October 18, 2010

Cheers — October 18, 2010

JOHNS HOPKINS MEDICINE

Marketing and Communications has been recognized with two awards from the Washington-area chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. Dome has won a Thoth Award, the top prize in its category, while the office’s H1NI flu campaign received the second place honor, the Award of Excellence. The Dome honorees include then-editors Mary Ellen Miller and Judy Minkove; Amy Goodwin, who oversaw its production; Max Boam, its creative designer; and photographer Keith Weller. The H1N1 award winners are Goodwin and Boam; communications specialists Janet Anderson and Mark Guidera; Web production specialist Katrin Evseeva; Stephen Gaede, associate director of strategic Web services; and Melissa Schmelick, digital signage content manager.

PEABODY INSTITUTE

Ted Bickish, a master of music candidate, and EunHye Grace Kim, a graduate performance diploma candidate, tied for first place in the Bach Concert Series’ Inaugural Organ Competition, held Sept. 11 at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore. Junior Christopher Keenan was the runner-up.

Neil Thompson Shade, instructor in the Recording Arts Department, was an invited speaker at the 2010 Concert Hall Research Group Summer Institute 2010, held in conjunction with the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Shade gave a multimedia presentation on the historic development of chamber music halls, focusing on the acoustic and architectural attributes of venues and how they influenced composers from the Renaissance to current times. The CHRG meets every four years to discuss advances and current thinking on the design of music performance spaces; the focus of this year’s meeting was halls for chamber music and opera.

Pianist Min-Kuei Yang, a doctor of musical arts candidate studying with Alexander Shtarkman, was awarded the Bronze Medal in the Seattle International Piano Competition, which took place Sept. 17 to 19. She also received a jurors’ award for the Best Performance of Chopin.

SAIS

Nelson Graves has joined SAIS Bologna as director of Recruitment and Admissions, a new position. Graves, who has spent two decades as a foreign correspondent managing multimedia news teams in six countries in Europe and Asia, joins the center from his position as editor of Reuters News, Japan. Graves taught for four years and was a trustee for two years at an international school in New Delhi, India. A graduate of Yale University, he is a Fulbright Award recipient and an alumnus of SAIS (Bologna, 1982, and Washington, 1983).

Stefano Zamagni, SAIS Bologna vice director and senior adjunct professor of international economics, was awarded the 18th annual Internazional Prize for Dialogue Among Peoples and Their Cultures by the  Franciscan International Study Center on Oct. 4 at Palazzo Ducale in Massa Carrara, Italy. Zamagni was recognized for a lifetime of commitment to interreligious, international and interdisciplinary values. He received the honor together with Carlo Azelio Ciampi, former president of Italy; Renato Raffaele Martino, former Holy See representative in the United Nations; and Angelo Pansa, a well-known missionary.

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, professor and chair of the Department of Counseling and Human Services, addressed the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Region’s Association for Counselor Education and Supervision on Oct. 1 in New Brunswick, N.J. She discussed the role of school counselors in closing the achievement and college access gap.

SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Larry Appel, professor of medicine, has been named head of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical Research. Appel, who joined the faculty in 1989 and has a joint appointment as a professor of epidemiology and international health in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, is a pioneer in research on hypertension, diabetes, nutritional supplements and obesity. He succeeds Fred Brancati, professor and chief of General Internal Medicine, who served as interim head of the 25-year-old center, which is operated jointly by the schools of Medicine and Public Health.

John Bartlett, professor and former chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, is one of only 16 out of nearly 1,200 physicians to receive a Community Choice Award from QuantiaMD, an online worldwide physician-to-physician learning collaborative. Dubbed the “ultimate form of peer review” by the Waltham, Mass., communications company, the award is based on rankings that online lecturers receive from the physicians who watch their presentations. One thousand or more respondents gave Bartlett a top, five-star ranking for his lectures about issues concerning HIV and clostridium difficile, a potentially life-threatening bacterial infection.

Mary Beach, associate professor of medicine, went to Verona, Italy, in September to receive the Jozien Bensing Research Award from the Netherlands-based European Association of Communication in Health Care.  A member of the Berman Institute of Bioethics, Beach is only the second recipient of the award, which is bestowed once every two years to talented early-career researchers. Her research focuses on patient-physician communication and relationships.

Roger Blumenthal, professor and head of the Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease, has received the 2010 David Levine Research Award from the Division of General Internal Medicine for his cardiology research and unsurpassed reputation as a mentor. His multidisciplinary NIH-funded training program on behavioral aspects of cardiovascular disease has been funded continuously for more than 30 years and recognized as perhaps the best of it kind in the history of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. The Levine Award is named for the former chief of General Internal Medicine.

Vered Stearns, associate professor of oncology, has been named co-director of the Kimmel Cancer Center’s breast cancer program. Stearns joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2002. She is internationally known for her groundbreaking work on the pharmacogenetics, or hereditary response to drugs, of potential breast cancer patients who are given Tamoxifen, a medication that interferes with the activity of the female hormone estrogen. She also is known for the use of biomarkers to implement new interventions for breast cancer treatment and prevention. The breast cancer program’s other co-director is Sara Sukumar, professor of oncology.

Jon Weingart, professor of neurological surgery and oncology, is one of 10 recipients of a 2010 Healthnetwork Foundation Service Excellence Award. The award comes with a $10,000 research grant from an anonymous donor, who nominated Weingart for his consistently high standards of patient care and service. The nonprofit Cleveland-based Healthwork Foundation, which strives to improve health care for all through philanthropy, acts as a networking group for business leaders or affluent families with medical problems, linking its members to top hospitals.

WHITING SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Peter Searson, the Joseph R. and Lynn C. Reynolds Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the Institute for NanoBioTechnology, has been named a fellow of the Electrochemical Society. This distinction is given in recognition of Searson’s contributions and leadership in the achievement of science and technology in the area of electrochemistry and solid-state sciences, and his participation in the affairs of the society.

Russell Taylor, professor of computer science and director of the Engineering Research Center for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology, has received the 2010 Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society’s Enduring Impact Award. The prestigious award is given annually in recognition of research leadership in the field. Taylor, a Johns Hopkins School of Engineering alumnus, was a founding member of the MICCAI and was elevated to the rank of MICCAI Fellow in 2009.