Mike's Blog

One advantage of a long career in medicine is the opportunity to witness the emergence and development of new concepts that advance from curious observations to routine clinical practice. One area of growing interest is the microbiome and its potential for manipulation. Its reach now appears far broader than we...

Gotta admit, the groundhog was right this year. DC is digging out of its second snowfall of the year. Typically, we get at most one snow event where enough snow falls and sticks around to impact the area. This latest was smaller than the previous but still closed schools and...

I’m writing this blog entry in the waning days of the current continuing resolution (CR) we are operating under which expires as of Friday (January 30) at midnight (technically Saturday, January 31 at 12:01AM). Things had been looking quite hopeful over the last several weeks. The USG funds itself with...

Quality is not an act. It is a habit.

- Aristotle

The NCATS CTSA Program Quality Assurance / Quality Control (QA/QC) initiative was launched in FY2020 as part of the UL1 administrative supplement (NOT-TR-20-014) with a straightforward mission: help hubs deliver the highest-quality, most compliant, and least burdensome...

We’re back, it’s FY26 now, aaaaaand we’re already behind.

The USG is once again open for business after 43 days (now the longest shutdown ever). Most staff are still digging out from the avalanche of emails that accumulated over that time. At the same time, hundreds of study sections (>400) have...