A unique science program celebrates 10 years at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute

A lot of heavy things were happening in and around Ubadah Sabbagh’s life when he started post-graduate work at Virginia Tech’s Translational Biology, Medicine and Health program.

It was 2016, and the Syrian immigrant was worried about friends and family back home, where  civil war raged. In the United States, Donald Trump was elected president, and the next year he signed an immigration ban with targets that included Syrian refugees. The year before Sabbagh arrived in Roanoke from the University of Missouri, Roanoke’s then-mayor, David Bowers, made national news with a public letter stating that Syrian refugees should not be resettled here.

Sabbagh recalled in a Friday interview that all of these things were on his mind as he was settling into Roanoke, as one of the earliest Translational Biology, Medicine and Health students at Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC.

“I was here for five years,” Sabbagh said. “I really loved that time. I had a lot of struggles during that time. It can be immigration struggles. It can be like family trouble.”

During those years, he got to thinking about science beyond a research lab, and how he could use his knowledge to reach out. He considered what it means to be a “values-driven scientist or scholar,” he said.

Sabbagh, a neuroscientist, joined several other TBMH graduates and current students on Friday to begin the Translational Biology, Medicine and Health 10 Year Celebration and Alumni Symposium, at the Riverside Center-based research institute. Sabbagh and five other graduates were scheduled to speak at the symposium on Saturday.

He took a National Institutes of Health grant that he won while in Roanoke to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he does research and policy writing. But he said he didn’t plan on talking about his research during the symposium. Instead, he would discuss the “values-driven science and research” ideas that took root during his time at TBMH — why it’s important, how you can implement it in practice and research, and what it means for values to be part of your scientific identity.

“I think it’s something that’s important for scientists to reflect on,” he said. “And the talk is kind of like me doing a self-reflection out loud.”

It wasn’t intended solely for younger students, just starting out and considering their role in society, he said. It was also meant for established scientists, who should do similar reflection.

“Our role should be more than just doing experiments in the lab,” Sabbagh said.

His professional growth points to the first word in the program’s name. “Translational,” according to the National Institutes of Health, means “the process of turning observations in the laboratory, clinic and community into interventions that improve the health of individuals and the public.”

That is also true in large part at TBMH, an interdisciplinary program that offers doctoral and master’s degrees. The program focuses on cancer, immunity and infectious disease, metabolic and cardiovascular science, molecular and cognitive neurosciences, and the emerging field of health implementation science.

But there is room for much more, said Steve Poelzing, who was a co-director for eight years at the program that was developed by Fralin Biomedical Research Institute Executive Director Michael Friedlander and former Virginia Tech administrator Audra Van Wort.

Virginia Tech, through the Translational Biology, Medicine and Health program, is one of the few universities doing such a thing, he said.

“I think a lot of other programs only think about ‘translational’ in terms of getting into the clinic, but translation can be building a startup company,” Poelzing said on Friday. “Translation could be leveraging the discovery to start a whole new research program or a center grant. … Translational is much broader than just taking it to clinics. And this is not to discount the importance of translating to clinics. We have a lot of good examples of students who have translated into clinics.”

Poelzing, a cardiac research specialist and associate vice president of faculty for biomedical research, was looking forward to the weekend and getting to see some of the students he has known over the decade.

“They’re just an impressive group of people, and it’s kind of fun today, because I get to greet a lot of them as colleagues today,” he said.

The program has 90 alumni, according to information the university supplied. Of that cohort, there are 79 with a doctoral degree, eight with a Master of Science, two with a combined M.D./Ph.D. and one with a combined M.D./M.S. There are 91 students enrolled, with 84 seeking a doctoral degree, four on an Master of Science track and three aiming to combine an M.D. with a Ph.D.

Program graduates have jobs at institutions including Emory University, the University of North Carolina, the Aspen Institute and, closer to home, at various Virginia Tech laboratories.

Lauren Kennedy-Metz was in the first TBMH class in 2014, and joined the crowd on Friday at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. The Roanoke College undergrad has since returned to that alma mater, where she is an assistant professor, teaching psychology and neuroscience.

“There are a lot of people that I haven’t seen in a while that are coming back for this, including all the folks that are speaking,” Kennedy-Metz said. “They’re all like friends of mine who I haven’t seen, because everyone has moved on.”

Kennedy-Metz, a Massachusetts native who did her post-doctoral work at Harvard University, also saw some of her former Roanoke College students on Friday. Among them was Andy Chitwood, to whom she was both a teacher and adviser at Roanoke.

Kennedy-Metz liked the idea of being a “guinea pig” in what was a new program, but 10 years later, she’s happy to facilitate others’ enrollment at TBMH.

“It’s nice to still be in touch with people, because then I can help my students, but it’s beneficial for [the program]  too,” she said. “Everyone sort of wins.”

Chitwood, of Martinsville, was ending a week of orientation before classes begin this week. He graduated from Roanoke College with a public health degree and said he hopes to combine that study with neuroscience.

He and other new students will help the program develop into its second decade. John Chappell, the new director of Translational Biology, Medicine and Health, will look to increase enrollment, as the program is now established not just in Roanoke and at Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus, but also at the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., with a focus on children’s cancer research.

“The next 10 years’ [focus] is, I think, to continue training these fantastic students who are creative, and when they graduate, go off and do just a myriad of wonderful things in the science community,” Chappell said.

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