Weill Cornell Medicine has received more than $10 million from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of substances of abuse on the developing brain. The study will follow approximately 10,000 children beginning at ages 9 to10, before they initiate drug use, through the period of highest risk for substance use and other mental health disorders. Scientists will track exposure to substances, including nicotine, alcohol, and marijuana, and measure intellectual, emotional, social, and physical development together with brain development using state-of-the-art structural and functional neuroimaging technology.

The Weill Cornell Medicine portion of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study will follow 1,100 teens and specifically focus on predictors of early-onset substance use and how these substances alter the developmental trajectory of the brain in the near and long term.

"I'm really excited about this study because adolescence is a time when the brain is capable of remarkable adaptability in light of the many social, physical, sexual, and intellectual challenges that this developmental phase brings, yet a peak time for the clinical onset of most mental illnesses," said Dr. BJ Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology and a professor of psychology in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine who is leading the grant at Weill Cornell Medicine. "Trying to understand the brain changes that lead to risk for mental illnesses including substance use disorders and those that can be harnessed to prevent these illnesses is really important and hasn't been done at this scale before."

Dr. Casey and her collaborators, including those at the University of California, San Diego, where data coordination and analysis will take place, will collect mental and physical health information. This will include data from high-resolution brain scans and genetic material, as well as information about sleep patterns, diet and exercise, social media use, and other environmental factors. Dr. Casey has organized an interdisciplinary team of investigators to meet this challenge including co-investigators Drs. Barry Kosofsky and Jonathan Dyke at Weill Cornell Medicine; Dr. Deborah Estrin of Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medicine; co-Principal Investigator Dr. Rita Goldstein and her colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; and Drs. Nim Tottenham and Diana Martinez at Columbia University.

While collecting the information and creating a longitudinal snapshot of this potentially turbulent time in a person's development is important, so too is determining how these data can be used to help at-risk teenagers from going down a path of chronic mental illness, said Dr. Casey, who is a paid consultant to and receives research support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for work relating to adolescent brain development and juvenile justice reform.

"The adolescent brain is going through many dynamic changes that not only put the teen at risk, but that provide a window of opportunity for positive change," she said. "We hope that our findings will inform new public policies designed to protect these young people and for intervening when they're at their most vulnerable."

NEW YORK (December 4, 2014) — Weill Cornell Medical College announced today that it has received a $25 million gift from Gale and Ira Drukier to establish a premier, cross-disciplinary institute dedicated to understanding the underlying causes of diseases that are devastating to children. Its goal will be to rapidly translate basic research breakthroughs into the most advanced therapies for patients.

The extraordinary gift names the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children's Health and will enable the medical college to recruit a team of leading scientists, including a renowned expert who will serve as the Gale and Ira Drukier Director, to pursue innovative research that improves treatments and therapies for the littlest patients. The Drukier Institute, a marquee program that will be headquartered on the 12th floor of Weill Cornell's new Belfer Research Building, will also expand and enhance the medical college's already-distinguished research and clinical care programs that strive to end diseases and disorders that affect children and adolescents, including asthma, autism, cancer, cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases and schizophrenia."We couldn't be more grateful to Gale and Ira, whose generous gift exemplifies their commitment to advancing human health and their steadfast support of Weill Cornell Medical College," said Sanford I. Weill, chairman of the Weill Cornell Board of Overseers. "The Drukiers' investment will better the lives of children in New York and beyond, and will leave a lasting mark on our next generation."

"We are greatly appreciative of Gale and Ira Drukier, whose remarkable gift will enable Weill Cornell to expand its world-class research and clinical care programs for children, who can't be treated like little adults," said Dr. Laurie H. Glimcher, the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College. "The Drukiers' generosity is critical in allowing us to attract the best and brightest minds in pediatric research, who will lead the way as we pursue innovative treatments and therapies that will ensure the health of children now and in the future."

