For the Record: Cheers

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.

 

Bayview Medical Center

Johns Hopkins Bayview has received the Maryland Department of Education's 2009 Career and Technology Education Outstanding Secondary Business Partnership Award of Excellence. The award recognizes the hospital's partnership on two programs with the Sollers Point Technical High School in Baltimore County, one providing training for sophomores and juniors interested in becoming certified nursing assistants, the other giving 12th-graders the kind of real-life clinical experience needed to become patient care technicians.

 

Johns Hopkins Health System

The Information Technology Department of The Johns Hopkins Hospital has received a top 2009 Innovators Award from Healthcare Informatics magazine for its Comprehensive Unit Safety Program. Under CUSP, an initiative launched in 2003, senior administrators "adopt" individual hospital units and help identify and resolve issues to improve patient safety and satisfaction. Cited in the award-winning entry were the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, Blood Bank and Wilmer Eye Institute, all of which benefited significantly from CUSP assistance.

Johns Hopkins Medicine marketing and communications teams received Alfred Knight Awards this spring from the Maryland Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, the state's top organization for professionals in the field. In the category of New Product or Service Launch Campaign, first place went to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center for its Memory & Alzheimer's Treatment Center and second place to Johns Hopkins at Green Spring Station, Otolaryngology. In the Consumer Newsletter category, the Office of Marketing and Communication took first place for Johns Hopkins Health, and JHBMC's Health & Wellness News took second. JHBMC received second place in the Media Placement category for "Stolen Years," a front-page article in The Baltimore Sun about early-onset Alzheimer's disease. Other first-place recognitions went to Howard County General Hospital in the Web Site category; JHBMC for its Service Recovery Kit, in Hot Topics/Customer Service; and HCGH for its Directory of Physicians, in Hot Topics/Physician Referral Marketing.

 

Krieger School of Arts and Sciences

Sharon Cameron, professor in the English Department, has received the Hubbell Medal, a lifetime achievement award given by the American Literature section of the Modern Language Association. She also has been chosen by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to receive the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award, a $10,000 prize that honors "a recent book in recognition of the quality of its prose style" for Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago, 2007). Past winners of this nonfiction prize include Ursala Le Guin, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks and Judith Thurman. The award will be presented on May 20 at a ceremony in New York along with awards for fiction, poetry, music, art and translation.

Will Kirk, a photographer with Homewood Imaging and Photographic Services, has been selected to receive a Green Apple Award from Higher Achievement in recognition of the work he has done for five years for the nonprofit, which provides academic enrichment programs to middle school children from underserved areas in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Va. He will receive the award on May 18 at the organization's eighth-grade graduation event, at which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will speak.

 

Peabody

Faculty artist Joe Burgstaller performs on trumpet, piccolo trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn on Martignon 4: Mozart's Blue Dreams & Other Crossover Fantasies, a CD released this month.

Soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson, who chairs the Voice Department, has been named the winner of the American Composers Alliance Laurel Leaf Award, which will be presented next month at the ACA Summer Music Festival at Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York. Among the recipients of the Laurel Leaf Award, which recognizes "distinguished achievement in fostering and encouraging American music," have been the Juilliard String Quartet, Martha Graham, Aaron Copland and Leonard Slatkin.

Faculty artists Stanley Cornett and Eileen Cornett will visit Taiwan in June and July to give recitals, teach lessons and lead master classes and opera coaching sessions. In Kaoshung, they will help with the Kaoshung Opera Company's current production of Don Giovanni. Eileen Cornett will be the pianist for recitals by alumnus Peter Lee and I-chia Chan at the Taiwan National Recital Hall in Taipei and in two other cities.

Soprano Jennifer Holbrook, a master's candidate in the studio of Phyllis Bryn-Julson, has won this year's Russell C. Wonderlic Competition, a contest run by Baltimore's Community Concerts at Second that alternates annually between voice and piano. Soprano Hyunah Yu and pianists Grace Kim, Awadagin Pratt and Eric Zuber were also Wonderlic Competition winners while studying at Peabody.

Southern Comforts, a violin concerto by Music Theory faculty member Joel Puckett, had its premiere performance in March with the Baylor University Wind Ensemble in Waco, Texas, with additional performances in Austin, Texas; Iowa City, Iowa; and Atlanta.

