• VA researcher, former White House policy advisor, leads panel recommending solutions to the opioid crisis

    Experts believe the precipitous rise was driven by abuse of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left many drug users feeling isolated and unable to get treatment or other support. Fentanyl is believed to be much more potent than heroin and morphine.

  • VA research spells out COVID’s down-the-road risks for cardiovascular and mental health

    Al-Aly heads up both the Clinical Epidemiology Center and the Research and Development Service at the VA St. Louis Health Care System. He is also a nephrologist—a doctor who specializes in kidney disease—and a clinical epidemiologist with expertise in big data. His group analyzes huge data sets too complex for conventional computer software.

  • Dr. Leigh Hochberg, pioneer in brain-computer technology, receives 2022 VA Magnuson Award

    Hochberg is a researcher at the Providence VA Medical Center in Rhode Island, with more than 17 years’ expertise. He is director of the BrainGate clinical trials—conducted by leading laboratories in neuroscience and neuroengineering—which are focused on developing and testing intracortical brain-computer interfaces (BCI). 

  • VA scientist dedicates career to cure Alzheimer’s

    As a result of her grandmother's death from Alzheimer’s disease, a would-be fourth generation farmer embarked on a different career path.

  • Air Force Veteran a leader in VA research on traumatic brain injury

    I have had a series of mentors over the years. Air Force Brigadier General Charles “Chuck” Yeager, the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound, took me on my first flight in an F100F fighter in 1958. Air Force Colonel Henry Godman, a pilot in the first full squadron to fly the B-17 Flying Fortress during World War II and later the head of Strategic Air Command, taught me to fly a propeller AC.

  • VA scientist first to show viruses can cause cancer

    In 1974, Gross received the prestigious Lasker Award for his discovery of what became known as the Gross mouse leukemia virus. His work in the 1950s, the Lasker Foundation said, opened the field of tumor virology in mammals and “laid the foundation for the subsequent discovery by others of cancer-inducing viruses in animals of various species ranging from rodents to the higher primates.”

  • Army Veteran a biostatistician, researcher at Iowa City VA

    Initially, I served with the United States Army Reserve in St. Cloud, Minnesota. I was a technical engineer, which means that I learned how to do so soils testing, drafting, and surveying. (I think it’s funny that I now work on a totally different kind of survey as a researcher.)

  • Former VA medical director key to shaping agency’s current health care system

    Custis was born in Goshen, Indiana, on July 23, 1917. In 1939, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Wabash College in Indiana, before being commissioned ensign in the U. S. Naval Reserve. While on inactive duty, he completed his medical degree at Northwestern University in Illinois in 1941.

  • In a landmark study, both of VA’s top psychotherapies lead to meaningful improvements for Veterans with PTSD

    Dr. Paula Schnurr, executive director of VA’s National Center for PTSD, was the lead author of the study, which was also the largest PTSD psychotherapy study to date in any population in the total number of participants: 916. The findings appeared in JAMA Network Open on Jan. 19, 2022.

  • Lab studies seek hormone-based obesity treatment

    Dr. James E. Blevins of the VA Puget Sound Health Care System completed the study with colleagues from Seattle Children’s Research Institute; the University of Washington; Harvard Medical School; and OXT Therapeutics, Inc. The research focused on ASK1476, a human-made peptide with a structure similar to that of oxytocin.

  • Navy Veteran chief of nuclear medicine at the Truman VA

    My grandfather, Thomas Purinton, enlisted in the Navy at age 16 in 1899 and was assigned to the square-rigger USS Essex, and my Massachusetts ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, so I was favorably disposed to military service. When I was a second-year medical student in 1971, one of my colleagues was accepted into the Medical Osteopathic Scholarship Program, which is the Department of Defense program to recruit future physicians.

  • VA clinicians testing new radioactive tracer drug to track prostate cancer in the body

    Images from a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner show the location of the cancer. This type of drug appears to be the best diagnostic tool for staging prostate cancer and determining whether it has metastasized, says Dresser, the chief of nuclear medicine at the Truman VA.