"As parents and grandparents, Gale and I appreciate the tremendous impact medicine can have on growing children," said Dr. Ira Drukier, a member of the Weill Cornell Board of Overseers. "When you cure children, you give them their entire life back. It's with immense pride that we are able to make this investment, which will empower Weill Cornell Medical College to focus and direct all of its outstanding pediatric research under the auspices of one institute and provide vital resources to develop tomorrow's treatments and cures."

"It gives us great joy to be able to support Weill Cornell Medical College and make such a tremendous difference in children's lives," Dr. Gale Drukier said. "This gift also continues our enduring relationship with Cornell University, with which we have been connected for 40 years."

The Drukiers have a legacy of philanthropy at Cornell University, having provided generous support to its Herbert F. Johnson Art Museum and College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

"We at Cornell are immensely grateful to Gale and Ira Drukier for their extraordinary leadership and generosity, which has already been felt across the university," President David Skorton said. "With this spectacular new gift, the Drukiers are enabling us to achieve an unprecedented level of excellence in pediatric research. The bench-to-bedside approach of the Drukier Institute will have a lasting impact on children and their families, giving hope when they need it most."

"The gift from Gale and Ira Drukier establishing the Drukier Institute for Children's Health makes a powerful statement about the importance of focusing the energies of a major research institution on improving the health and wellbeing of children," said Dr. Gerald M. Loughlin, the Nancy C. Paduano Professor of Pediatrics and chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medical College and pediatrician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. "It is a wonderful legacy for these visionary philanthropists."

Caring for children is particularly challenging because their bodies are constantly changing as they grow, and their metabolisms and immune systems are vastly different than those of adults. Understanding the factors that spur growth in children can present possible lines of inquiry into other diseases, such as cancer, because tumors are also programmed to grow. There are also many genetic and developmental diseases that arise in childhood and pose serious health risks during adulthood. But treating these conditions can be arduous for pediatric patients. Many of the common treatments and therapies available to adults have toxic effects on children, making it critical to devise new and better interventions.

Using genomics and other cutting-edge research approaches, the cross-disciplinary Drukier Institute will drive excellence and innovation in pediatrics, seeking to rapidly and seamlessly catalyze research breakthroughs into the most advanced, safe and effective patient care. The Drukiers' generosity will empower the medical college to recruit five top-flight investigators — including a faculty member who conducts clinical research in pediatric genetics — to augment the distinguished team of physician-scientists already at Weill Cornell, as well as train the next generation of researchers in the field.

To help realize this vision, the Drukiers' gift will enable Weill Cornell to secure the latest research equipment, such as sequencing and informatics technology, as well as develop an infrastructure to establish a biobank. Investigators at the institute will work in close collaboration with clinicians in Weill Cornell's Department of Pediatrics to ensure that children immediately benefit from the latest research advances.

To encourage and support faculty development, research and education, the gift will endow the Drukier Lectureship, an annual lecture at Weill Cornell on a research or clinical topic in the field of children's health. It will also establish the Drukier Prize, which will be awarded once a year to a junior faculty member in the United States or abroad for excellence and achievement in advancing research on childhood diseases or disorders.

About Gale and Ira Drukier

A Cornell University graduate, Ira Drukier is co-owner of BD Hotels, LLC, a real estate development company that owns and operates more than two-dozen hotel properties in New York City, including the Mercer, Hotel Elysee and the Maritime.

Dr. Drukier graduated from Cornell in 1966 with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering with a focus on solid-state physics and in 1967 with a Master in Engineering, earning a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1973 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Upon graduation, he joined RCA Corporation's David Sarnoff Research Center, conducting research in the field of microwave semiconductors, which culminated in his development of the first high-power compound semiconductor field effect transistor. In 1976, he joined Microwave Semiconductor Corporation (MSC) and established a division to develop and manufacture high-power microwave transistors for commercial and military use. Siemens Corporation acquired MSC in 1981, and Dr. Drukier stayed on as corporate vice president until 1983, when he ventured into a career in real estate.

