May 17, 2010

Cheers – March, 2010

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

Samuel C. Durso, associate professor, has been named director of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology. An honors graduate of Baylor College of Medicine, Durso completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at University of Alabama Hospitals. He has held various leadership positions during the past 15 years, including medical director of Oakcrest Continuing Retirement Community, Johns Hopkins Geriatrics at Johns Hopkins at White Marsh and clinical director of the division. He is also co-director of the Johns Hopkins Memory and  Alzheimer’s Treatment Center. Durso is the author of Teaching Ambulatory Medicine: Moving Medical Education Into the Office and the editor of Oxford American Handbook of Geriatric Medicine. He also serves as the principal investigator for a number of educational training grants, including the Donald W. Reynolds Consortium for Faculty Development to Advance Geriatric Education.

Archie Golden, associate professor of pediatrics and chief of Pediatrics from 1984 to 1998, received a Distinguished Service Award from President Alan Garcia Perez of Peru in recognition of his past and present service to the country. In the 1960s, Golden helped establish floating clinics on the Amazon River, as well as initiatives to improve medical education at the University of Trujillo. In 2009, he worked in Peru with Project Hope to help the University of Trujillo School of Medicine prepare primary care physicians for the needs of the country’s new universal health system.

JOHNS HOPKINS HEALTH SYSTEM

Seven members and a management team from the Johns Hopkins community were named 2010 Health Care Heroes by The Daily Record, Maryland’s legal newspaper. Cited for Advancements in Health Care were Alessandro Olivi, chairman of Neurosurgery at Bayview Medical Center; Howard County General Hospital’s Provider Order Management Team; and Laurie Zabin, professor and founding director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health. Named a Physician Hero was Alfredo Quinõnes-Hinojosa, associate professor of neurosurgery and oncology. Honored as Health Care Professional Heroes were Leslie Piet, a Johns Hopkins HealthCare advance practice case manager, and Kokila Argarwal, of Jhpiego’s Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program. Named a Nurse Hero was Ron Noecker, of JHH’s Radiation Oncology Department. Recognized as a Volunteer Hero was Ann Mech, a Howard County General Hospital volunteer.

The Johns Hopkins Health System received a Peer Choice Award for critical supply chain efficiency at the Spring IDN Summit and Expo in Florida. The IDN (integrated delivery network) group, which includes 144 executives from 56 health systems, praised Johns Hopkins’ use of an electronic system to foster more competitive bidding for medical supplies rather than renegotiating existing contracts. In a test case involving specialty and therapeutic bed rentals, a bidding process that normally would have taken weeks was concluded in two hours. The Johns Hopkins system since has held 49 e-sourcing events and documented savings exceeding $10 million.
The Johns Hopkins Hospital Sleep Disorders Center has received a National Sleep Achievement Award from ADVANCE for Respiratory Care and Sleep Medicine, a magazine that covers the fields of pulmonology, respiratory care and sleep. The award recognizes such innovative programs at the center as its effort to promote sleep awareness among inpatients and improve the hospital’s sleep environment for them. The 12-member interdisciplinary center’s team of pulmonologists, neurologists, psychologists and anesthesiologists is headed by Nancy Collop, associate professor of medicine.

JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE

Marketing and communications teams across Johns Hopkins Medicine earned awards of merit and excellence at the 2010 Maryland Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development Alfred Knight Awards. The winners were: Best in Show—Johns Hopkins Liver Tumor Center (team leader, Susan Brickley); Awards of Excellence—Consumer Newsletter: Johns Hopkins Bayview Health and Wellness News (Johns Hopkins Bayview Communications and Public Affairs); Physician/Referral Marketing: Johns Hopkins Pediatric Otolaryngology Physician Referral Campaign (team leader, Sharon Applestein); Integrated Marketing Campaign Less than $75K: Johns Hopkins Liver Tumor Center (team leader, Brickley); Video Production up to $25K: Johns Hopkins Neurosurgery Videos (team leaders, Applestein and Maureen Martin); Awards of Merit Ad Campaign $75K–150K: Johns Hopkins Heart and Vascular Institute Good Reasons Advertising Campaign (team leader, Jenni Freas) and Johns Hopkins Children’s Center’s Big Words, Little Patients Gastroenterology TV and Radio Advertising Campaign (team leaders, Kim Hoppe and Kim Martin).

JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE INTERNATIONAL

Manuela “Meme” de Carvalho, an international care coordinator in the Latin America/Europe regional office on the East Baltimore campus, received a Friend of the Brazilian Army Commission certificate for the superb service she has given to patients referred to Johns Hopkins by the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, D.C. De Carvalho was the only non-Brazilian to receive the honor during a ceremony held in April at the embassy.

KRIEGER SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

Andrew Zhan Mo, a junior majoring in molecular and cell biology, received the Biology Department’s Danny Lee Award for outstanding undergraduate research in biomedical sciences.
James Edward Tooley III, a senior majoring in biophysics, received the Biology Department’s William D. McElroy Award for meritorious research conducted by an undergraduate in the biological sciences.

PEABODY INSTITUTE

Gonzalo Arias Contreras, a freshman guitarist studying with Manuel Barrueco, performed in a concert reading May 3 at New York’s Public Theater of Speak Truth to Power: Voices From Beyond the Dark, a play by Ariel Dorfman. The all-star cast included Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci. The reading benefited Habitat for Humanity’s relief efforts in Chile, Arias Contreras’ native country.
O Death, an expansive chamber work by composition faculty member Oscar Bettison, is the title track of a new CD by Dutch group Ensemble Klang. An audio excerpt and commentary by Bettison may be heard by going to www.peabody.jhu.edu/magazine and clicking on the feature “Finding Their Voice.”
Brandon Keith Brown, a master of music candidate in conducting, has been invited by Lorin Maazel to be an apprentice at the 2010 Castleton Festival in Virginia. He will work directly with Maestro Maazel in an intensive program that includes opportunities to conduct symphonic works and opera.
Pianist Hui-Chuan Chen, a doctor of musical arts candidate studying with Ellen Mack, was the first-place winner in the 2010 Russell C. Wonderlic Memorial Competition, presented by Baltimore’s Community Concerts at Second. GPD candidates Eunkyung Yoon, a student of Yong Hi Moon, and Jee In Hwang, a student of Boris Slutsky, were the second- and third-place winners, respectively.

Kristina Lewis, a master of music candidate, won Peabody’s Sylvia Green Voice Competition. She will receive a cash prize and perform at a Peabody Symphony Orchestra concert next season.

Underground, a film scored by computer music major Bijan Olia, a junior, premiered last month at the Boston International Film Festival and won the Indie Spirit Special Recognition Award.

Song Yi Park, a GPD student of John Walker, won second place in the First Presbyterian Church National Organ Competition in Fort Wayne, Ind.

SAIS

Matthias M. Matthijs, a visiting assistant professor at the Bologna Center, was selected as the winner of the 2010 Samuel H. Beer Prize for the best dissertation on British politics. The selection committee described Matthijs’ dissertation, “The Political Economy of Crisis Making: The United Kingdom from Attlee to Blair,” as “a sweeping study of the changes—some significant, some less so—in British electoral politics in the post-war period.” Matthijs will receive a certificate and $300.

David Ahn and Bryan Prior are among the 575 U.S. undergraduate and graduate students selected for the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarships Program to study Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, Persian, and Russian and Indic (Bangla/Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu) and Turkic (Turkish and Azerbaijani) languages. The students will spend seven to 10 weeks this summer in intensive-language institutes in countries where these languages are spoken. Ahn will study Korean in South Korea, and Prior will study Persian in Tajikistan. CLS recipients are expected to continue their study beyond the scholarship and apply their critical language skills in their future professional careers.
Justin Frosini, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development, a partnership between the SAIS Bologna Center and the Faculty of Law of the University of Bologna, has been awarded the University of Victoria’s EU Centre of Excellent Visiting Scholar grant for summer 2010. Frosini, who also teaches at Bocconi University in Milan, will be teaching a course at UVic in comparative constitutional law that focuses on theoretical and methodological matters, the nature and challenges of jurisdictional analysis, and select topics in comparative constitutional law. He also will give a public lecture.

SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Margaret Chisolm, assistant professor, has been accepted into the Miller-Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence, part of the Center for Innovative Medicine at Bayview Medical Center.
Raymond DePaulo, professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has been selected to receive a 2010 National Alliance on Mental Health Exemplary Psychiatrist Award, nominated by NAMI Metropolitan Baltimore.
David Hellmann, professor of medicine, was presented at the May 6 Associates Program Meeting of the Maryland chapter of the American College of Physicians with the C. Lockard Conley Award for contributions to resident education and research. Conley, who died in January at the age of 94, had been a role model to Hellmann as a medical student and resident at Johns Hopkins, and also later in his academic life.
Kay Redfield Jamison, the Dalio Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, will receive an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland at a ceremony to be held on June 23.
Thomas Quinn, professor of medicine and deputy director of the Division of Infectious Diseases, has received the Senior Clinical Virology Award from the Pan American Society for Clinical Virology. The award recognizes the major impact that the recipient’s contributions to clinical virology have had on the epidemiology, treatment or understanding of the pathogenesis of viral diseases. Quinn, who is also director of the Center for Global Health in the School of Public Health, has been involved in HIV/AIDS clinical and epidemiological investigations in 25 countries.

Akira Sawa, professor and director of the Program in Molecular Psychiatry, has been awarded the Tsukahara Award, the highest honor of the Japanese Society for Neuroscience.

Mark Shelhamer, associate professor of otolaryngology–head and neck surgery and of biomedical engineering, has been chosen by NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute as one of 11 researchers receiving grants to develop programs that address astronaut health and performance risks during future space missions. Shelhamer’s proposal, funded through approximately $10 million in NASA research and technology development money set aside for such research, will examine procedures and equipment for the sensorimotor assessment and rehabilitation apparatus for future astronauts.

The Adolescent Depression Awareness Program, led by Karen Swartz, has won the 2010 Outstanding Merit Award from the Maryland Foundation for Psychiatry.

SCHOOL OF NURSING

Jerilyn Allen, M. Adelaide Nutting Chair and professor in the Department of Acute and Chronic Care, was elected president of the Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association in April. PCNA is the leading nursing organization dedicated to preventing cardiovascular disease through assessing risk, facilitating lifestyle changes and guiding individuals to achieve treatment goals.

Catherine Denver, a senior, received the Kaiser Family Foundation’s first-place award for undergraduates in its contest for essays on the major health policy challenges the nation will face in 2015 and how they should be addressed.

WHITING SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Robert Grande, an undergraduate majoring in mechanical engineering, was recently awarded second prize in the Philadelphia Classical Guitar Society Peter Segal Competition. Grande is minoring in guitar in the studio of Serap Gray at the Peabody Conservatory.
Carey Priebe, professor of applied mathematics and statistics, is the recipient of the American Statistical Association’s 2010 Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security Distinguished Achievement Award. Priebe is being recognized for his leadership and accomplishments on research projects for the Navy, Army, Air Force, DARPA and the intelligence community. The SDNS citation stated that “his prodigious contributions have resulted in solutions to problems at the forefront of both statistics and defense. Specifically noteworthy is his seminal theoretical work on random attributed graphs. Along with his numerous contributions in computer security, methods for target detection and classification and in image segmentation, he is the inventor of a tool for discovering latent classes in high-dimensional data known as the class-cover digraph.”
Danielle Tarraf, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award given in recognition of young scientists’ commitment to research and education. Tarraf’s award was given for “Analysis and Synthesis of Systems over Finite Alphabets: Theoretical Foundations, Analytical Methods and Algorithmic Tools.” The grant will support the development of a unifying framework built around the use of finite state automata as nominal models of both physical and computing processes. The research addresses fundamental problems at the interface of control theory, computer science, and mathematics and its applications.