Johns Hopkins Gazette | August 18, 2008
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The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University August 18, 2008 | Vol. 37 No. 42
 

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.

 

Academic Centers and Affiliates

William Brieger, senior malaria specialist for Jhpiego, has received the 2008 Award of Merit for Contribution to the Development of Public Health in Africa from Nigeria's oldest university. The honor was given by the Faculty of Public Health, College of Medicine, at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. The recognition was presented in July at that institution's national conference, "Public Health in Nigeria and the Challenges of Achieving the Millennium Development Goals." Brieger, who is also a professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, taught at the African Regional Health Education Center of the University of Ibadan from 1976 to 2002. He is internationally renowned for his expertise in the social and behavioral aspects of tropical disease control and prevention, with special emphasis on malaria. He is also a consultant for the Malaria Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for Malaria Action Coalition activities in Nigeria. Brieger serves as a malaria expert for the Voices advocacy project of JHU's Center for Communication Programs. In addition, he teaches distance-education courses on training methods, continuing education for health workers, and social and behavioral foundations of primary health care.

 

Applied Physics Laboratory

Mohammed Dehghani has joined the Lab as head of the 350-member Technical Services Department, whose duties include engineering, design and fabrication, plant operations and maintenance, and construction management. He comes to APL after 11 years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Before that he served on the Mechanical Engineering faculty at Ohio University for 10 years.

More than a dozen APL staff members, primarily from the Applied Information Sciences Department, were part of a 26-organization team that received the National Aeronautic Association's 2007 Robert J. Collier Trophy for its work on the Automatic Dependent Surveilliance-Broadcast Project, a groundbreaking effort to develop next-generation airborne surveillance and cockpit avionics that will keep planes at safe distances in the air and on runways.

 

Bayview Medical Center

Catherine Passaretti has joined the Division of Infectious Diseases. She received her medical degree from Johns Hopkins and completed her residency in internal medicine with the Osler Medical Service of the School of Medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases at JHH. Her interests include infection control, hospital epidemiology and transplant-related infectious diseases. A consultant for the Maryland Health Care Commission, Passaretti aids the development of a statewide system for the public reporting of health careŠassociated infections.

Patricia Wong, a graduate of Stanford Medical School, has joined the Division of Digestive Diseases. Wong completed her residency in internal medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, and a fellowship in gastroenterology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She practices general gastroenterology with a special focus in colorectal cancer. Her research interests include identifying high-risk groups for colon cancer and screening tools such as chemoprevention. She has been published in Gastroenterology and Molecular and Cellular Biology.

 

Bloomberg School of Public Health

Scott Zeger, the Frank Hurley and Catharine Dorrier Professor of Biostatistics, chair of the Department of Biostatistics and university vice provost for research, was named the 2008 Wilks Memorial Award recipient by the American Statistical Association at the annual Joint Statistical Meeting in Denver. The award is given to a statistician who has made a significant contribution to the advancement of scientific or technical knowledge, developed an ingenious application of existing knowledge or successfully fostered cooperative scientific efforts in matters of public interest or national defense. Zeger was recognized for his significant contributions to public health, including his work in environmental epidemiology, quantifying the health effects of smoking and air pollution, and co-development, with colleague Kung-Yee Liang, of Generalized Estimating Equations. Zeger has also been recognized as one of the most cited mathematical scientists of the past decade.

 

Multidisciplinary

Deborah Gross, a professor in Acute and Chronic Care at the School of Nursing and a nationally recognized expert in children's mental health, will be installed Oct. 3 as the inaugural Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor in Mental Health and Psychiatric Nursing in a unique dual faculty appointment between the schools of Nursing and Medicine. President William R. Brody, Nursing Dean Martha Hill and Raymond DePaulo Jr., chair of the SoM Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, will preside at the ceremony, to be held at 4 p.m. in the SoN Alumni Auditorium.

 

School of Medicine

Kay Redfield Jamison, professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and co-author Frederick K. Goodwin have received the American Medical Writers Association's 2008 AMWA Medical Book Award, Physicians Category, for Manic-Depressive Illness, 2nd Edition.

Bradley J. Phillips has joined the Department of Surgery at the Children's Center as director of pediatric burn surgery and of the burn fellowship program. Previously director of the University of New Mexico burn program, Phillips received his medical degree from the College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University. He completed a burn fellowship at Shriners Hospital for Children at the University of Texas Medical Branch and a trauma-ICU fellowship at Boston Medical Center. A member of the American College of Surgeons and the American Burn Association, Phillips is the editor of several medical journals, including the Journal of Burns & Wounds, and has been published in books that include Adult Cardiac Surgery and Heart Failure & Transplantation.

M. Christine Zink has been named director of Molecular and Comparative Pathobiology, a department she had served as interim director and deputy director. A prominent researcher on the effects of HIV in the brain, Zink has been at Johns Hopkins for more than 22 years, first as a postdoctoral student in Neurology and then joining the department as a faculty member in 1988. Two years later, she moved to the Division of Comparative Medicine, forerunner of her current department, and became an associate professor in 1992 and a full professor in 2000. She earned both her DVM and PhD from the University of Guelph in Canada. Since 1999, she has led her department's training program, helping to enhance its emphasis on training veterinarians to become biomedical researchers as well as veterinary pathology and laboratory animal scientists.

 

School of Nursing

Miyong Kim, professor, has been named chair of the Department of Health Systems and Outcomes. Her work has focused on the key areas of hypertension and diabetes control, cancer prevention and mental health, and involves community-based participatory research, health literacy and program evaluation. Through grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, American Legacy Foundation and American Alzheimer's Association, she is testing the effectiveness of a community-based, self-help program in underserved minority populations. Kim has participated in the Robert Wood Johnson Executive Nurse Fellows Program, an advanced leadership program for nurses in senior executive roles, and serves as a regular NIH study section member and evaluation consultant on an array of national and international research and policy analysis projects.

 

University Administration

Kimberly Gibson has joined the Office of the Provost as executive assistant to the provost. She comes to Johns Hopkins from BearingPoint, where she was a senior management analyst and executive assistant to the vice president of the health services sector. She previously served as an executive assistant to vice presidents and senior officers at Novell, MCI and WorldCom.

 

Whiting School of Engineering

Baruch Awerbuch, professor of computer science, and co-author David Peleg, the Norman D. Cohen Professorial Chair of Computer Sciences in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, have been selected as recipients of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for their paper "Sparse Partitions," published by Foundations of Computer Science in FOCS 1990. The prize is sponsored jointly by the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science Symposium on Distributed Computing.

Gregory S. Chirikjian, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named a 2008 fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The fellow grade is the highest elected grade of membership within ASME, the attainment of which recognizes exceptional engineering achievements and contributions to the engineering profession. The ASME cited Chirikjian as a pioneer in the design, implementation and analysis of several novel robotic technologies, adding that he has a proven track record as an administrator and mentor.

Konstantinos Konstantopoulos, an associate professor, has been named chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, effective July 1. Konstantopoulos, who holds a doctorate in chemical engineering from Rice University, has been a member of the Whiting School faculty since 1997. Because of Konstantopoulos' prior commitments in the fall term, Joseph Katz has agreed to serve as acting chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering until January 2009. Katz, who has been at the Whiting School since 1979, holds a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Ed Scheinerman, associate dean for education since August 2007, has been named vice dean for education. In addition to managing the staff of the Office of Engineering Advising, he is responsible for the ABET accreditation process, graduate student affairs, the Center for Leadership Education and the Center for Educational Outreach.

 
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