January Luncheon with guest speaker, Dr. J Usha Raj, M.D.

Luncheon Details:

Mixer: 11:30 AM | Lunch served: 12:00 PM | Guest speaker program: 12:20 PM 

Program: "Child Health in the US: Bridging the Gap."

Dr. Raj will be discussing the major causes of ill health in children in the United States. She will outline the great disparities that exist in health among children based on ethnicity, poverty, and the zip code where they live. She will also briefly touch on some possible solutions that other countries have used and what Americans can do to bridge the gap in the United States.

More about Dr. Raj:

Her research interests have been in Developmental Pulmonary Vascular Biology and her laboratory has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health for over 31 years. Dr. Raj is studying the mechanisms that control the pulmonary circulation in the fetus and newborn and is trying to understand why some babies develop problems related to the lung blood vessels while others do not.

Dr. Raj and her team are researching the genetic and environmental basis of pulmonary vascular disease in the fetus and newborn. One of the fastest-growing areas of contemporary biomedical research is proteomics, the study of protein interactions and identification of patterns in molecular cell structure.  Proteins are far more difficult to analyze than DNA in that they are much more complex, numerous, and fragile than genes, and are often difficult to locate, separate, and identify.