Kuchel to present Smythe Lecture May 21
McGovern Medical School welcomes George Kuchel, MD, professor of medicine and Travelers Chair in Geriatrics and Gerontology at UConn Health, as the keynote speaker for the 2024 Cheves Smythe Lecture on May 21.
The Cheves Smythe Lecture, hosted by the Office of Research Affairs, will be held from 4-5 p.m. in MSB 3.001. Kuchel will present on “Accelerating the Discovery of Gerotherapeutics: Role for Studies of Immune Resilience and Precision Gerontology.”
Kuchel serves as the director of the UConn Center on Aging, where his team works to improve health and independence in older adults through multidisciplinary team sciences. The Center on Aging has established a research program focused on defining risk factors and mechanisms that are implicated in aging and chronic diseases to design specific and effective interventions leading to discoveries in the gerontological sciences.
Kuchel’s research centers on defining and targeting risks and mechanistic pathways contributing to functional declines involving voiding, cognition, mobility, and host defense. The UConn Center of Aging hosts clinical investigators, population and social scientists, and basic researchers.
Kuchel also holds director appointments as the UConn Older American Independence (Pepper) Center, the NIH SenNet KAPP-Sen Tissue Mapping Center, the NIA Geroscience Education and Training Network, and is the deputy editor for the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
The Cheves Smythe Distinguished Lecture was established in 2006 to honor Dr. Cheves Smythe, the first dean of the medical school, who served 1970-75. Smythe skillfully guided the school through its early years with his long-standing commitment to the field of geriatrics and education and his exemplary standards of leadership.