Department of Surgery

In 2009, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force raised the age for women to begin routine breast cancer screening to 50 from 40. The task force also found insufficient evidence to recommend for or against screening for women 75 and older. Now, 14 years later, researchers at the Larner College of Medicine at The University of Vermont have discovered some unintended − and unwelcome − consequences from those loosened guidelines: A decline in mammography screening rates for every age group of women, including those aged 50-74 who are at the highest risk of developing breast cancer.

UVM Cancer Center researchers Sarah Nowak, Ph.D., and Brian Sprague, Ph.D., found that a 2009 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force change in guidelines led to an unintended consequence: a decline in mammography screening rates for all age groups, including the 50-74 group, which is most at risk of developing breast cancer and most in need of screenings. Their results were recently published in The American Journal of Preventative Medicine.

Fanny Asmussen, an International visiting medical student from Aarhus University in Denmark, will also be visiting from March – May 2023 to conduct research with Thomas Ahern, PhD as her faculty mentor. The project title is “Infection and risk of breast cancer recurrence: A Danish nationwide case-control study.”

Elisabeth Solmunde, an International visiting medical student from Aarhus University in Denmark, Departments of Epidemiology and Clinical Medicine, conducted research with Thomas Ahern, PhD, Associate Professor of Surgical Research as her faculty mentor.

Many congratulations to Somen Mistri, PhD of the Boyson Lab who successfully defended his PhD in Cellular, Molecular and Biomedical Sciences in December 2022!

The Dean's Celebration of Excellence in Research is an annual three-day event highlighting the research being conducted by junior faculty, senior faculty, postdoctoral trainees, and graduate students at the University of Vermont and the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine.

In a formal ceremony held at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine on June 28, 2022, Associate Professor of Surgery William Brundage, M.D., was invested as the inaugural Green and Gold Professor in the Division of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery.

BCSC study finds that with 3D mammography technique, advanced cancer is reduced in women with most dense breasts and highest risk

Question: Is digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) associated with lower risk of interval invasive and advanced breast cancer (prognostic pathologic stage II or higher) compared with digital mammography among women with dense breasts?

Undergraduate students strive to understand COVID-19 vaccines in a UVM lab under Larner College of Medicine surgery professor Dr. Dev Majumdar. Students of each graduating class work in the lab. Split into two components, half of the researchers work on mRNA vaccine development and half learn as much as they can about how COVID-19 works, Majumdar said.

Kalev Freeman, MD, associate professor of surgery and pharmacology, received a $1.95 million, five-year R35 Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Becoming bat-man: comparative computational modeling between bats and humans to discover bat-inspired treatment for acute viral infections.

The Surgical Skills Laboratory under the direction of Sheila Russell received a Gore Educational Materials Grant in the amount of $106,354.50.

Brian Sprague, PhD, Associate Professor of Surgery, Director of the Vermont Breast Cancer Surveillance System and Senior Epidemiologist at the Vermont Center on Behavior and Health (VCBH), was interviewed by WCAX in February 2021 to share the findings of the new study on US cancer statistics as reported in American Cancer Society’s 2021 annual report.

Congratulations to the Freeman Lab for receiving an NIH grant for a project entitled ”Mechanisms of Endotheliopathy in SARS-CoV-2 Infection”. The funds are from NIH administered through a sub-OTA agreement, via University of Michigan.

Congratulations to Oliver Dienz, PhD in the Boyson Lab on being first author in the publication: “Critical Role for SLAM/SAP Signaling in the Thymic Developmental Programming of IL-17– and IFN-γ–Producing γδ T Cells” in the Journal of Immunology.

Dr. Majumdar was a co-corresponding author in the publication “SARS-CoV-2 Disrupts Splicing, Translation, and Protein Trafficking to Suppress Host Defenses” in the journal Cell.

Congratulations to Dev Majumdar, PhD on his receipt of a SPARK-VT award! The Majumdar Lab will work to develop a method to map and measure the repertoire of B cells that are binding to antigens from SARS-COV2.

Congratulations to Jonathan Boyson, PhD on his receipt of an NIH R03 award! Dr. Boyson is the PI for a project entitled “Defining the SAP-dependent and SAP-independent gamma delta TCR repertoire.”

Congratulations to Gary An, MD and Chase Cockrell, PhD of the An-Cockrell Lab at UVM Larner College of Medicine on being a participant of a multi-institution research team led by the University of Pittsburgh that recently secured a $22 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Bioelectronics for Tissue Regeneration (BETR) program.