Visionary, patient-centric health research for all — dr. julia moore vogel, phd — scripps research / long covid treatment trial.
Dr. Julia Moore Vogel, PhD, MBA is Assistant Professor and Senior Program Director at The Scripps Research Institute (https://www.scripps.edu/science-and-me… where she is responsible for managing a broad portfolio of patient-centric health research studies, including The Long COVID Treatment Trial (https://longcovid.scripps.edu/locitt-t/), a fully remote, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial targeting individuals with long COVID, testing whether the drug Tirzepatide can reduce or alleviate symptoms of long COVID.
Prior to this current role, Dr. Vogel managed The Participant Center (TPC) for the NIH All of Us Research Program (https://www.scripps.edu/science-and-me… which was charged with recruiting and retaining 350,000 individuals that represent the diversity of the United States. TPC aims to make it possible for interested individuals anywhere in the US to become active participants, for example by collaborating with numerous outreach partners to raise awareness, collecting biosamples nationwide, returning participants’ results and developing self-guided workflows that enable participants to join whenever is convenient for them.
Prior to joining the Scripps Research Translational Institute, Dr. Vogel created, proposed, fundraised for, and implemented research and clinical genomics initiatives at the New York Genome Center and The Rockefeller University. She oversaw the proposal and execution of grants, including a $44M NIH Center for Common Disease Genomics in collaboration with over 20 scientific contributors across seven institutions. She also managed corporate partnerships, including one with IBM that assessed the relative value of several genomic assays for cancer patients.
Dr. Vogel has a BS in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a PhD in Computational Biology and Medicine from Cornell and an MBA from Cornell.
Scientists from New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have uncovered new evidence that water once flowed beneath the surface of Mars, revealing that the planet may have remained habitable for life much longer than previously thought.
The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research—Planets, shows that ancient sand dunes in Gale Crater, a region explored by NASA’s Curiosity rover, gradually turned into rock after interacting with underground water billions of years ago.
Led by Dimitra Atri, Principal Investigator of NYUAD’s Space Exploration Laboratory, with research assistant Vignesh Krishnamoorthy, the research team compared data from the Curiosity rover with rock formations in the UAE desert that formed under similar conditions on Earth.
Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a new tool that can estimate a person’s risk of developing memory and thinking problems associated with Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms appear.
The research, published in The Lancet Neurology, builds on decades of data from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging—one of the world’s most comprehensive population-based studies of brain health.
The study found that women have a higher lifetime risk than men of developing dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a transitional stage between healthy aging and dementia that often affects quality of life but still allows people to live independently. Men and women with the common genetic variant, APOE ε4, also have a higher lifetime risk.
Conventional wearable ultrasound sensors have been limited by low power output and poor structural stability, making them unsuitable for high-resolution imaging or therapeutic applications.
A KAIST research team has now overcome these challenges by developing a flexible ultrasound sensor with statically adjustable curvature. This breakthrough opens new possibilities for wearable medical devices that can capture precise, body-conforming images and perform noninvasive treatments using ultrasound energy.
A naturally-occurring protein that tends to be expressed at higher levels in breast cancer cells boosts the effectiveness of some anticancer agents, including doxorubicin, one of the most widely used chemotherapies, and a preclinical drug known as ErSO, researchers report. The protein, FGD3, contributes to the rupture of cancer cells disrupted by these drugs, boosting their effectiveness and enhancing anticancer immunotherapies.
The discovery is described in the Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research.
The new findings were the result of experiments involving ErSO, an experimental drug that killed 95–100% of estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer cells in a mouse model of the disease.
In 1980, Stephen Hawking gave his first lecture as Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge. The lecture was called “Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?”
Hawking, who later became my Ph.D. supervisor, predicted that a theory of everything—uniting the clashing branches of general relativity, which describes the universe on large scales, and quantum mechanics, which rules the microcosmos of atoms and particles— might be discovered by the end of the 20th century.
Forty-five years later, there is still no definitive theory of everything. The main candidate is string theory, a framework that describes all forces and particles including gravity. String theory proposes that the building blocks of nature are not point-like particles like quarks (which make up particles in the atomic nucleus) but vibrating strings.
Researchers have demonstrated that the theoretically optimal scaling for magic state distillation—a critical bottleneck in fault-tolerant quantum computing—is achievable for qubits, improving on the previous best result by reaching a scaling exponent of exactly zero.
The work, published in Nature Physics, resolves a fundamental open problem that has persisted in the field for years.
“Broadly, I think that building quantum computers is a wonderful and inspiring goal,” Adam Wills, a Ph.D. student at MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics and lead author of the study, told Phys.org.
When an intense laser pulse hits a stationary electron, it performs a trembling motion at the frequency of the light field. However, this motion dies down after the pulse, and the electron comes to rest again at its original location. If, however, the light field changes its strength along the electron’s trajectory, the electron builds up an additional drift motion with each oscillation, which it retains even after the pulse. The spatial light intensity acts like a slope that the electron slides down.
This effect, known for decades, is called ponderomotive acceleration. However, due to the low spatial dependence of intensity even in focused light beams, this light-driven sliding effect can only be clearly observed for long-lasting laser pulses with many oscillations of the field.
In a recent study, researchers have demonstrated pronounced ponderomotive acceleration during just a single light oscillation. The crucial trick was the use of sharp metallic needle tips, which exhibit an extremely strong spatial variation in light intensity when illuminated with laser light. The work is published in the journal Nature Physics.