Three Johns Hopkins University researchers have been
elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences'
Institute of Medicine. Robert Blum, Scott Zeger and Chi Van
Dang are among 65 new members nationwide. Election to this
prestigious body affirms the members' remarkable
contributions to medical science, health care and public
health, as well as to the education of generations of
physicians. It is one of the highest honors for those in
the biomedical profession.
Blum, professor and William H. Gates Sr. Chair of the
Department of Population, Family and Reproductive
Health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health,
focuses his research in the areas of adolescent sexuality,
chronic illness and international adolescent health care
issues. In May, Blum was named interim director of the
Johns Hopkins Urban Health Institute.
He is a past president of the Society for Adolescent
Medicine, has served on the American Board of Pediatrics
and was a charter member of its sub-board of adolescent
medicine and is a past chair of the Alan Guttmacher
Institute board of directors and of the National Academy of
Sciences Committee on Adolescent Health and Development.
Blum is a consultant to the World Bank, UNICEF and the
World Health Organization, where he has served on the
technical advisory group of the Child and Adolescent Health
Department and the scientific and technical advisory group
of the Human Reproductive Program. He was awarded the
Society for Adolescent Medicine's Outstanding Achievement
Award in 1993 and in 1998 was the recipient of the American
Public Health Association's Herbert Needleman Award for
"scientific achievement and courageous advocacy" on behalf
of children and youth. He has edited two books and written
more than 220 journal articles, book chapters and special
reports.
Zeger, the Frank Hurley and Catharine Dorrier
Professor in Biostatistics and chair of the
Department of
Biostatistics in the School of Public Health, develops
novel designs and methods of analysis for biomedical data.
With Johns Hopkins colleague Kung-Yee Liang, he created the
method GEE for the analysis of data from longitudinal, time
series, genetic and other studies that produce correlated
responses. He has made substantive contributions to
environmental epidemiology, quantifying the health effects
of smoking and air pollution, and served as statistical
expert for the U.S. Justice Department and several states
in their suits against the tobacco industry.
He is also involved in clinical research, having
served on the board of scientific advisers to the Merck
Research Laboratory and on the steering committee of the
Hopkins Graduate Training Program in Clinical
Investigations. Zeger is a fellow of the American
Statistical Association, fellow of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, co-editor of the Oxford
Press journal Biostatistics and on the editorial
boards of the Annual Review of Public Health and
the Springer-Verlag Series on Statistical Science. He is
the author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and two
books.
In 2005, Science Watch identified Zeger as one of the
25 most-cited mathematical scientists of the past decade.
He has mentored the thesis or postdoctoral research of 30
graduate students and fellows at Johns Hopkins. He was
awarded the 1987 American Statistical Association's
Snedecor Award for best paper in biometry (with Liang), the
1991 Spiegelman Award from the American Public Health
Association for contributions to health statistics and the
1987, 2002 and 2006 Johns Hopkins Golden Apple Award from
Public Health students for excellence in teaching.
Dang, the Johns Hopkins Family Professor in
Oncology Research, is vice dean for research at the
School of Medicine. He oversees the Hopkins
Institute
for Cell Engineering and is a professor in the
departments of
Medicine,
Pathology,
Oncology and
Cell Biology with joint
appointments in
Molecular Biology and Genetics. A practicing
hematologist-oncologist, Dang is senior editor of Cancer
Research and serves on the editorial boards of
Current Cancer Therapy Reviews, Drug Discovery Today,
Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Molecular
Medicine, Molecular and Cellular Biology and
Neoplasia. He has authored more than 160 scientific
and medical articles, book chapters and a book.
He was a member of the National Cancer Institute board
of scientific counselors, was elected to the Association of
American Physicians and is a past president of the American
Society for Clinical Investigation. He received the
Vietnamese-American National Gala Golden Torch Award for
medicine and education in 2005. He holds an NIH/NCI MERIT
award and has sponsored 10 NIH K08 physician-scientist
awardees, mentored 12 doctoral candidates and 26
postdoctoral fellows. The Dang laboratory has contributed
to the understanding of the function of the MYC cancer
gene, which has emerged as a central switch in many
different human cancers.
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