Cheers is a monthly listing of honors and awards received by faculty, staff and students plus recent appointments and promotions. Contributions must be submitted in writing and be accompanied by a phone number.

Applied Physics Laboratory

Jason Bunn, who develops attitude-control systems for APL satellites, received the Black Engineer of the Year Award for the Most Promising Engineer at the 16th annual Black Engineer Awards Conference, held in February in Baltimore.

A Lab science team for the Littoral Warfare Advanced Development sea test program has received the prestigious Office of Naval Research Group Award for its effort in obtaining an extremely important data set for the Navy during the multinational LWAD 01-2 experiment conducted in the East China Sea last summer.

Bloomberg School of Public Health

Jacqueline Agnew has been promoted to professor, Environmental Health Sciences.

Charles E. Boult has been appointed professor, Health Policy and Management.

Michele L. Dreyfuss has been appointed assistant research professor, Population and Family Health Sciences.

Claude Earl Fox, director of the university’s Urban Health Institute, has been appointed public health professor, Population and Family Health Sciences.

Tiffany L. Gary has been appointed assistant research professor, Epidemiology.

Michael J. McQuestion has been appointed assistant professor, Population and Family Health Sciences.

David H Peters has been appointed assistant professor, International Health.

Corinne Shefner, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Population and Family Health Sciences, has received the top award in the student paper category from the International Communication Association’s Health Communication Division. Shefner will receive her award in July at the ICA's annual conference, to be held in Seoul, South Korea. Her paper examined Suami SIAGA, an innovative multimedia campaign in Indonesia that focused on engaging men in safe motherhood. The campaign was implemented by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs in 1999-2000.

Michael Sweat has been promoted to associate professor, International Health.

Margarita S. Treuth has been appointed associate research professor, International Health.

Jon S. Vernick has been promoted to associate professor, Health Policy and Management.

Daniel W. Webster has been promoted to associate professor, Health Policy and Management.

Peter P. Zandi has been appointed assistant professor, Mental Hygiene.

Health Divisions Administration

John Lazarou has joined JHM’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs as a senior media relations representative. Lazarou’s areas of responsibility are urban and community health, sports medicine, orthopedic surgery, physical medicine and rehabilitation, community medicine and psychiatry, and corporate services. Prior to relocating to Maryland two years ago to join a public relations firm, Lazarou was the media relations representative for Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in New Jersey. He received his bachelor of arts in communications from Temple University and holds a master of arts in liberal studies from Fordham University.

Johns Hopkins Health System

Toby Gordon, vice president of planning and marketing for the health system, has been selected as a member of the Greater Baltimore Committee Leadership Class of 2002. The group’s 50 Baltimore-area executives from business, nonprofit organizations and government were chosen based on professional and volunteer leadership, judgment, civic activity, concern for the community and potential to help build a better Baltimore.

Bayview’s child day care center has been selected to receive the 2001 Child Care Challenge Award, given annually by the women legislators of Maryland to child care centers that have unique relationships with the parents, children and communities they serve. Bayview’s center offers employees child care services for 12-hour shifts, helping to recruit and retain nurses in the face of Maryland’s severe nursing shortage.

Multidisciplinary

Three women from Johns Hopkins have been named to The Daily Record’s list of Maryland’s Top Women for the year 2002. They are Ilene Busch-Vishniac, dean of the Whiting School of Engineering; Lynne Lochte, director of general accounting in the university’s Office of the Controller; and Toby Gordon, vice president of planning and marketing for the health system and an associate professor of surgery in the School of Medicine. An awards ceremony will be held March 26 at the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.

School of Medicine

Peter Agre, professor of biological chemistry and of medicine, was among a small group of scientists selected to speak at the Nobel Jubilee Symposium at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, prior to the recent Nobel Award ceremonies. The symposium helped mark the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize. Agre spoke about aquaporins, a group of proteins his laboratory first reported in 1991.

Marilee C. Allen has been promoted to professor of pediatrics.

Robert J. Arceci has been promoted to professor of oncology and pediatrics. In addition, the title King Fahd Professor of Pediatric Oncology has been transferred to Arceci from Curt I. Civin.

Betsy J. Barnes, a postdoctoral fellow of Paula Pitha-Rowe, has received the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research Milstein Young Investigator Award for 2001.

Philip J. Burke has been named professor emeritus in the Department of Oncology.

Gert H. Breiger has been named Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of the History of Science, Medicine and Technology.

Ruth R. Faden, the Philip Franklin Wagley Professor of Biomedical Ethics and executive director of the Phoebe R. Berman Bioethics Institute at Hopkins, has been named to the Consortium to Examine Clinical Research Ethics, a multidisciplinary group of clinical researchers, industry representatives, institutional review board members and bioethicists from across the nation.

Stephen J. Gould has been promoted to professor of biological chemistry.

Julia Haller has been promoted to professor of ophthalmology.

Lee McCabe, associate professor and director of behavioral health care in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has been appointed chair of the National Committee for Best Clinical Practices of the American Academic Behavioral Health Consortium. The group is working to promote the adaptation of academic psychiatry departments to health care reform.

