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.