MJH Life Sciences COVID-19 Coalition to hold virus variant webinar

As new variants of the COVID-19 coronavirus continue to emerge, physicians and patients can be at a loss for what they mean for a country ravaged by the pandemic.

The MJH Life Sciences COVID-19 Coalition will hold a free webinar focusing on what you need to know about these emerging variants at 6 p.m. ET on Jan. 26.

Sign up here.

Springing from MJH’s mission to improve quality of life through healthcare communications, education, and research, the MJH Life Sciences™ COVID-19 Coalition was formed to help keep healthcare professionals up-to-date and informed on the science and latest learnings on COVID-19.

Leveraging our relationships with top thought leaders across a variety of key specialties, the Coalition generates the most accurate, up-to-the-minute information on the pandemic’s ever-evolving impact on healthcare professionals and the patients they treat.

The participants in this webinar will be:

• Moderator: Carlos del Rio, MD – Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, and professor of global health and epidemiology at the Rollins School of Emory University. He serves as the Executive Associate Dean of Emory University School of Medicine at Grady Health System, and is the co-director and principal investigator of the Emory Center for AIDS Research. His research interests include the early diagnosis of HIV, linkage to and retention in HIV care, and prevention of HIV infection. He has long worked in hospitals and clinics with hard-to-reach populations including substance abuse users to improve outcomes of those infected with HIV and to prevent infection among those at risk.
• Panelist: Angela Rasmussen, PhD - Rasmussen is a virologist studying host responses to infection by combining classical virology with modern systems biology approaches. Her research objectives are to identify host response signatures predictive of infection severity or disease outcome and host pathways to target drug development or repurposing. She is particularly interested in viruses that are highly pathogenic, newly emergent or likely to emerge because of climate change, land development, or ecological disruption.
• Panelist: Saskia v. Popescu, PhD, MPH, MA, CIC, PhD, MPH, MA, CIC - Popescu is an infectious disease epidemiologist and infection prevention with a focus on hospital bio preparedness. He holds a PhD in Biodefense and an MPH in infectious disease epidemiology and is certified in infection control. She is a term assistant professor at George Mason University and an adjunct professor at the University of Arizona College of Public Health.
• Panelist: Adam S. Lauring, MD, PhD - Lauring began working at the University of Michigan in 2012. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Internal Medicine (Division of Infectious Diseases), Microbiology and Immunology, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. 75% of his time is devoted to conducting basic and translational research on RNA virus evolution. He is a physician-scientist and spends a little over a month each year taking care of patients in the hospital with a variety of infectious diseases. The remainder of his time is spent teaching virology to medical and graduate students in the classroom throughout the year. He recently won the prestigious Burroughs Wellcome Fund "Investigators in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease" Award, which supports accomplished investigators at the assistant professor level in bringing multidisciplinary approaches to the study of human infectious diseases.