Dr. Drukier has served on the Weill Cornell Board of Overseers since 2012, sat on Cornell University's Board of Trustees for eight years and was a member of the Cornell Tech Task Force to help develop the Cornell NYC Tech campus on Roosevelt Island. He is chair of the council for the Johnson Art Museum at Cornell, chair of the board of trustees building committee of the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., and serves on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's President's Council. Dr. Drukier is vice-chair of the American Society for Yad Vashem and is a member of the Museum of Jewish Heritage's Board of Overseers. He has also published numerous papers and given lectures in the field of microwave electronics and has contributed a chapter to a book on Gallium Arsenide Field Effect Transistors.

Gale Drukier graduated from New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development in 1972 with a degree in speech pathology and audiology, later earning a Master of Science ('73) and a Doctor of Education degree ('79) in audiology from Teacher's College at Columbia University. Dr. Drukier began her career as an audiologist at Bellevue Hospital and at Veterans Affairs hospitals in metropolitan New York, later joining Trenton State University — now the College of New Jersey — as a professor. During her 17-year tenure there, Dr. Drukier conducted research, taught and developed the college's nationally accredited graduate program in audiology. She was consistently recognized by her students as the "Best Teacher." After retiring from teaching, Dr. Drukier joined her family's business, BD Hotels, and has managed and renovated properties on Manhattan's West Side for more than 12 years.

Dr. Drukier has continued to serve NYU since her graduation. She has been a member of the Steinhardt Dean's Council since 2005 as a supporter of the educational and fundraising initiatives of the school. In 2007, Dr. Drukier joined the NYU Board of Trustees and presently chairs its Academic Affairs Committee. In 2010, Dr. Drukier endowed and named the deanship of NYU's Steinhardt School of Education. She was awarded the Meritorious Service Award by NYU in 2013.

Dr. Drukier has also been active at Cornell University, chairing the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art's Program Committee and is a member of the Plantations Council. Dr. Drukier and her husband endowed the deanship at Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning, endowed the curator of prints and drawings at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum and created a garden at Plantations at Cornell University. The couple is also active in the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., and serves on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's President's Council. Dr. Drukier is an animal lover, particularly of felines, and is on the board of directors of the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons. The Drukiers have one daughter and four grandchildren.

Weill Cornell Medical College

Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University's medical school located in New York City, is committed to excellence in research, teaching, patient care and the advancement of the art and science of medicine, locally, nationally and globally. Physicians and scientists of Weill Cornell Medical College are engaged in cutting-edge research from bench to bedside aimed at unlocking mysteries of the human body in health and sickness and toward developing new treatments and prevention strategies. In its commitment to global health and education, Weill Cornell has a strong presence in places such as Qatar, Tanzania, Haiti, Brazil, Austria and Turkey. Through the historic Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Cornell University is the first in the U.S. to offer a M.D. degree overseas. Weill Cornell is the birthplace of many medical advances — including the development of the Pap test for cervical cancer, the synthesis of penicillin, the first successful embryo-biopsy pregnancy and birth in the U.S., the first clinical trial of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, and most recently, the world's first successful use of deep brain stimulation to treat a minimally conscious brain-injured patient. Weill Cornell Medical College is affiliated with NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, where its faculty provides comprehensive patient care at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The Medical College is also affiliated with Houston Methodist. For more information, visit weill.cornell.edu.

This release was updated on Dec. 16, 2014.

The bond between young adult cancer patients and their physicians appears to be a critically important factor in preventing thoughts of suicide, new research from Weill Cornell suggests.

Cancer patients have a suicide rate that is twice that of the general population. Young adult patients with advanced disease may be at even higher risk, said Dr. Holly Prigerson, the study's senior author who was recruited to Weill Cornell as the Irving Sherwood Wright Professor in Geriatrics.

Researchers interviewed 93 patients ages 20-40 with incurable, recurrent, or metastatic cancer about their mental health and their relationships with their oncologists. The results were published May 28 in Cancer.

