Andrew Adams, MD, PhD, has joined the Department of Surgery as a professor and as chief of the Division of Transplantation at both M Health Fairview University of Minnesota hospitals. He brings $11.7 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health focused on developing novel therapies to improve outcomes for transplant patients.

Federal and state agencies have temporarily allowed unprecedented flexibility for the use of telemedicine, including audio-only visits, for encounters where opioid use disorder (OUD) medications are prescribed. Cuong Pham, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, is analyzing telemedicine’s efficacy for patients with OUD during COVID-19.

Alexander Herman, MD, PhD, in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and David Darrow, MD, MPH, in the Department of Neurosurgery, are studying hair samples from frontline healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to determine how their cortisol levels might correlate with their responses on a “multi-armed bandit task.”