CUIMC Grand Rounds

Dr. Verdin is president and chief executive officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. The Buck Institute, located in the San Francisco Bay Area, is globally recognized as the pioneer and leader in the field of research on aging, the No. 1 risk factor for chronic disease.

A native of Belgium, Dr. Verdin received his MD degree from the University of Liege and completed additional clinical and research training at Harvard Medical School. He has held faculty positions at the University of Brussels, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Gladstone Institute at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Verdin is currently adjunct professor of medicine at UCSF and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California (USC).

Dr. Verdin studies how metabolism, diet, and small molecules impact epigenetic regulatory mechanisms and, thereby, the aging process and its associated diseases. He is a highly cited scientist and has been recognized for his research with multiple awards including a fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and election to the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and Belgium’s Royal Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Stone is the Centennial Professor of Health Policy in the Columbia University School of Nursing. She directs the School of Nursing’s Center for Health Policy and the NIH-funded Center for Improving Palliative Care for Vulnerable Adults with Multiple Chronic Conditions. For the past two decades, most of her research has focused on the prevention of infections in vulnerable adults across health care settings. Since 2010, she has led an interdisciplinary team that has conducted multiple NIH and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-funded studies examining nursing home capacity for infection prevention. These mixed methods studies use multiple data sources including national surveys linked to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data (i.e., Minimum Data Set and Medicare Claims) and the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network data. Her team also has engaged nursing home stakeholders and conducted qualitative interviews. The results of these studies have informed national regulations for nursing homes to have trained infection preventionists. Because many nursing home residents have serious illness, Dr. Stone is also interested in the integration of infection management and palliative care at the end-of-life. She is the current editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Infection Control and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Ho is the Clyde’56 and Helen Wu Professor of Medicine, founding scientific director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, and director of the Wu Family China Center for Health Initiatives at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. He received degrees from California Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School. 

Dr. Ho has been at the forefront of AIDS research for 39 years, publishing over 400 papers. His elegant studies unraveled the dynamic nature of HIV replication in vivo and revolutionized our basic understanding of a disease that took the lives of so many. He championed combination antiretroviral therapy that resulted in unprecedented management of HIV in patients, transforming a disease that meant almost certain death into a chronic condition for more than 25 million individuals worldwide. His research team is now devoting considerable effort to vaccine and antibody research directed at halting or slowing the spread of AIDS. After working on the SARS virus, he has turned his work now to developing drugs and antibodies to fight the new coronavirus.

Dr. Ho has received 14 honorary doctorates, including one from Columbia University. He was named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1996 and received a Presidential Citizen Medal in 2001. He was inducted into the California Hall of Fame, recognized by the Kingdom of Thailand with the Prince Mahidol Award in Medicine, and given the Distinguished Alumni Award by Caltech. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine as well as the Chinese Academy of Engineering.