Denise J. Montell has been promoted to professor of biological chemistry.

John K. Niparko, professor of otolaryngology and director of the Division of Otology, will receive the Hearing Health Award for Achievement from the Deafness Research Foundation. The award recognizes Niparko’s efforts in the laboratory and examining room, as well as his work educating the public about the importance of hearing health.

Elizabeth O’Hearn, assistant professor of neurology, has been awarded over $30,000 from the National Ataxia Foundation to investigate the mechanisms involved in neuronal injury in spinocerebellar ataxia 12, a hereditary neurological disease. In collaboration with other Hopkins scientists, O’Hearn is studying links between neuronal injury and neurological diseases. This is the second consecutive year she has received this award.

Richard Rivers has been named chief of the Division of Ophthalmologic Anesthesiology. Before coming to Hopkins, Rivers was an associate professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology at the University of Rochester. Rivers trained in anesthesiology and obtained his doctorate in microvascular physiology at the University of Virginia.

Brett Simon, associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine, has been appointed chief of the Division of Adult Anesthesia. His new role includes establishing clinical guidelines for patient care and evaluating research projects involving adult anesthesia.

Mark A. Talamini has been promoted to professor of surgery.

Bert Vogelstein, the Clayton Professor of Oncology and a Howard Hughes investigator at Hopkins’ Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, has received the International Chiron Award for Biomedical Research and Training from the Italian National Academy of Medicine. Vogelstein will receive a $10,000 grant supported by Schering-Plough in recognition of his studies on oncogenes and colorectal cancer.

Richard Wahl, a professor of radiology and director of nuclear medicine in the Department of Radiology, was named Scientist of the Year by the Academy of Molecular Imaging at its 2001 annual conference. The award includes a $10,000 prize. Wahl, who is vice chairman for technology and business development in the department, was cited by AMI as the first person in the United States to apply positron emission technology, or PET, to diagnose a broad array of human cancers.

School of Nursing

Claire Bogdanski has been named associate dean for finance and administration. During the previous four years she was senior administrator of the Department of Health Policy and Management. She is a certified public accountant and has an MBA from the University of Baltimore.

Fannie Gaston-Johansson, a professor, has been selected as the recipient of the National Black Nurses Association’s Trailblazer Award for her outstanding contributions and accomplishments in the field of public health.

Elizabeth Jordan, an instructor, was ap-pointed to the National Practice Committee for 2002-2003 of the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses.

Robin Remsburg, an assistant professor, was appointed to the editorial board of the journal Geriatric Nursing.

Kathleen Sabatier, director of the Institute for Johns Hopkins Nursing, was appointed to the executive board of the International Nursing Coalition for Mass Casualty Education and to the executive committee of the board of the United Way of Central Maryland.

University Administration

Claude Earl Fox, director of the Urban Health Institute, has been elected to the board of directors of MEDBANK of Maryland Inc., a nonprofit organization that helps low-income Marylanders receive free medications.

Whiting School of Engineering

M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman, a professor in the department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, will receive the Desert Research Institute’s 2002 Nevada Medal. Wolman, a pioneer in studying water quality issues and how surface waters influence the shape of the Earth’s landforms, will formally accept the award at ceremonies in Las Vegas, on March 18, and in Reno, on March 20. The eight-ounce, pure silver minted medallion and $10,000 prize are provided by SBC Nevada Bell.

Historian’s Essays Chronicle U.S. Fabric The New York Review of Books this month has published a 4,000-word review of John Higham’s recent book, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture, published by Yale University Press. Titled “Wise Man,” the review traces Higham’s distinguished career as a historian who resisted specialization and sought out broader themes in American history and culture, without ignoring ethnicity and race. “I’m much more interested in looking at the stresses and strains among the American people as a whole than I am at highlighting their separate group identities,” Higham says. Hanging Together is a collection of essays written by Higham and selected and introduced by a group of his former students. Higham, professor emeritus of history, retired from Hopkins in 1989 but continues to do research and to publish. The essays cover a range of topics, and Higham credits former student Carl J. Guarneri, who received his doctorate from Hopkins in 1979, with suggesting the idea for a book. “I thought the scheme was quite ingenious, and I told him to go ahead with it,” Higham said. Hanging Together is a book about what holds Americans together, in spite of all their differences, a theme that Higham says is particularly appropriate in light of the tragic events of Sept. 11. American wars always have spurred an upsurge in patriotism, civic identity and volunteerism, but one thing Higham says he’s noticed “so far” since September is quite different. “There’s been traditionally a lot of animosity toward those who deviate in one way or another, people who are against the war, people who in one way or another go against the crowd. We’re having very little of that. I’m tempted to say it’s unprecedented.” In the Feb. 28 New York Review of Books article, Harvard professor George M. Fredrickson writes, “Hanging Together makes it possible to assess the full achievement of a very creative historian. Higham, in his own singularly judicious and good-tempered fashion, is an engaged intellectual in close touch with contemporary cultural trends and controversies, particularly over changing perceptions of the American past.” To read the full review, go to: http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/higham.html --Glenn Small