February 20, 2012

Cheers — February 20, 2012

APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY

Danielle Hilliard, a project manager in the Air and Missile Defense Department, has received the Black Engineer of the Year Community Service Award. Hilliard was honored for her volunteer efforts in the community, including work with students in Howard and Prince George’s counties and with the local chapters of the Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement program. Hilliard, who joined APL in 2001, commits up to 12 hours a week to judging public school science, technology, engineering and math competitions and to helping with activities such as MentorNet, Project Lead the Way and Girl Power, an APL-sponsored event that familiarizes middle and high school girls with STEM careers.

Patrick Newell, supervisor of the Space Department’s Space Weather Science and Applications Section, has been elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. Newell specializes in space weather, primarily studying the aurora by using images and particle measurements from satellites. His nomination specifically lauded his 1996 discovery that sunlight suppresses strong aurora, but his discoveries also include the first rigorous criteria for identification of the particle cusp, the first map of precipitation according to magnetospheric source region, the first composite imaging of the plasma sheet and finding a nearly universal solar wind–magnetosphere coupling function. Newell joined APL in 1985 and has written or co-written about 230 refereed journal publications.

Edward Tunstel, a robotics engineer in the Space Department, has been named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in recognition of his work on planetary missions. Tunstel came to APL in 2007 from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he developed autonomous control and navigation algorithms, software and systems for robotics research and spaceflight projects, including the Mars Exploration Rovers, on which he served as a flight systems engineer for autonomous rover navigation and was the mobility and robotic arm subsystem lead for surface mission operations.

 

BAYVIEW MEDICAL CENTER

Phillip Dennis has been named director of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview and director of the Department of Oncology. Dennis says he will expand and integrate oncology care across departments to provide better access to cancer screening, diagnosis and treatment. He also will lead all lung cancer treatment efforts within the center’s Upper Aerodigestive Cancer Program, including the creation of a Center of Excellence in Thoracic Oncology. It will include clinical care, translation/clinical research and teaching. Dennis will recruit new faculty, and integrate and align current faculty in the Kimmel Cancer Center on the East Baltimore campus and at Johns Hopkins Bayview. Dennis was previously a tenured senior investigator in medical oncology at the National Cancer Institute.

Anita Langford, vice president for care management services, has received this year’s William J. McCarthy Award from the Bayview board of trustees. The award recognizes Langford’s ability to go beyond expected standards of service and to skillfully juggle the operational oversight of the Johns Hopkins Bayview Care Center as well as hospital services, which include pharmacy, care management, social work, admissions, rehabilitation, patient relations, pastoral care and volunteer services. Langford came to Bayview (then Baltimore City Hospitals) in 1981 as the assistant director of Psychiatric Nursing. In 1985, she was named director of Nursing for the Mason F. Lord Chronic Hospital and Nursing Facility, which is now the Bayview Care Center. She then became administrator for the Care Center and senior director of long-term care. She has been a medical center vice president since 2004.

Kenneth M. Stuzin has been appointed to Bayview’s board of trustees. Stuzin is a partner at Brown Advisory, where he is responsible for managing the firm’s large-cap growth portfolios and is also the lead manager for the Brown Advisory Growth Equity Fund. Previously, Stuzin was vice president and portfolio manager at J.P. Morgan & Co. in Los Angeles. He is a graduate of Columbia University and received his MBA from the Columbia Business School.

 

KRIEGER SCHOOL OF ARTS AND
SCIENCES

Richard Kagan, the Arthur Oncken Lovejoy Professor of History in the Department of History, has received the 2011 Premio de Investigacion Humanistica Real Sociedad Menendez Pelayo for his book Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain, published in Spanish as Los Cronistas y la Corona: La Politica de la Historia en la Espana Medieval y Moderna. In accepting this honor in Spain in May, Kagan will present a lecture, to be published, before an audience of scholars and notables.

 

MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Three Johns Hopkins faculty members are among the men and women chosen as 2012’s Influential Marylanders by The Daily Record, Baltimore’s legal and business newspaper. Those cited as having made significant impacts in their fields and as leaders in the state are pediatric neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson and Cornelia Trimble of the Johns Hopkins Center for Cervical Dysplasia, both in the Health Care category, and astrophysicist Adam Riess, in the Technology category.

