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Mar 06

Kelvin Davies Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine

By Featured, Honors and Awards

Kelvin_Davies_Royal_Medicine

USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology Professor Kelvin J. A. Davies was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine in the United Kingdom.

Scientists are elected to the Royal Society of Medicine following nomination and committee review. An elite group of physicians or scientists are elected annually to fellowship. Elected fellows of the Royal Society of Medicine correspond to members of the Institute of Medicine in the U.S.; famous former fellows include Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Edward Jenner, and Sigmund Freud.

Davies is currently the James E. Birren Professor of the Biology of Aging at USC’s Davis School of Gerontology, where he is also Dean of Faculty and Director of the Andrus Gerontology Center. Davies holds a joint appointment as Professor of Molecular & Computational Biology in Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. He has previously held tenured appointments in both the Keck School of Medicine (Biochemistry) and the School of Pharmacy at USC.

Davies described himself as being “delighted and honored beyond belief” by his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.

“The fields of free radical biology and medicine and the biology of aging, in which I have worked for the past 30-plus years, have really started making significant contributions to human knowledge and to improving health and vitality in our later years,” he said. “I am proud to have been a small part of the advances we have made in these areas.”

Kelvin Davies, a citizen of both the U.K. and the U.S., is a fellow of seven other national or international societies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Gerontological Society of America, the Society for Free Radical Biology & Medicine, and the Royal Institution (London). He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees by six universities in Europe, South America, and China, and in 2012 was knighted as a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite de France (Knight, National Order of Merit of France) by then-President Nicolas Sarkozy for his contributions to science and international cooperation.

Davies’ early education took place in England, after which he earned M.S. and PhD degrees from the Universities of Wisconsin and California, Berkeley. Following postdoctoral training and a junior faculty position at Harvard University, Davies joined the USC Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy, where he earned tenure. He left USC in 1989 to become the Chairman and John A. Muntz University Professor of the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and Distinguished Professor of Molecular Medicine in the Department of Medicine, at The Albany Medical College in NY. In 1996 Davies returned to USC to take up his current positions in the Davis School and the College, at the USC University Park Campus.

About the Royal Society of Medicine

The Royal Society of Medicine was established in 1805 as The Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, meeting in two rooms in barristers’ chambers at Gray’s Inn and then moving to Lincoln’s Inn Fields where it stayed for 25 years. The name was changed to the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London in 1834 when the Society was granted a Royal Charter by His Majesty King William IV. The Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London eventually subsumed seventeen other medical specialist societies and, with a supplementary Royal Charter granted by Edward VII, became the Royal Society of Medicine in 1907. The objects of the Society laid down by the 1834 Charter are the cultivation and promotion of Physic and Surgery and of the Branches of Science connected with them. The Supplementary Charter of 1907 empowered the Society to create Sections for the cultivation and promotion of any branch of medicine or any science connected with, or allied to, medicine. In 1910 the Society acquired the site on the corner of Wimpole Street and Henrietta Place, which was opened by King George V and Queen Mary in May 1912.

Jan 16
Victor Hudson

Faith and Service

By Featured, Student Profile
Victor Hudson

Victor Hudson MAG ’15

As a student in the Master of Arts in Gerontology Program at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, Victor Hudson has merged his experience as a clergyman with his passion for gerontology, studying hospice care in order to help ill and older individuals and their families.

The entries on Victor Hudson’s résumé are incredibly diverse, but his commitment to working hard and helping others has shone through at every point in his life.

Hudson was born in Chicago but grew up in Southern California; as a teenager, he lived just a few miles from the USC campus. Following nine years of service in the United States Marine Corps, Hudson received his Master of Business Administration degree from Regent University in 2001 and began working for the Neuroscience Division of Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Inc. later that year. There, he learned more about issues facing older adults as he marketed the Alzheimer’s disease drug Aricept and the neuropathic pain medication Neurontin.

“During that time, I became friends with a board-certified internist and geriatrician, Dr. Shekar Chakravarthi, who is a USC Marshall alum,” Hudson says. “Dr. Chakravarthi saw my passion for helping the elderly, so he allowed me to participate in several preceptorships while he was medical director for a skilled nursing facility. It was during those hours together that Dr. Chakravarthi encouraged me to apply for the Master of Arts in Gerontology program.”