"What was most astounding in this paper was that when we controlled for all the usual confounding factors that might explain away the relationship, the perceived bond with their oncologist was the most important element predicting patients' degree of suicidal ideation,"or thoughts of suicide, Dr. Prigerson said.

Working with lead author Dr. Kelly Trevino, the investigators then compared the effect of a strong perceived bond between young cancer patients and their oncologists with a number of other interventions that also might affect thoughts of suicide, including psychotherapy, palliative care, antidepressants and treatments for pain.

"None of those things mattered as much as their perceived bond with their oncologist,"Dr. Prigerson said.

Dr. Prigerson described the patient-oncologist bond as a "therapeutic alliance,"a term used in psychotherapy to reflect the patient's perception that the doctor "has their back, sees them as a whole person, and will work collaboratively with them toward shared goals of care.”

However, oncologists, who are already charged with treating patients with serious, potentially life-limiting illnesses, may view emotional caregiving as the responsibility of a psychologist or a patient's family, she said.

"We are not saying oncologists need to become psychotherapists, but we are saying that they should acknowledge their role in shaping how the patient feels and copes with having cancer,"Dr. Prigerson said.

"Rational or not, many patients are concerned that their oncologist will abandon them if they fail to respond to treatment and their illness progresses,"she said. She suggested that even "emotional check-ins"like letting patients know that they should feel comfortable asking questions, or that failing treatment is not their fault, go a long way toward establishing a strong therapeutic alliance.

Teens take longer than adults to make choices when the stakes are high, a new study by Weill Cornell researchers suggests. The study's findings contradict the perception that adolescent decision-making is always impulsive, and suggest that when rewards are involved, adolescents are quite capable of making informed decisions.

Lead investigator Theresa Teslovich, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College, said the findings suggest that teens can be incentivized to slow down their decision making. For example, Teslovich said that reward systems could be used in schools to increase students' involvement.

"One example of incentivizing programs in school would be providing students the opportunity to earn points for cooperating in class or for exceptional school work, or even attendance, since it's a high predictor of better outcomes," Teslovich said. Points could be exchangeable currency for free time or other extracurricular activities, she said.

In the study, published online Sept. 16 in Developmental Science, adolescents and adults were asked to observe a cloud of randomly moving dots and determine the direction in which the dots were moving. Either a small or a large reward was paired with each correct answer.

Adults made their decisions more quickly when a large reward was associated with the correct answer. In contrast, teens were slower to make a decision when a large reward was at stake. That trend held even when the researchers controlled for differences in how well participants performed the task and for their perceptual abilities.

Teens' brains also showed heightened activity in fronto-parietal networks, regions of the brain associated with amassing evidence before making decisions. Taken together, the findings suggest that when large rewards are at stake, teens are willing to withhold a decision until they've accumulated sufficient evidence that their choice is the correct one.

Teslovich said she believes that teens are sensitive to "taking advantage of large rewards...If they were 'fast and loose' they would run the risk of making an error and not maximizing their gains."

Adolescents react more impulsively to threats than either adults or children — a new finding by Weill Cornell Medical College scientists that has important implications for helping teens understand and overcome potentially dangerous behaviors.

"The responses [to threats] we are seeing in the laboratory are on the order of milliseconds," said Dr. BJ Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell. "Even teaching teens strategies to take a deep breath before acting could have potential implications for their safety."

The research may also help explain why teens have more accidents as well as deaths from suicide than people in other age groups. The collaborative study's results were presented on Nov. 10 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience by lead author Dr. Kristina Caudle, a former postdoctoral fellow at Weill Cornell who now works at the Veterans Health Administration's National Center for PTSD.

"The broader context for our findings, beyond how they may impact policies on the treatment of juveniles who typically commit crimes in the heat of the moment, is to understand why teens put themselves in harm's way," Dr. Casey said, noting that there is a 200 percent increase in mortality during adolescence that is not due to an increased risk for disease, but rather to preventable causes of accidental injury, homicide and suicide.

