Yale School of Medicine

Laura Niklason, MD, PhD is a tissue engineer and an anesthesiologist who cares for patients with severe disease. Her research is focused on creating engineered blood vessels and lung tissue using bioreactors, with the eventual goal of providing new therapies for patients who have few other options. More on Laura Niklason's work: medicineatyale.org.

On August 16, 2012, Yale School of Medicine welcomed 100 first-year students to a life in medicine during the White Coat Ceremony. Five students speak about their reasons for entering the profession.

Yale sleep expert Meir Kryger, MD, talks about school start times, and the impact of sleep or lack of sleep on the academic performance of children and teenagers.

This is footage from Student Research Day on May 8, 2012, in The Anlyan Center at Yale School of Medicine. Medical students speak about their research thesis projects, 92 of which were displayed as posters on Student Research Day. The video also includes interviews with two faculty members.

A Yale study reveals the pathway by which mitochondrial DNA defects cause maternally-inherited deafness. The study may also open the way to learning more about age-related deafness. We interviewed Gerald Shadel, Ph.D., professor of genetics and pathology at Yale School of Medicine. The study appears in the journal Cell.

Megakaryocytes are cells in the bone marrow responsible for making platelets, which are necessary for blood clotting. One mystery regarding megakaryocytes is how they achieve their enormous size and large number of nuclei. Instead of the single nucleus that a normal cell possesses, a megakaryocyte may contain 64 or more nuclei. This results from a process known as endomitosis, in which the DNA divides but the cell doesn't. Megakaryocytes do not undergo cytokinesis—the separation of the dividing cell into two distinct cells—after the DNA divides. A March 2012 paper by Yale School of Medicine authors in the journal Developmental Cell elucidates several of the mechanisms that take place to prevent cytokinesis from occurring. These findings are relevant not only to normal hematopoiesis and the maturation process of normal megakaryocytes but also to leukemia. In megakaryoblastic leukemia, for example, cells don't fully mature. The authors are now investigating the link between normal megaka

Scientists have for the first time watched and manipulated stem cells as they regenerate tissue in an uninjured mammal, Yale researchers report July 1, 2012, online in the journal Nature. Using a sophisticated imaging technique, the researchers also demonstrated that mice lacking a certain type of cell do not regrow hair. The same technique could shed light on how stem cells interact with other cells and trigger repairs in a variety of other organs, including lung and heart tissue. Valentina Greco, assistant professor of genetics and of dermatology at Yale School of Medicine, and her team focused on stem cell behavior in the hair follicle of the mouse. The accessibility of the hair follicle allowed real-time and non-invasive imaging through a technology called 2-photon intravital microscopy. Using this method, Panteleimon Rompolas, a post-doctoral fellow in Greco's lab and lead author of this paper, was able to study the interaction between stem cells and thei! r progeny, which produce

A brief portrait of Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI), the rural Borneo clinic founded by Kinari Webb, M.D., a 2002 alumna of Yale School of Medicine. The video was created by Rebecca Sananes, a University of Vermont undergraduate from New Haven, Conn., during her internship at ASRI in the summer of 2010.

Dr. Irwin Braverman and curator Linda Friedlaender, with students from a March 26, 2009 class session, explain the origins and workings of the innovative School of Medicine workshop that brings all 100 first-year medical students into the Yale Center for British Art to improve observational skills by looking at paintings. Originated at Yale, the program has been imitated by more than 20 other medical schools.