 

PEABODY INSTITUTE

The United States Marine Chamber Orchestra—known as The President’s Own—recently performed Southern Comforts by Music Theory faculty member Joel Puckett, with Staff Sgt. Sheng-Tsung Wang, a Peabody violin alumnus, as soloist. The performance was held Jan. 29 in the Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center at Northern Virginia Community College, in Alexandria, Va.

Distinguished Visiting Artist Shenyang and the Beijing Guitar Duo (Peabody Graduate Performance Diploma recipients Meng Su and Yameng Wang) took part in WQXR’s China in New York Festival, held Jan. 23 to 29.

Pianist Lior Willinger, a sophomore in Yong Hi Moon’s studio, won both the first prize and audience prize in the Camerata Virtuosi New Jersey Young Artists International Competition on Jan. 7. He will perform Prokofiev’s Third Concerto with the ensemble on April 14 at New York’s Symphony Space.

 

SAIS

Students Kyle Burgess, Elizabeth Hegedus-Berthold and Erik Leikin participated in the Pace/ICLN International Criminal Court Moot Competition round for the Americas and the Caribbean from Feb. 10 to 12 at Pace University School of Law in New York. Leikin won the Best Brief Defense award and Hegedus-Berthold took third place for Best Oralist.

 

SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Judith Carrithers has been appointed assistant dean for human research protection and director of the Human Research Protection Program in the Office of Human Subjects Research. A graduate of Stanford Law School and Seattle University’s master of public administration program, Carrithers joined Johns Hopkins in 2002. For the past nine years she has overseen implementation of the institutional review board electronic submission system, which allows researchers to prepare, submit and track their human subjects research applications online. She succeeds Barbara Starklauf, who retired in December.

Todd Dorman, senior associate dean for education coordination, associate dean for continuing medical education, and professor and vice chair for critical care in the Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, has been appointed to a three-year term on the board of directors of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education, the nation’s main accrediting body for CME. Dorman will serve on the ACCME’s Decision Committee, which reviews and provides final recommendations on accreditation status nationwide.

Jeanne Keruly, assistant professor of medicine and director of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Clinical Services program, has been named vice chair of the Greater Baltimore HIV Health Services Planning Council. Keruly, who also is operations manager of Johns Hopkins’ HIV Clinical Outcomes program, has been a member of the planning council since 1998.

Joanna Pearson, a 2010 graduate of the School of Medicine and a second-year resident in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, has received the 2012 Donald Justice Poetry Prize from West Chester University for her first collection of poetry, Oldest Mortal Myth. It will be published in June.

Thomas Quinn, professor of medicine and director of the Center for Global Health, was chosen to deliver the Benjamin Keane Lecture at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York last October, and will be given the University of Notre Dame’s Distinguished Alumnus Award this May.

 

SCHOOL OF NURSING

Five faculty members from Johns Hopkins are among the 14 nurse researchers who will be inducted into Sigma Theta Tau International’s International Researcher Hall of Fame. The prestigious award from nursing’s honor society recognizes “STTI nurse researchers from around the world who have achieved significant and sustained national and/or international recognition for their work and whose research has impacted the profession and the people it serves.” The Johns Hopkins recipients, who will be honored at STTI’s 23rd International Nursing Research Congress, to be held this summer in Brisbane, Australia, are Jerilyn K. Allen, associate dean for research and the M. Adelaide Nutting Professor in the Department of Acute and Chronic Care; Deborah Gross, the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor in Mental Health and Psychiatric Nursing; Pamela Jeffries, associate dean for academic affairs and a professor in Health Systems and Outcomes; Miyong Kim, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Health in Vulnerable Populations, professor and chair of the Department of Health Systems and Outcomes; and Marie Nolan, professor and chair of the Department of Acute and Chronic Care.

WHITING SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Seth Guikema, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, is the recipient of an NSF Faculty Early Career Development award. Guikema’s award will support his efforts to provide an approach for assessing the economic, environmental and social sustainability and reliability of interdependent power and water systems, particularly in areas susceptible to natural hazards such as hurricanes and earthquakes. His research will include the development of indicators for measuring trends in these areas as well as the creation of new computational frameworks for modeling these systems. Ultimately, Guikema’s work could enable improved and more-cost-effective methods for assessing and managing aging infrastructure systems in the United
States.