In the study, 83 test subjects from ages 6 to 29 were presented with images of neutral or threatening facial expressions while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They were told to press a button when a neutral face was presented and not to do so when threatening faces were presented.

Teens were less able than either children or adults to refrain from pressing the button when a threatening face was presented.

The investigators — who included tri-institutional MD/PhD students Michael Dreyfus and Andrew Drysdale and PhD student Alexandra Cohen — also found that when teenagers were able to control their responses to threats, they had more activity in an area of the brain known as the ventral prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate responses in emotional situations.

Taken together, the findings suggest that teens' proclivity for danger is the result of changes in the brain that occur specifically at that age.

"It's fascinating because, although the brains of young children are even less mature, children don't exhibit the same attraction to risky or criminal behaviors as do adolescents," Dr. Caudle said. "Our research suggests that biological changes of the ventral prefrontal cortex during adolescence influence emotional processes, such that they react rather than retreat from dangerous activities."

New Study Shows Fear is Hard to Extinguish from the Developing Teenage Brain, Which May Explain Why Anxiety and Depression Spikes during Adolescence

NEW YORK (Sept. 27, 2012) — A new study by Weill Cornell Medical College researchers shows that adolescents' reactions to threat remain high even when the danger is no longer present. According to researchers, once a teenager's brain is triggered by a threat, the ability to suppress an emotional response to the threat is diminished which may explain the peak in anxiety and stress-related disorders during this developmental period.

The study, published Sept. 17 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), is the first to decode fear acquisition and fear "extinction learning," down to the synaptic level in the brains of mice, which mirror human neuronal networks. Also, through human and rodent experiments, the study finds that acquired fear can be difficult to extinguish in some adolescents. By contrast, the study shows that adults and children do not have the same trouble learning when a threat is no longer present.

"This is the first study to show, in an experiment, that adolescent humans have diminished fear extinction learning," says the study's lead author, Dr. Siobhan S. Pattwell, a postdoctoral fellow at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell. "Our findings are important because they might explain why epidemiologists have found that anxiety disorders seem to spike during adolescence or just before adolescence. It is estimated that over 75 percent of adults with fear-related disorders can trace the roots of their anxiety to earlier ages."

The study findings suggest there is altered plasticity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain during adolescence, with its inability to overcome fear, says the study's senior co-investigator, Dr. Francis Lee, professor of pharmacology and psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, and an attending psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

"This study is the first to show activity, at the synaptic level, for both fear acquisition and fear extinction — and we find that while these areas function well in both younger and older mice, neurons involved in fear extinction are not as active in adolescent mice," says Dr. Lee. "If adolescents have a more difficult time learning that something that once frightened them is no longer a danger, then it is clear that the standard desensitization techniques from fear may not work on them. This new knowledge about the teenage brain's synaptic connections not responding optimally will help clinicians understand that the brain region used in fear extinction may not be as efficient during this sensitive developmental period in adolescents."

Adolescent Mice Never Lose Their Fear Response

Fear learning is a highly-adaptive, evolutionarily conserved process that allows one to respond appropriately to cues associated with danger. In the case of psychiatric disorders, however, fear may persist long after a threat has passed, and this unremitting and often debilitating form of fear is a core component of many anxiety disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD).

Existing treatments, such as exposure therapy, are designed to expose an individual slowly to the cues associated with a perceived threat. This technique is used for a variety of fears, from wartime PTSD to fear of flying, as well as serious adolescent anxiety about school, says Dr. Lee, who treats, among others, patients with PTSD acquired during the World Trade Center collapse on September 11, 2001.

Anxiety disorders are increasingly being diagnosed in children and adolescents, but the success rate of fear extinction-based exposure therapies are currently not known in this population. This study aimed to discover if they could be effective — and why or why not.

The human experiment was conducted at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell in collaboration with its director, Dr. B.J. Casey, a study senior co-investigator, who is the Sackler Professor of Developmental Psychobiology and professor of psychology in psychiatry at Weill Cornell. In the experiment, a group of volunteers — children, adolescents and adults — wore headphones and skin sweat meters and were asked to look at a computer screen with a sequence of blue or yellow square images. One of the squares was paired with a really unpleasant sound. For example, 50 percent of the time the blue square would set off the noise.