 

School of Education

Laurie U. deBettencourt, professor and chair of the Department of Special Education, and Michael S. Rosenberg, professor in Special Education and chair of Doctoral Studies, have been selected as co-editors of Teacher Education and Special Education, the journal of the Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children. The three-year appointment will begin Jan. 1, 2010. The Teacher Education Division emphasizes the preparation and continuing development of professionals in special education and related service fields. DeBettencourt is co-author of six textbooks including Teaching Students With Mild and High-Incidence Disabilities at the Secondary Level and The Effective Special Education Teacher: A Practical Guide for Success. Rosenberg is the co-author of four textbooks, most recently Special Education for Today's Teachers and the forthcoming Inclusion: Effective Practices for All Students.

Two researchers from the Center for Research and Reform received the prestigious Review of Research Award at the 90th annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, held April 15 in San Diego. The award was presented to co-authors Robert Slavin, center director, and Cynthia Lake, research scientist, for their article "Effective Programs in Elementary Mathematics: A Best-Evidence Synthesis," which appeared in the September 2008 issue of Review of Educational Research. In making the presentation, the award committee noted, "Examining studies of various programmatic attempts to improve elementary mathematics education, the authors found that instructional approaches such as cooperative learning and better classroom management and motivation, and additional tutoring programs can lead to improved outcomes. The finding is both insightful and compelling."

 

School of Medicine

Sandra Eder, a doctoral candidate in History of Medicine, is one of just seven 2009 Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellows in Women's Studies nationwide, selected earlier this month in a competition conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The Woodrow Wilson Women's Studies Fellowship, now in its 35th year, is the only national fellowship for doctoral students writing on women's issues in various humanities and social science fields. Eder's topic is "The Birth of Gender: Intersexuality, Gender and Clinical Practice in the 1950s."

Chao-Wei Hwang, a second-year fellow in the cardiovascular training program, is the recipient of this year's Silverman Research Award for his proposal "Triggered Stent-Based Delivery of On- Demand Thrombolytic Therapy." The $500 Silverman prize, awarded annually to a second-year fellow, honors the memory of Howard L. Silverman, a former Cardiology fellow and faculty member who died in 1996. The research proposals are evaluated by faculty judges with regard to creativity, originality and potential impact. Silverman battled heart disease himself and was very active in basic cardiovascular research.

Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue, associate professor of pathology, has received the 2009 Ramzi Contran Young Investigator Award from the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology. The award, named for a past president of the USCAP, recognizes research that has contributed significantly to the diagnosis and understanding of human disease. Iacobuzio-Donahue is the principal investigator of an NIH-funded laboratory that focuses on the molecular genetics of pancreatic and colorectal cancer. She has made many breakthrough discoveries about both malignancies.

Lillie Shockney, University Distinguished Service Assistant Professor of Breast Cancer and administrative director of the Johns Hopkins Avon Foundation Breast Center, has been awarded the 2009 Healthcare Hero Award for nursing excellence from The Daily Record, Maryland's legal newspaper.

Sandy Swoboda, a senior research nurse in Surgery, has been elected as a fellow of the American College of Critical Care Medicine. The designation honors practitioners, researchers, administrators and educators for outstanding contributions to the collaborative field of critical care. Of the estimated 700 practitioners who are fellows of the college of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, less than 3 percent are nurses.

Luca Vricella, assistant professor of surgery, has been appointed chief of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery. A native of Rome, Vricella joined the School of Medicine faculty in 2002.

 

School of Nursing

Phyllis Sharps, chair of Community Public Health, has been named to the Institute of Medicine committee to study "Qualifications of Professionals Providing Mental Health Counseling Services under TRICARE." The 12 committee members will make recommendations for permitting licensed mental health counselors to practice independently under the TRICARE program, the Department of Defense's health care services plan for active-duty military, retirees and their families.

 

Whiting School of Engineering

Aleksander S. Popel, professor of bio-medical engineering, has received the Microcirculatory Society's 2009 Eugene M. Landis Research Award, its highest honor. This annual award was established in 1969 to recognize an outstanding investigator in the field of microcirculation. The award was presented in April in New Orleans at the Experimental Biology meeting, where Popel delivered a lecture titled "Systems Biology of Angiogenesis: From Molecules to Therapy."

 
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