UTMB News

America’s Essential Hospitals has recognized the University of Texas Medical Branch for its work to craft and continuously maintain a compendium of expert interpretive commentary regarding SARS-CoV-2 testing and a novel supporting technology that applies these comments and delivers them to physicians and patients.

The Galveston Healing Arts Orchestra will perform a classical concert at 7 p.m. June 24 in the Levin Hall Dining Room on the Galveston campus. The orchestra members include faculty, staff and students at UTMB.

Pew Charitable Trusts announced that Noe Baruch Torres, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was selected as a 2022 Pew Latin American Fellows Program in the Biomedical Sciences.

Dr. Neil Mehta, an associate professor in epidemiology in the School of Public and Population Health at UTMB, is a guest editor of the special supplemental issue, Why is Health in the United States Continuing to Lag Behind? “There’s no simple answer,” Mehta said. “The issue touches on the many complicated factors with a focus on social and behavioral factors.”

The University of Texas Medical Branch partners with UT El Paso on deep learning approach to improving lung region segmentation accuracy in chest x-ray images. The model is one of the first products created in partnership leveraging medical expertise at UTMB and computational expertise with machine learning and artificial intelligence at UT El Paso.

Thanks to a $56 million grant, the University of Texas Medical Branch and global health care company Novartis will enhance their work together to discover drugs to fight off the next pandemic. The grant comes from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and is one of nine such grants awarded by NIAID to establish Antiviral Drug Discovery (AViDD) Centers for Pathogens of Pandemic Concern.

The unveiling of two new Zen Rooms—one on the Galveston Campus and another on UTMB's League City Campus—coincided with Health System & Nurses Week, an annual week of recognition of UTMB’s hospital and nursing staff.

Dr. Samuel E. Mathis, associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Texas Medical Branch, has been elected to the Texas Medical Association (TMA) Board of Trustees to represent the Young Physician Section. TMA’s House of Delegates policymaking body elected Mathis during the association’s annual conference TexMed, in Houston on April 30.

When it comes to treating heart attacks, U.S. hospitals may have the latest tech and low readmission rates, but the country’s mortality rate is one of the highest among the nations included in a new study. The study, published May 4 in The BMJ, found substantial differences in care for heart attack patients across six high income countries despite international agreement on how heart attacks should be treated.

The Texas Department of State Health Services has named the University of Texas Medical Branch’s League City Campus as an Advanced Level III Trauma Facility.