MD/PhD students’ work contributes to $2.6 million NIH grant
Yifu Ding and Spencer Katz, students in Penn State College of Medicine’s MD/PhD Medical Scientist Training Program, are part of a NIH-funded project that will explore replacing 2D histology, the current diagnostic gold standard, with 3D histology. The work was recently featured in the University’s Penn State News.
Ding, a third-year medical student, and Katz, a fourth-year graduate student, have worked in the lab of Keith Cheng, MD, PhD,
Distinguished Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (Division of Experimental Pathology) as well as the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Department of Pharmacology.
Ding’s thesis work and five years in the Cheng lab resulted in the successful use of this new technology. He is from Souderton, Pa., and receive his undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins in 2011. After medical school, he plans to specialize in radiation oncology.
Ding’s work in the Cheng lab, in combination with his clinical area of interest, will provide the basis for continual progress using his new technology, which creates three-dimensional whole-organism images suitable for quantitative histological phenotyping. The combination of research and clinical work exemplifies the goals of those pursing a dual MD/PhD degree, allowing for the research to inform and help advance clinical care.
Read more
- NIH-funded work to explore replacing diagnostic gold standard with 3D histology (Penn State News)
- MD/PhD students’ work featured as Biomedical Picture of the Day (Penn State Health News)
- Increase in resolution, scale takes CT scanning and diagnosis to the next level (Penn State Health News)
- Computational 3D histological phenotyping of whole zebrafish by X-ray histotomography (eLife)
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