February 2004
Honors & Appointments
Sherene Fakhran, MD, MPH, a 2003 graduate of the Feinberg School of Medicine and first-year resident in internal medicine at the McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University, received the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award from Northwestern Memorial Hospital during a ceremony in January. Dr. Fakhran started a free clinic on Chicago’s South Side that offers health screenings and primary care services. This is the first time in the history of the award that it was given to a member of the hospital’s housestaff.
The American Academy on Physician and Patient has given its Lynn Payer Award to Gregory Makoul, PhD, associate professor of medicine and director of the Program in Communication & Medicine. The award recognizes his “outstanding contributions to the literature on the theory, practice, and teaching of effective health care communication and related skills.”
Stephen D. Miller, PhD, professor of microbiology—immunology and director of the Interdepartmental Immunobiology Center, has been invited to join a consortium of leading scientists in myelin research. The Myelin Repair Foundation announced on January 19 the formation of the consortium, which includes Dr. Miller and scientists from Stanford, McGill, and Case Western Reserve Universities and the University of Chicago. By combining these scientists’ resources and talents, the group expects to develop viable drug targets that restore the body’s natural ability to repair myelin and thus fight central nervous system diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
Darby J. Morhardt, MSW, research assistant professor in the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease Center, will receive the 2004 Mind/Alert Award at the Joint Conference of the American Society on Aging and the National Council on Aging that will be held April 14â17 in San Francisco. A winner in the Early-Stage Dementia Programs category, Morhardt is being honored for the Buddy Program, which provides opportunities for medical students to build relationships with persons who have Alzheimer’s disease or other related illnesses outside the clinical setting.
Thomas A. Volpe, PhD, assistant professor of cell and molecular biology, has received the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2003 Newcomb Cleveland Prize. He was nominated by readers of Science for his article, “Regulation of Heterochromatic Silencing and Histone H3 Lysine-9 Methylation by RNAi.”
On December 18, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare (ENH) held investiture ceremonies for four new endowed chairs. Hamid Band, MD, PhD, professor of medicine and director of the Division of Molecular Oncology at ENH, was named to the Jean Ruggles Romoser Chair of Cancer Research in recognition of his research on immune and inflammatory responses to disease, including breast cancer. The chair was established at ENH in 1989 by Mr. and Mrs. Randy Ruggles in memory of their daughter. Vimla Band, PhD, professor of medicine and director of the Division of Cancer Biology at ENH, received the Duckworth Family Chair of Breast Cancer Research. Dr. Band was the first person to develop the technique to grow breast cancer cells in culture and is investigating the molecular basis of the development of human breast cancer.
The Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Walgreen Jr. Chair of Interventional Cardiology was awarded to Ted Feldman, MD, professor of medicine and director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory at ENH. Internationally renowned for his work in interventional cardiology, Dr. Feldman recently developed a catheter-based technique for repairing leaky aortic and mitral heart valves. Todd K. Rosengart, MD, professor of surgery and head of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at ENH, became the first holder of the Owen L. Coon Chair of Cardiothoracic Surgery. A pioneer in gene therapy in cardiology, Dr. Rosengart leads a research team studying angiogenesis as a promising alternative to conventional bypass surgery and angioplasty. ENH was the first hospital in the world to participate in a clinical trial of angiogenesis genes for this purpose.