Medical students from all four years nominated Eugene Silinsky, PhD, professor in the Department of Pharmacology, to be the 2015 Harry N. Beaty Honors Day Speaker.
“I am delighted and humbled to be chosen as the 2015 Honors Day speaker,” Silinsky said. “This Honors Day serves the important function of recognizing the exceptional achievements of the Class of 2015. It also provides me with the opportunity to thank the medical students for all they have given me.”
Honors Day, a campus-wide event to recognize excellence in teaching, research and patient care, will take place on Friday, May 15, 2015, at 11 a.m. More than two dozen individual honors will be bestowed on faculty, trainees and students.
“Honors Day is a wonderful tradition that allows us to recognize students who have excelled in clinical rotations and faculty who have truly impacted students through classroom or bedside teaching,” said Diane Wayne, ’91 MD, vice dean of Education. “Interacting with our talented medical students is one of the best parts of being a faculty member at Feinberg. Honors Day showcases some of our best and brightest and allows all of us to reflect on the privilege we have to learn, teach and improve the health of our patients.”
For almost twenty years, Silinsky served as chair of the former Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry.
Silinsky’s research focuses on neuromuscular transmission and its modulation at both voluntary (skeletal) and involuntary (autonomic) neuromuscular junctions. His lab found adenosine and adenosine triphosphate (ATP), molecules implicated as important components of metabolic pathways and in the subtle control of the rate of chemical reaction, to be essential modulators of neuronal function and also to be neurotransmitters in the mammalian nervous system.
Silinsky received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2007, and the George H. Joost Award for Teaching Excellence in the Scientific Basis of Medicine in 2008 and 2011.