School Notes: School of Medicine
January/February 2024

School to form a new Parkinson’s disease research center

Yale School of Medicine has announced the formation of the Stephen and Denise Adams Center for Parkinson’s Disease Research, whose goal is to change the ways that Parkinson’s—a neurological disorder that currently affects an estimated one million people in the United States—is diagnosed and treated. The director of the center will be Clemens Scherzer, MD, who comes to Yale in January 2024 from Harvard Medical School, where he has been professor of neurology, director of the APDA Center for Advanced Parkinson Research, and director of the Precision Neurology Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Scherzer says the resources available at Yale for Parkinson’s research are formidable, and he looks forward to bringing together scientists and engineers across disciplines from neurology, neuroscience, cell biology, genetics, bioinformatics, and computer science to advance research on Parkinson’s. The center and the recruitment of Scherzer were made possible by the philanthropic support of Stephen Adams ’59 and his wife Denise.

Yale joins biomedical research hub

Yale University is one of three partners that will form a new biomedical research hub announced by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The mission of CZ Biohub New York, to be located in New York City, will be to bioengineer immune cells to detect the earliest stages of diseases—potentially allowing clinicians to intervene before the diseases become symptomatic and detectable using current approaches. The biohub will be a collaboration among Columbia University, the Rockefeller University, and Yale. Yale’s team will be led by John Tsang, professor of immunobiology and of biomedical engineering at Yale School of Medicine, and director of the Yale Center for Systems and Engineering Immunology. The teams will initially apply their novel technology to hard-to-detect malignancies such as ovarian and pancreatic cancers; neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s; and aging and autoimmunity.