of this event can be found here**

by Hannah Shoenhard, Jamie DeNizio, and Michael Allegrezza
Craig Spencer, a New York City doctor, tested positive for Ebola on October 23. The story broke online the same day, and by the next morning, tabloids were plastered with images of masked and gowned health workers with headlines such as Bungle Fever and Ebola! Late-night comedy, Twitter, local news: the story was inescapable, the hysteria palpable. All in all, only eleven Ebola patients were treated on U.S. soil. But the media’s reaction affected the lives of anyone who watched television or had an internet connection.
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NIH to chimera researchers: Let's talk about this...

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by Chris Yarosh
When we think about the role of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in biomedical research, we often think only in terms of dollars and cents. The NIH is a funding agency, after all, and most researchers submit grants with this relationship in mind. However, because the NIH holds the power of the purse, it also plays a large role in dictating the scope of biomedical research conducted in the U.S. It is noteworthy, then, that the NIH recently delayed some high profile grant applications related to one type of research: chimeras.
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Chris Yarosh

This Science Spotlight focuses on the research I do here at Penn, the results of which are now in press at Nucleic Acids Research1. You can read the actual manuscript right now, if you would like, because NAR is “open access,” meaning all articles published there are available to anyone for free. We’ve talked about open access on this blog before, if you’re curious about how that works. 
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