WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Debra I. Diz, Ph.D., director of basic science research at the Hypertension and Vascular Research Center at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, has been named the 2007 Lewis K. Dahl Memorial Lecturer.
The lecture will be presented on Friday, Sept. 28 at the American Heart Association’s 61st Annual Council for High Blood Pressure Research Conference 2007 in Tucson, Ariz. Professor Diz has joint appointments in surgical sciences, physiology and pharmacology and neurosciences at Wake Forest Baptist.
Diz’s research has mapped several of the circuits and chemical substances in the brain involved in the control of blood pressure. Long-standing studies she is leading investigate brain, blood and kidney interactions in people with high blood pressure and during the aging process.
Diz has published more than 100 full-length articles. Her research has been funded continuously by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1986. She was an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association (AHA) from 1989 to 1994. Diz is currently co-director of a grant that funds research on the regulators involved in maintaining balance between factors that raise, versus those that lower, blood pressure.
She has participated in NIH and AHA peer review systems since 1988 including the NHLBI Program Project Review Committee and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences Minority Access to Research Careers Review Committee. Diz has collaborations with many outside investigators including those at Winston-Salem State University and North Carolina Central University, Durham, to foster development of minority faculty and students in the biomedical sciences.
The Lewis K. Dahl Memorial Lecture was established in 1988 by the Council for High Blood Pressure Research in honor of Dahl’s pioneering work on the relations between salt, the kidney, genetics and hypertension. His work launched a major genetically based experimental model of hypertension, the Dahl salt-sensitive rat.
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Media contact: Jim Steele, (336) 716-3487, jsteele@wfubmc.edu, Bonnie Davis, bdavis@wfubmc.edu; or Shannon Koontz, shkoontz@wfubmc.edu, (336) 716-4587.
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center is an academic health system comprised of North Carolina Baptist Hospital and Wake Forest University Health Sciences, which operates the university’s School of Medicine. The system comprises 1,154 acute care, psychiatric, rehabilitation and long-term care beds and is consistently ranked as one of “America’s Best Hospitals” by U.S. News & World Report.