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.

 

New Director Named for Center for Clinical Trials

Kay Dickersin will join the faculty of the Bloomberg School of Public Health with primary appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and become director of the Center for Clinical Trials.

The Center for Clinical Trials, a joint initiative of the schools of Public Health and Medicine, supports the conduct of clinical trials for investigators from throughout the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. Its faculty, based in many departments, collectively works to advance the methodology and conduct of clinical trials.

Dickersin is currently professor of medicine and director of the Center for Clinical Trials and Evidence-based Health Care at Brown University. She is internationally known for her work on clinical trials and evidence synthesis and for her insights into the use of research findings to influence policy and medical practice. She received her doctorate in 1989 from the Bloomberg School's Department of Epidemiology and was a faculty member at the University of Maryland School of Medicine before moving to Brown in 1998.

Dickersin succeeds her Johns Hopkins adviser, Curt Meinert, the center's founding director and a pioneer in clinical trials, who planned to step down once a replacement was recruited. He will remain an active investigator and educator with the center and the department.

 

Institute for Policy Studies

Tama Leventhal, an associate research scientist, has received the William T. Grant Scholars Award, a five-year grant for outstanding social scientists at an early stage of their careers. The award will allow Leventhal to pursue her research on how neighborhoods affect adolescent development.

Rachel Garbow Monroe, a lecturer in the Center for Civil Society Studies, has been appointed to the newly created position of chief operating officer of the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation. She joins the foundation from The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, which she had served as a senior professional since 1998.

Demetra Nightingale, a principal research scientist, was elected to a four-year term on the Policy Council of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. She is also on the APPAM 2005 annual conference program committee, where she chairs the subcommittee on areas of the program related to social policy.

 

JHPIEGO

Koki Agarwal has been named director of ACCESS, a $75 million program at JHPIEGO funded by the United States Agency for International Development to save the lives of mothers and newborns in developing countries. Argawal joins JHPIEGO from the Futures Group, where she was director of the Center for International Health; she also served concurrently as deputy director of the USAID-funded POLICY project. Agarwal received her doctorate from the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

 

Multidisciplinary

Alice E. Chen and Jeffrey Han are among the 15 graduate students who have been chosen to receive the 2005 Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award sponsored by the Basic Sciences Division of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Nominations were solicited internationally; the winners were selected on the basis of the quality, originality and significance of their work. Chen is a doctoral candidate in the Krieger School Department of Biology and the Carnegie Institution of Washington Department of Embryology. Han is an M.D./Ph.D. candidate in the Medical Scientist Training Program and Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics in the School of Medicine. They will participate in a scientific symposium May 6 and 7 at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Four assistant professors at Johns Hopkins are among the 116 outstanding young scientists, mathematicians and economists who have been selected to receive the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship, the oldest fellows program in the United States. Grants of $45,000 for a two-year period are administered by each fellow's institution. Once chosen, fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them. The recipients are David Kaplan, Physics and Astronomy, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences; and Seth Blackshaw, Xinzhong Dong and Guo-li Ming, all from the Department of Neuroscience, School of Medicine.

 

School of Medicine

Anthony N. Kalloo has been appointed director of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the Department of Medicine. Kalloo, a leader of a nationally recognized interventional program in gastroenterology, has served as clinical director of the division.

Beth Laube, associate professor of pediatrics, has been named president of the International Society for Aerosols in Medicine, a not-for-profit group that works to further the international exchange of information on all aspects of aerosol research in medicine.

Steven Leach, chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology, has received one of seven one-year, $100,000 grants awarded by the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research. Leach's project is titled Zebrafish Model of Early Pancreatic Cancer.

Deborah Persaud, an assistant professor in Pediatrics-Infectious Diseases, is the 2005 recipient of the Elizabeth Glaser Scientist Award, the most prestigious research grant of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Although multiple recipients have been chosen in other years, Persaud is the only scientist recognized this year. This grant provides her with $700,000 for five years of research dedicated to the treatment and prevention of pediatric HIV/AIDS.

Eduardo Rodriguez, assistant professor in plastic surgery, and Jesse Taylor, resident in plastic surgery, have won awards for best presentations from the American Society of Reconstructive Microsurgery. Rodriguez won Best Poster Presentation; Taylor, Best Research Paper. The awards were presented at the society's annual meeting in February.

Dobrila Rudnicki, a postdoctoral fellow in Neurobiology in the Department of Psychiatry, has received the John J. Wasmuth Postdoctoral Fellowship, which covers two years of salary and research expenses. The award is given by the Hereditary Disease Foundation to support work that will help identify and improve understanding of the basic defect of Huntington's disease. Rudnicki will be studying Huntington's disease-like 2, a rare disorder that may offer unique insights into the pathogenesis of Huntington's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.

Crystal Simpson, assistant professor in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Geronotology, has been named assistant dean of student affairs. She will work to recruit a diverse medical student body.

 

School of Nursing

Marion J. Ball has been promoted to full professor. Ball, an adjunct professor at Nursing since 1996, also holds adjunct professorships at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Division of Health Sciences Informatics, and at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. She is a member of the Institute for Medicine and the board of regents of the National Library of Medicine, and is vice president of clinical informatics strategies at Healthlink Inc. The author of 17 books and hundreds of articles in the field of health informatics, Ball earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics with minors in computer science and German from the University of Kentucky and a master's degree in mathematics and secondary education and a doctor of education degree from Temple University.

Victoria Mock has been promoted to professor. Formerly an associate professor, Mock is director of both the JHU Center for Nursing Research and the school's new Center for Collaborative Intervention Research. She also leads the SON collaborative doctoral nursing program with Peking Union Medical College and serves as director of nursing research at the Kimmel Cancer Center. She holds a joint appointment in oncology at the School of Medicine and is internationally known for her research in symptom management for patients receiving cancer treatment. Mock received a bachelor of science in nursing from Duke, a master's degree from the University of California, San Francisco, and a doctor of nursing science from Catholic University in Washington, D.C.

Gayle Giboney Page has been promoted to professor. An associate professor since 1998, Page holds the Independence Foundation Chair in Nursing Education. She also serves as the director of the school's doctoral program. Her research focuses on pain management, stress and cancer in animal models. Page received a bachelor of science in nursing from California State College and holds a master's in nursing and doctor of nursing science from UCLA, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in biobehavioral sciences.

 

School of Professional Studies in Business and Education

Johns Hopkins Professional has received a gold award in the 2005 Marketing and Publications Awards Competition of the University Continuing Education Association. The semiannual magazine is produced by Barbara Wallace, director of communications services; Andrew Blumberg, communications manager; Sue De Pasquale, consulting editor; and Aimee Bracken, publication designer.

 

Whiting School of Engineering

Frederick Jelinek, the Julian S. Smith Professor of Electrical Engineering and director of the Center for Language and Speech Processing, is the recipient of the 2005 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. The honor recognizes Jelinek's fundamental contributions to the statistical modeling of speech and language. Jelinek's innovations can be found in all of today's commercial speech recognition systems, and he is hailed by his contemporaries as one of the fathers of modern speech and language processing.

 
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