Obstetrics & Gynecology

News and Events

Programs and providers of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Weill Cornell Medicine are often the focus of news stories and features appearing in major national media. We invite you to review some stories that typify the breakthrough accomplishments of our remarkable team and highlight the impact our care has had on patient’s lives.

Dr. Samie Jaffrey Receives NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award

Man standing in a lab

Dr. Samie Jaffrey, the Greenberg-Starr Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, has received a five-year, $5.5 million NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award for the comprehensive study of how messenger RNAs are regulated in cells by small molecules called metabolites.

The NIH Director’s Transformative Research Awards, part of the Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research, fund bold and innovative projects that have the potential to transform one or more fields of biomedical research. Only six such awards were issued in 2026. Dr. Jaffrey and his team are known both for their development of tools for studying RNA molecules and for their use of such tools to make important discoveries. Their recent work suggests that metabolites—relatively simple molecules involved in cell metabolic processes—represent a previously hidden layer of mRNA regulation in higher organisms. With the new NIH award, the scientists will comprehensively map and characterize metabolite-RNA interactions. Their aim is to open up this realm of biology for basic research and the development of novel disease treatments.

Dr. Olivier Elemento Wins NIH Director’s Pioneer Award

man in a suit

Dr. Olivier Elemento, the director of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been awarded an NIH Director's Pioneer Award to build an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to accelerate cancer research, starting with lung cancer.

Part of the Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award supports scientists with outstanding records of creativity to develop pioneering approaches to major biomedical challenges. Only seven such awards were issued this year. The five-year, nearly $6 million grant will fund an AI-human discovery engine that uses large language model agents, such as those used in AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT, to generate hypotheses from human cell and tissue data. The system will then test the hypotheses using robotics testing platforms that can run hundreds to thousands of experiments in parallel on human cells or organoids, miniature three-dimensional tumors grown from patients’ own cells.

“It’s a real honor and a privilege to receive this award,” said Dr. Elemento, who is a professor of systems and computational biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “It will support the creation of an AI system to drive research from the initial data analysis through the validation stage, with human scientists’ oversight.”

Newly Discovered Cell Helps Shape Blood Vessel Growth in the Heart

zebrafish heart

Researchers have discovered a new cell type that may help regulate blood vessel growth in the heart during development and in response to injury, according to a study from Weill Cornell Medicine. Working with zebrafish, they found that the new cell type helps stabilize the vascular network that supplies oxygen to growing cardiac muscle.

The findings, published Aug. 20 in Nature Communications, could provide novel insights into how the human heart builds its blood-vessel network and guide future efforts to promote heart regeneration after injury.

“Our ultimate goal is to repair the damaged human heart,” says Dr. Jingli Cao, associate professor of cell and developmental biology and a member of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at Weill Cornell. “Being able to rebuild vessels at the right time and in the right location is key to the process.”

Starting on the Surface

Dr. Cao’s search began as a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, where he determined that the epicardium, the thin layer of cells that surrounds the heart, provides both the signals and the cells needed to regenerate heart tissue in zebrafish.

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