If the participants acquired a fear of the noise, they showed increased sweat when viewing the image that was paired with it, says Dr. Pattwell. The same group was brought back the next day, and again viewed a sequence of blue or yellow squares, but this time there was no associated noise. "But teenagers didn't decrease their fear response, and maintained their fear throughout subsequent trials when no noise was played," she says. However, the researchers documented that, unlike the teens participating in this study aged 12-17, both children and adults quickly learned that neither square was linked to a noxious sound, and this understanding rapidly decreased their fear response.

The mouse experiment, which used standard fear conditioning common in these types of animal studies, obtained similar findings. Adolescent mice (29 days old) did not decrease their fear response to stimuli that no longer existed, but younger and older mice did. Interestingly, the adolescent mice never lost their fear response as they aged.

The research team then monitored the brains of mice as they participated in the experiment. With the assistance of study senior co-investigator, Dr. Ipe Ninan, an electrophysiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center who is an assistant professor of psychiatry, the research team found that the prelimbic region in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region that processes emotion, is activated during acquisition of fear, and the infralimbic prefrontal cortex is used to extinguish this fear association. While other groups have suggested that the prefrontal cortex plays a role in extinction, no one has shown that this activity is at the level of the synapse — the connections between the neurons.

"In young and old mice, we see plasticity, which is activity in the infralimbic cortex, which helps the animals decrease their fear response when a threat no longer applies," says Dr. Pattwell. "Interestingly, we didn't witness similar activity in adolescent mice."

According to researchers there is much more to explore about the fear response and its decoding in human adolescents, such as whether genes contribute to susceptibility to altered fear learning, and most importantly, what can be done to help the adolescent population overcome fear.

"We need to investigate personalized approaches to treatment of these fear and anxiety disorders in teens," says Dr. Lee. "It is essential that we find a way to help teenagers become more resilient to the fear they experience during adolescence to prevent it from leading to a lifetime of anxiety and depression."

The research was supported by the Sackler Institute, the DeWitt-Wallace Fund of the New York Community Trust, the Irma T. Hirschl/Monique Weill-Caulier Trust, the International Mental Health Research Organization, the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation, the Pritzker Consortium, National Institutes of Health Grants and a Swiss National Science Foundation Grant.

Weill Cornell co-authors are Dr. Stéphanie Duhoux, Dr. Catherine A. Hartley, David C. Johnson, Dr. Deqiang Jing, Mark D. Elliott, Erika J. Ruberry, Alisa Powers, Natasha Mehta, Rui R. Yang, Dr. Fatima Soliman, and Dr. Charles E. Glatt.

Weill Cornell Medical College

Weill Cornell Medical College, Cornell University's medical school located in New York City, is committed to excellence in research, teaching, patient care and the advancement of the art and science of medicine, locally, nationally and globally. Physicians and scientists of Weill Cornell Medical College are engaged in cutting-edge research from bench to bedside, aimed at unlocking mysteries of the human body in health and sickness and toward developing new treatments and prevention strategies. In its commitment to global health and education, Weill Cornell has a strong presence in places such as Qatar, Tanzania, Haiti, Brazil, Austria and Turkey. Through the historic Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, Cornell University is the first in the U.S. to offer a M.D. degree overseas. Weill Cornell is the birthplace of many medical advances — including the development of the Pap test for cervical cancer, the synthesis of penicillin, the first successful embryo-biopsy pregnancy and birth in the U.S., the first clinical trial of gene therapy for Parkinson's disease, and most recently, the world's first successful use of deep brain stimulation to treat a minimally conscious brain-injured patient. Weill Cornell Medical College is affiliated with NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, where its faculty provides comprehensive patient care at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. The Medical College is also affiliated with the Methodist Hospital in Houston. For more information, visit weill.cornell.edu.