Awards and Honors: May 22, 2007

Posted 3:57 PM, May 22, 2007, by jaruiz

Luke Higgins, PhD, first-year medical student, has been awarded a Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) Foundation Medical Student Research Grant. Through this grant, SIR encourages medical students to engage in cutting-edge research in interventional radiology that will likely translate to improved patient care. Funding criteria includes scientific merit, innovative quality of the research proposal, and relevance to interventional radiology. Dr. Higgins earned his PhD in biological chemistry from MIT and is now working with Lawrence "Rusty" Hofmann, MD, who is investigating the delivery of autologous adipose-derived multipotential stromal cells (ASCs) to treat peripheral arterial disease. Under Dr. Hofmann's mentorship, Dr. Higgins will be analyzing the capacity of human and rabbit MR-labeled ASCs to differentiate and express arteriogenic factors relative to unlabeled cells and will be comparing these expression levels to cells under stressed conditions.