JoAnne L. Flynn, a PhD, is now chair of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. She is an international expert in the field of tuberculosis and infectious disease immunology who has led the department on an interim basis since Thomas Smithgall, the William McEllroy Professor, retired from the position in December 2022.

Flynn has been studying tuberculosis, a disease that kills 1.5 million people annually, for almost 35 years. She has made seminal discoveries that illuminate the roles of various aspects of the immune response against Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Since 2015, Flynn has also served as assistant dean for the Medical Scientist Training Program, as well as codirector of the University of Pittsburgh–Carnegie Mellon University Medical Scientist Training Program.

Victor O. Morell has been appointed chair of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery. Morell is an MD and the Eugene S. Wiener Professor of Pediatric Cardiothoracic Surgery. He also serves as director of cardiovascular services and is surgeon-in-chief of UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

A highly accomplished teacher, mentor, scientist, administrator and surgeon, Morell is chief of pediatric cardiothoracic surgery at Children’s. His current research interests include transposition of the great arteries, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as a bridge to cardiothoracic transplantation in pediatric patients and congenital cardiac surgery education. He succeeds James D. Luketich, the Henry T. Bahnson Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery.

Frederick P. (Fritz) Roth has joined the School of Medicine as professor and chair of the Department of Computational and Systems Biology. Roth is a PhD known worldwide for his work in computational biology and genomics. He will also lead the development of the school’s institutional computational genomic strategy.

Since 2011, Roth has held joint appointments as professor of molecular genetics and computer science at the University of Toronto’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and senior investigator at Sinai Health System’s Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI), also in Toronto. His research team carries out computational and experimental genomics research and pursues technology development through fundamental discovery and clinical applications. The department was most recently led on an interim basis by Jeremy Berg, associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning for the health sciences, after founding chair Ivet Bahar led the department for 18 years.

Sen leads McGowan Institute 

Chandan K. Sen, a PhD and MS who joined the University of Pittsburgh in July 2023, has been named director of McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He succeeds William R. Wagner, a PhD Distinguished Professor of Surgery with appointments in bioengineering and chemical and petroleum engineering, who led the institute for 12 years and has 50 patents. Sen also serves as associate vice chancellor for life sciences innovation and commercialization for Pitt Health Sciences and as professor of surgery with a secondary appointment in plastic surgery.

Sen’s research focuses on the use of nanotechnology for tissue regeneration. Among many breakthroughs, his team built a nanochip device that can noninvasively reprogram one type of tissue so that it functions like another type of tissue. He will lead the Pennsylvania clinical research unit of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases–sponsored Diabetic Foot Consortium.

—Staff reports

Read more from the Fall 2023 issue.