UC Head Football Coach Butch Jones with his players at the spring football game: Bearcat Bowl IV. Photo Courtesy of UC Athletics.

When Football Coach Brian Kelly announced his decision to leave UC for Notre Dame, members of the UC Neuroscience Institute breathed a collective sigh of resignation. An important new friend and ally of the Academic Health Center would be leaving town. But if Tuesday evening was any indication, our community and institutions have a wonderful new friend in Coach Kelly’s replacement, new Bearcat Coach Butch Jones, who comes to UC after producing a dandy record and two MAC championships at Central Michigan University.  

Parkinson's disease specialists and researchers, from left: Fredy J. Revilla, MD (Gardner Center), Michael Schwarzschild, MD, PhD (MassGeneral) and Alberto Espay, MD (Gardner Center). Photo by Cindy Starr/Mayfield Clinic.

Physicians and scientists packed a UC lecture hall last Wednesday to hear Harvard University’s Michael Schwarzschild, MD, PhD, one of the nation’s leading Parkinson’s disease researchers, talk about what’s new in the area of purines, chemical compounds that are being studied at multiple sites – including UCNI's Gardner Center -- with the help of the largest single investment ever made by the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

From left: Orlando J. Andy, MD; Dr. Andy (above) and George Mandybur, MD; Dr. Mandybur during a DBS procedure at University Hospital. Left and center photos courtesy of University of Mississippi Medical Center; photo at right by Tonya Hines/Mayfield Clinic. 

George Mandybur, MD, a neurosurgeon with the Mayfield Clinic and the Gardner Center for Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders at UCNI, remembers the late Orlando J. Andy, MD, as a colleague, mentor and friend. He also remembers Dr. Andy, a pioneer in the field of movement disorders, seizure disorders and chronic pain, as an iconoclast who wasn’t afraid to defy political wisdom and go his own way.

From left, Sandy Hempel, Ron Warnick, MD, and Kathy Beechem.
Photo by UC Academic Health Center Medical Communications.

The UC Brain Tumor Center’s leaders and supporters are toasting the success of their social debut, a wine-tasting event that drew 214 guests and netted nearly $14,000.  Proceeds from the April 29 event, held in the atrium of the CARE/Crawley Building on the UC Academic Health Center campus, will fund brain tumor research and clinical care.

“We are very excited about the outcome,” said Kimbaird Avant, the Brain Tumor Center’s Business Manager. “The event exceeded our attendance and financial expectations, and we’re already starting to discuss next year’s event.”

Photo of John Breneman, MD, by Mark Bowen.

When we say that the UC Neuroscience Institute is nationally recognized and respected, we are often talking about people like the UC Brain Tumor Center’s John Breneman, MD, the Charles M. Barrett Professor of Radiation Oncology and Adjunct Professor of Neurosurgery at the UC College of Medicine. Dr. Breneman recently assumed a new national appointment with the American Board of Radiology.

Symposium photo by Tonya Hines/Mayfield Clinic.

Cindy Hughes enjoys a quiet moment in University Hospital's beautiful courtyard. Photo by Cindy Starr/Mayfield Clinic.

The question was simple, the answer was anything but. Asked why she had become a nurse, Cindy Hughes, RN, looked around the University Hospital courtyard, green and blooming and full of life, and up toward the hospital towers that were home to a never-ending mission. She had spent more than half of her life here, as a nursing student, as a registered nurse, and, for the last 20 years, as a nursing specialist and clinical nurse coordinator at the UC Epilepsy Center.

Members of Cincinnati’s NETT team, from left: Irene Ewing, RN, Peggy Waymeyer, RN, Sara Stark, MEd, and Principal Investigator Arthur Pancioli, MD.

In early 2007 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established NETT – the Neurological Emergencies Treatment Trials network, a permanent research framework that currently involves 17 university medical centers throughout the United States. The Neurotrauma Center at the UC Neuroscience Institute is part of this large and ongoing program.

Brendan Kelley, MD (left), meets with medical residents during a recent lecture. Photo by UC Academic Health Center Medical Communications.

Brendan Kelley, MD, uses the phrase “potential healthcare disaster” to describe an anticipated surge of patients with Alzheimer’s in the next 20 years, from 5.3 million Americans today to more than 8 million in 2035. At the same time, he remains optimistic that scientists will develop drugs that can slow the degenerative process.

Andrew Ringer, MD, at work. Photo by Ryan Kurtz.

In the afterword of his best-selling book, Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande, MD, a professor at Harvard University, offers five suggestions* to medical school students for how they might make a difference in the world.

One of the suggestions is to “count something.”

“Regardless of what one ultimately does in medicine – or outside medicine, for that matter – one should be a scientist in this world,” Dr. Gawande writes. “In simplest terms, this means one should count something.”