Sunrise ceremony organized by the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion calls for strength, guidance and protection during the new academic year.

Antibody levels—one of the easiest immune metrics to measure—slip downward over the course of several months, before roughly leveling off. That’s perfectly normal, Deepta Bhattacharya, PhD, an immunologist at the University of Arizona, told me. “You have a big increase at the beginning, then a decline.” Consider the alternative: If humans never quieted any of the immunological furor that follows infections and simply kept accumulating antibodies for every pathogen we came across, we’d all have burst a long time ago.

Many in the U.S. are still swayed by misinformation, but the latest numbers suggest that over time, trust in science is growing. Even then, it’s important to remember that “vaccines are one of the best strategies we have, but it’s not a risk eliminator. It’s a risk reducer," said Saskia Popescu, PhD, MPH, MA, an infectious disease epidemiologist and adjunct professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

ASTEC Assistant Director Dave Biffar brings an innovative, interdisciplinary and experiential approach to next-generation health care education.

Seeking to unravel the biological complexities of this increased risk, Roberta Diaz Brinton, director of the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center for Innovation in Brain Science and Regents Professor of Pharmacology, has been awarded a $15.1 million grant from the National Institutes on Aging, a division of the National Institutes of Health. The grant will allow Brinton to continue research to reveal the transformations in the brain that occur during female midlife aging that lead to greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

Racial disparities aside, researchers are working hard to unravel what might be driving increases in colorectal cancer among Gen Xers and millennials, looking at everything from heightened exposure to pesticides and hormone-mimicking chemicals in the environment, to early overuse of antibiotics, to lack of vitamin D-generating sunlight. “There are so many different candidates, and there is a lot of speculation in the field,” says Nathan Ellis, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Arizona Cancer Center who studies colon cancer risk.

A study at the University of Arizona that began this past May is specifically tracking self-reported menstrual experience in a subset of participants in a larger, longer-running study of the effects of the pandemic on health. "We have about 600 women in this reproductive cohort and we're following them for a variety of things, so we're collecting saliva to measure cortisol, we're collecting dried blood spots to measure anti-Müllerian hormones, which is a marker of ovarian reserve," said Leslie Farland, ScD, MSc, an assistant professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

High levels of community spread, a category that currently engulfs almost the entire state of Arizona, puts everyone at some risk, though unvaccinated people not wearing a mask face the most serious risks. "They have no protection against the virus," said Farshad Fani Marvasti, MD, an associate professor and director of the public health, prevention and health promotion curriculum at the College of Medicine – Phoenix.

In Arizona and around the United States, hospitals are noticing a shortage in the number of nurses available to work around the clock to care for both COVID-19 patients and those with other conditions. Betty Parisek , EdD, MSN, RN, a clinical assistant professor with the College of Nursing and the program director of the Bachelor of Science in Nursing Integrative Health (BSN-IH), hopes the holistic approach taught by the BSN-IH program will be a great start towards a greater number of qualified nurses in the time to come.

Michael Grandner, PhD, the director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the College of Medicine – Tucson, shares tips for getting a good night's sleep.