Last Week: NIH Celebrates #BHM2016, Part 2

This year we celebrate the accomplishments of African Americans in a variety of fields. This small selection of profiles highlights accomplishments from significant inventions, medical discoveries, and glass ceilings that were broken for many contributors to come through the 20th and 21st centuries. We hope you enjoy the series of profiles over the course of Black History Month 2016.

Darlene Dixon, D.V.M., Ph.D. is the Group Leader of the Molecular Pathogenesis Group. Under her leadership, the research group is focused on defining the pathogenesis/carcinogenesis of tumors affecting the reproductive tract of rodents and humans, and assessing the role of environmental and endogenous hormonal factors in the growth of these tumors Read more.

Rear Admiral Helena Mishoe, PhD, MPH is an Assistant Surgeon General in the United States Public Health Service, currently serving as Director for the Office of Research Training and Minority Health in the Office of the Director, National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) at the National Institutes of Health. Mishoe serves as the first Director of the Office of Research Training and Minority Health where she leads the effort to ensure greater participation in training and career development programs through recruitment, mentoring, and retention of individuals in biomedical and behavioral research. She also oversees and coordinates responsibilities for the NHLBI's health disparities research and training agenda.

Roland A. Owens, Ph.D. is an Assistant Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Intramural Research. Owens’ research focused on adeno-associated virus type-2 (AAV2). His group’s 1994 paper “Adeno-associated virus (AAV) Rep proteins mediate complex formation between AAV DNA and its integration site in human DNA” (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 91:5808-5812) has been cited more than 250 times. Roland is also a co-inventor on two patents involving AAV2 gene therapy applications. He served on the editorial board of Journal of Virology from 1997 to 2002, and he was a member of the NIH Central Tenure Committee from 2000–2002. He is active in mentoring minority scientists, and in 2002 he was selected as Mentor of the Year by the UMBC Meyerhoff Scholarship Program. In 2010, Dr. Owens won an NIH Director’s Award for co-leading the trans-NIH Earl Stadtman tenure-track investigator search. In 2011, he won an NIH Merit Award “in recognition of the exemplary support to NIH Leadership’s establishing diversity programs.” Read more.

Dr. Derrick C. Tabor serves as the program official for the Exploratory Centers of Excellence and SBIR/STTR programs within the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities at the National Institutes of Health. Prior, Tabor served as chair and professor, Department of Natural Sciences, at Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, NC, where he also directed an NIH-funded research program focused on the design and synthesis of novel anticancer drugs based on cyanine dyes. Prior to joining Johnson C. Smith, Tabor was a senior research chemist at Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories, Rochester, New York, where he was a co-inventor on two U.S. patents on cyanine dyes, led a team of photographic scientists and engineers in understanding the competitive threats of other manufacturer's technologies, and developed novel routes to narrowly-dispersed silver halide crystals. Tabor received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1979 under Slayton A. Evans, Ph.D., and completed post-doctoral research at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with Maurice Brookhart, Ph.D., and at the Loker Hydrocarbon Institute, University of Southern California, with George A. Olah, Ph.D., 1994 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.

Coming Next Week – NIH Celebrates #BHM2016, Part 4