When: Thursday June 8, 2017 – 7:30 PM
Where: Montgomery Community College (Rockville Campus) – Humanities Building (HU), Conference Room 009
(Get Directions, Campus Map)

Speaker: Mehrdad Michael Massumi, MD
Language: English

Synopsis:

The 2012 National Health Interview Survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) gathered information on 88,962 American adults and 17,321 children. The survey found that 33.2 percent of adults in the United States aged 18 years and over and 11.6 percent of children age 4 to 17 years used some form of Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) approach in the previous 12 months.
Americans spent $30.2 billion out-of-pocket on CIH during the 12 months prior to the survey. Americans spent $14.7 billion out-of-pocket on visits to complementary practitioners – almost 30 percent of what they spent out-of-pocket on services by conventional physicians ($49.6 billion). They spent $12.8 billion out-of-pocket on natural product supplements – about one-quarter of what they spent out-of-pocket on prescription drugs ($54.1 billion).
Complementary and Integrative Medicine is a rapidly growing component of the healthcare services not only in the USA but worldwide. This talk will review the many facets of this area of healthcare and provide a systematic discussion and comparative analysis of complementary and integrative health disciplines, modalities and research as well as resources for further study of this important sector of health services.

About the Speaker:

Mehrdad Michael Massumi, MD is a board-certified specialist in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and a Diplomate of the American Academy of Pain Management.
After graduation with honors from the University of Birmingham Medical School (UK) and two years of surgical residency training at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C. he undertook and concluded successfully his residency in Rehabilitation Medicine in Seattle, WA in 1988. He remains active at Harvard Postgraduate Medical Association.
Dr. Massumi has been in practice for twenty-eight years in Maryland. He was the founder or director of many Rehabilitation, Spine and Pain clinics in the Baltimore Metropolitan hospitals. He is a former clinical faculty of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He is currently in private practice in Baltimore and more recently also in Rockville, MD.

For this lecture: light refreshment will be provided

When: Thursday March 9, 2017 – 7:30 PM
Where: Montgomery Community College (Rockville Campus) – Humanities Building (HU), Conference Room 009
(Get Directions, Campus Map)

Speaker: Ashkan Balouchi, Ph.D.
Language: Farsi

Synopsis:

The interesting dynamics of vehicular traffic has gained both engineers and physicists attention for decades. While traffic engineering has been very successful in predicting or even controlling the traffic in a given situation based on empirical data, physicists approach is usually quite different. Physicist are mostly interested in modeling traffic in order to describe the general features of typical traffic. Developing models not only can provide an understanding towards the complexity of the traffic phenomena, but also may help to extract the fundamental aspects of traffic and use them to predict and control the real traffic state. 
The flow of traffic represents a many-particle non-equilibrium problem with important practical consequences. Traffic flow shows well defined collective behavior where the free flow of traffic at low density changes abruptly with growing density to a denser phase with jams. The jams themselves show organized motions with start-stop waves as the cars creep forward. In addition to free flow and jam phases, there are also instances of synchronized flow at low velocity. Understanding the collective dynamical behavior and controlling the jams will give insight into effective traffic management.

About the Speaker:

Ashkan Balouchi is a Data Scientist at LifeNome, a revolutionary personal genomics company with the aim of revolutionizing how individuals make well-being decision. He received his PhD in physics from Louisiana State University on feedback control analyses on complex dynamical systems. He focused on modeling the traffic phenomenon using theoretical physics and strong numerical simulations to understand the underlying features of the traffic jams. He was also a member of Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics. Before moving to the US in 2010, He received his MSc. and BSc. from Sharif University of Technology, during which he trained more than 20 international physics Olympiad medal winners.

When: Thursday January 12, 2017 – 7:30 PM
Where: Montgomery Community College (Rockville Campus) – Humanities Building (HU), Conference Room 009
(Get Directions, Campus Map)

Speaker:Yousef Zarbalian, MD
Language: English

Synopsis:

The cause of autoimmune diseases is complex and multifactorial: genetic, environmental, hormonal, and immunologic factors are all considered important in their development. The world’s increasing incidence and prevalence of autoimmune diseases over the past 30 years suggests that environmental risk factors are playing a major role. Chronic psychological stress has been implicated in the development of autoimmune disease, but what does this mean in practical terms? We will explore the nature of short-term and chronic stress and their protective and pathologic impacts on immune function. Based on the available scientific literature, we will discuss what steps may be taken on an individual and societal level to potentially prevent autoimmune disease and, ultimately, enhance overall well-being.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Yousef Zarbalian is a board-certified rheumatologist and internist. He obtained his medical doctorate (M.D.) from Washington University in St. Louis. He completed internal medicine residency at the University of Maryland followed by rheumatology fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He has done research on vasculitis (Giant cell arteritis) and presented his research at the 2016 American College of Rheumatology conference. Dr. Zarbalian started clinical practice at the Northern Virginia Center for Arthritis in August 2016 and he takes care of patients with autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, vasculitis, lupus, and sjogren’s syndrome.