In the meantime, Hudson had begun following another call to service, this time as a pastor and leadership coach. He served as a clergy advisor for the New Jersey Family Policy Council and developed a leadership course for incarcerated men before earning his Master of Arts in Religion from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in 2012. He has been a full-time faith leader and church planter ever since, and he is now completing his MA in Gerontology in concert with his clergy work.

Hudson says choosing the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology was easy for him.

“For starters, USC Leonard Davis is the largest and the oldest gerontology school in the country. Having served in the United States Marine Corps, it is obvious I believe in time-honored institutions—ones that have rich traditions like the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology,” he says. “Moreover, USC is about helping the world become a better place for all mankind.”

His passion for gerontology and his dedication to serving families as a clergy member have merged into a keen interest in caring for individuals at the end of their lives as well as their loved ones.

“In my second semester, I took an end of life course with [USC Leonard Davis Hanson Family Trust Associate Professor of Gerontology] Susan Enguídanos, which was amazing; she has been a true mentor! It was during that course that it became clear that my work in gerontology would be centered-round hospice and helping grieving families,” he says. “After that course, I applied to a hospice agency and was hired to develop hospice for families. As a seminary trained pastor, I am well-versed in the grieving process, thus I am able to educate families on the benefits of hospice, its philosophy of care, and what the grieving process looks like once death occurs.”

Upon graduation, Hudson hopes to use his background and his new skills to help others both in the U.S. and around the world.

“I believe my background in pastoral work and now gerontology work hand-in-hand, for they both integrate lifespan development. Thus, my hope is to continue to learn and be mentored by my professors as I carry on the USC tradition,” he says. “Furthermore, as a pastor, I have participated in missions in the Dominican Republic, so developing a hospice program for their sick and their elderly is in line with the Trojan tradition of helping all people become better world citizens.”

Jan 16

A Control Knob For Fat?

By Featured

A protein that makes other proteins also regulates fat levels in worms, and may do so in humans, according to a study led by Sean Curran, assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

Like a smart sensor that adjusts the lighting in each room and a home’s overall temperature, a protein that governs the making of other proteins in the cell also appears capable of controlling fat levels in the body.

The finding, which appeared in Cell Reports on Dec. 11, applies to the Maf1 protein in worms.

A version of the protein, which exists in humans, also regulates protein production in the cell, raising the possibility that it too may control fat storage. A protein with such a function would offer a new target for pharmaceuticals to regulate fat, said Sean Curran, assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and the study’s corresponding author.

“We’ve known about Maf1 for over a decade, but so far people have only studied it in single cells, where it is known to regulate protein synthesis,” Curran said. “No one really looked at its effect on the whole organism before.”

It turns out that Maf1 plays a much more significant role in a whole animal: altering how the animal stores fat.

Curran and his colleagues tweaked the amount of Maf1 in C. elegans, a transparent worm often used as a model organism by biologists.

The team found that adding in a single extra copy of gene that expresses Maf1 decreased stored lipids by 34 percent, while reducing Maf1 levels increased stored lipids by 94 percent.

As expected from previous research, increased Maf1 lowered protein synthetic capacity while reduced Maf1 raised it.

Curran collaborated with USC graduate student Akshat Khanna and Deborah Johnson, formerly of the Keck School of Medicine of USC and now dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at the Baylor College of Medicine.

“It’s really exciting to find a completely new role for such a well-studied molecule,” Khanna said.

Johnson published a related paper, released on the same day in PLoS Genetics, showing that Maf1 changes lipid metabolism in cancer cells, raising the possibility that it could be used in tumor cell suppression.

Next, Curran and his colleagues plan to explore whether the results hold true for mice and if so, plan to see whether they also do for humans.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant numbers GM109028 and AG032308), the American Heart Association (14GRNT20280731), The Ellison Medical Foundation (AG-NS-0748-11) and the American Federation of Aging Research (002666-00001).

The full study can be found online here: http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/abstract/S2211-1247(14)01001-8