Message from the Chair, Teresita Bellido, Ph.D.
Welcome to the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology, College of Medicine, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS).
The mission of our Department is to advance scientific knowledge and education in an environment of excellence and integrity. As departmental chair and academic leader, I promote that mission by guiding, respecting, and empowering each member of the Department, towards individual professional development combined with the success of the entire team.
I am pleased with our accomplishments during my first year as Chair of Physiology and Cell Biology. The research community, our institution, our country, and the world… had faced enormous difficulties during the last 18 months due to the COVID19 pandemics; and we continue to adapt to the continuous challenges of social distancing, masking, travel restrictions, vaccines, virus mutations, and more to come, undoubtedly. Despite these challenges, our department is focused on our mission and continues to move forward.
We renewed and increase the effort of our administrative team, which is now composed of four members with full 100% of effort in our department. We conducted our first Town Hall, changed the department name (previously Physiology and Biophysics) to better represent our faculty’s interests, convened virtual “first visits” for several potential faculty recruits, revitalized the departmental Seminar series, held out first departmental Teaching Retreat, and launched our new website. Our department graduated 4 students this year (1 MD, Ph.D., 2 PhDs, and 1 MS). Plans for this second year are to hold our first departmental Research Retreat, continue our assertive faculty recruitment efforts, increase our grant funding, and recruit and retain more students and trainees.
I look forward to continuing to grow the number of faculty and increase the visibility of what we do. Follow us by looking at our monthly newsletter.
Sincerely,
Teresita Bellido, Ph.D.
About Dr. Bellido
Dr. Bellido is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Physiology and Cell Biology in the UAMS College of Medicine. She started her tenure on July 1, 2020. She has joint appointments in the Department of Medicine (Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism) and in the Department of Orthopaedics, College of Medicine, UAMS. Dr. Bellido is also a non-clinician Research Career Investigator, at the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System – John L. McClellan Memorial Hospital, in Little Rock, Arkansas.
She is a highly respected scientist, an internationally known leader in bone research, and committed to mentorship, faculty development, and diversity in research. Her research focuses on signal transduction in bone and muscle, with particular emphasis on osteocyte biology in health and disease, the mechanisms of hormonal action in the musculoskeletal system, and the effects of cancer in bone.
Bellido holds multiple major grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Veterans Administration. She serves on the Skeletal Biology Development and Disease Study Section for the NIH, and is the immediate past president of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research (ASBMR), the premier international society of the field.
For her scientific and mentoring efforts, Bellido was awarded the Women Faculty Leadership Award and the Outstanding Postdoc Mentor Award in 2015 by Indiana University. In addition, she received the ASBMR 2015 Paula Stern Achievement Award, which recognizes a woman in the bone research field who has made significant scientific achievements and who has promoted the professional development and career advancement of women, and the 2018 ASBMR Gideon A. Rodan Excellence in Mentorship Award in recognition for outstanding support by a senior scientist who has helped promote the independent careers of young investigators in bone and mineral metabolism.