Peer Health Liaison Program

The Peer Health Liaison program seeks to bridge a gap between BSD students and Student Health and Counseling Services. Liaisons undergo a training session with SHCH senior leadership to become well-versed in the services and resources available to students. They communicate with their students via a monthly email digest with up-to-date information on SHCH services. They additionally meet monthly with leadership to discuss items brought to their attention by their peers. The liaisons for the 2017-18 academic year are:

Neuroscience Cluster, Biophysical Sciences, Medical Physics and Public Health Sciences

Andrew Tremain

1974

Donald Johanson: discovered a previously unknown hominin

On a survey in Ethiopia, in 1974, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, AM’70, PhD’74, discovered “Lucy,” a 3.2 million-year-old bipedal hominin skeleton that was 40 percent intact. Classified in 1978 as the first known member of Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy is a direct ancestor of the modern human. The discovery changed our understanding of human evolution.

A reconstruction of Lucy at the Warsaw Museum of Evolution

2016

Zhe-Xi Luo: discovered earliest-known arboreal and subterranean mammals

Zhe-Xi Luo, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at UChicago, was part of a team of researchers from UChicago and Beijing who discovered fossils of the earliest-known arboreal and subterranean mammals. The fossils suggest that early mammals were as ecologically diverse as modern mammals. Luo’s student David Grossnickle (Evolutionary Biology) also contributed to the research and was an author of one of the Science paper published on this discovery.

Fossils of the earliest-known arboreal and subterranean mammals

1949

Leon O. Jacobson: performed the first bone marrow transplant

In 1949, medical researcher Leon O. Jacobson, MD’39, performed the first bone marrow transplant. He discovered he could save a mouse whose bone marrow and spleen had been destroyed by transplanting donated spleen tissue into the mouse. The procedure now helps thousands of patients with cancer and other diseases each year.

Leon O. Jacobson, the Joseph Regenstein Professor in Medicine, in his laboratory

1910

Howard Ricketts: identified the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever

Pathologist Howard Ricketts discovered the organism that causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever before his death in 1910, providing the basis for treating the disease. Today the Howard T. Ricketts Laboratory at Argonne National Laboratory is a regional biocontainment laboratory that supports research for the detection, prevention, and elimination of anthrax, hemorrhagic fever, influenza, plague, and emerging infectious diseases.

1941

Charles B. Huggins: introduced hormonal treatment of cancer

In 1941, cancer researcher Charles B. Huggins treated patients suffering from advanced prostate cancer by removing the hormone the cancers needed to grow. Hormonal treatment has since become a mainstay of care for several types of cancer, including breast and gynecological cancers.

Peer Health Liaison Program

Biomedical Sciences

Darwinian Sciences

Molecular Biosciences

Neuroscience Cluster, Biophysical Sciences, Medical Physics and Public Health Sciences