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The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University October 15, 2007 | Vol. 37 No. 7
 
Six JHU Researchers Elected to Institute of Medicine

By Kenna Lowe and Audrey Huang
Schools of Public Health and Medicine

Six Johns Hopkins researchers have been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. Ron Brookmeyer, Frederick M. Burkle Jr., Aravinda Chakravarti, Kay Dickersin, Andrew Feinberg and Lynn R. Goldman are among 65 new members nationwide. Election to this prestigious body affirms their 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.

Brookmeyer is a professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Biostatistics and chair of the school's Master of Public Health Program. He focuses his work on the development and application of statistical methods and models to track the health of populations. He is currently working on models for a range of public health problems, including AIDS, biosecurity and Alzheimer's disease.

He is a fellow and chair of the Statistics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Statistical Association, and has received the American Public Health Association's Spiegelman Gold Medal for significant contributions to health statistics.

Burkle, who lectures in the Bloomberg School's Center for Refugee and Disaster Response and is a research associate in emergency medicine at the School of Medicine, was the founder and director of the Center of Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance, a World Health Organization Collaborating Center for humanitarian civil-military cooperation. He served as the senior adviser in medicine and public health for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and as a research scientist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He has worked in and consulted on numerous humanitarian emergencies and large-scale international disasters in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Burkle's research interests include bioterrorism, complex emergencies, disaster management, community emergency public health, education and training of public health workforce and surveillance capacity building in developing countries.

Chakravarti is director of the Center for Complex Disease Genomics and professor of medicine, pediatrics, molecular biology and genetics, and biostatistics at the schools of Medicine and Public Health. His research focuses on genomic-scale analysis of the human genome, computational analysis of gene variation and function, and understanding the molecular genetic basis of common disorders that include mental illness, heart disease and birth defects.

Chakravarti is president-elect of the American Society of Human Genetics. He is one of the founding editors in chief of Genome Research, a past member of the NIH National Advisory Council of the National Human Genome Research Institute, a key participant in the Human Genome Project and an architect of the International HapMap project. He chaired the NIH subcommittee on its third five-year Genome Project Plan and continues to serve on numerous NIH panels.

Dickersin, director for the Center for Clinical Trials at the Bloomberg School, is involved in methodologic research related to clinical trials and meta-analysis. Her specific research interests include trials registers, publication bias, peer review and evidence-based health care. She has conducted studies on women's health, eyes and vision, and surgery. Dickersin is president-elect of the Society for Clinical Trials and serves on a number of editorial and advisory boards, including those at the World Health Organization, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Institutes of Health. She is also director of the U.S. Cochrane Center and serves as an editor of the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Review Group.

Feinberg is the King Fahd Professor of Medicine and professor of molecular biology and genetics, and of oncology at the School of Medicine, where he also is director of the Center for Epigenetics. His research focuses on the epigenetic basis of human complex traits in general, including altered chromosome methylation and loss of imprinting in cancers, the molecular basis of Beckwith- Wiedemann syndrome, autism and psychiatric illness. The Center for Epigenetics aims to pioneer new tools for genomewide epigenetic analysis to better study human disease. Feinberg has developed several molecular methods, including random priming.

Goldman, a pediatrician and an epidemiologist, is a professor in the Bloomberg School's Department of Environmental Health Sciences, where she focuses on environmental health policy, public health practice and children's environmental health. She was just named principal investigator of one of 22 new National Children's Study centers that will assess the effects of environmental and genetic factors on child and human health in the United States.

From 1993 to 1998, Goldman served as the assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances. Before that, she headed the Division of Environmental and Occupational Disease Control at the California Department of Health Services. She has served on the Committee on Environmental Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC Lead Poisoning Prevention Advisory Committee and numerous expert committees for the National Research Council.

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