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BULLETINProceedings of the HMS Faculty CouncilAt the Nov. 20 Faculty Council meeting, Deborah Kuhn, HMS associate dean for planning and facilities, led a discussion of the survey on graduate student housing, including analysis of housing needs in the Longwood Medical Area. Compared to the rest of the University, the LMA population was found to be underserved. Harvard Planning and Real Estate (HPRE) and Kuhn's office are working to change this. Kuhn also reported that a similar housing survey for faculty and postdoctoral fellows is in the planning stages. Housing CrunchSusan Keller, director for residential real estate at HPRE, reported that only 20 percent of graduate students in the LMA, primarily those in their first year, are housed in University-owned residences. One remedy being considered is to purchase available properties or land, but both are scarce.Beth Shepard, assistant director for campus planning at HPRE, reported that only 27 percent of HMS students say they can afford to pay more than $800 per month for rent. Nike Damaskos, assistant director for faculty real estate services at HPRE, said her office offers a range of services, most of which are available to anyone with a Harvard ID. These include apartments owned and managed by the University that are primarily located in Cambridge; a Harvard community listing network that posts rental and sublet opportunities from area landlords and real estate brokers; and a real estate assistance program. Additionally, there are several internal programs that offer home ownership opportunities to full-time faculty of assistant professor rank or higher who receive a salary through Harvard. These include the Pleasant Street condominiums in Cambridge that are currently under development. Pamela Dunn, assistant director for residential housing and leasing services, told the council that HPRE also maintains a database of roommate-wanted listings that is available at the University. The current database has over 1,000 listings, primarily in Cambridge. Once a housing office is opened in the LMA, HPRE will seek to expand the database to include listings for the area. Shepard reported that the president and the provost of the University recently convened four committees to oversee academic planning for renewal and expansion on all four Harvard campuses: Cambridge, Allston, LMA, and Watertown. There is a special focus on the Allston opportunities. The four committees are focused on topical areas: graduate schools, sciences, housing, and cultural facilities. Sally Zeckhauser, vice president of administration, is chairing the housing committee, which has been meeting since May and has examined all aspects of housing need. Several options are currently being reviewed. Part-time AppointmentsLinda Heffner, vice chair of the Faculty Council, and Eleanor Shore, dean for faculty affairs, led a discussion on part-time appointments in the Faculty of Medicine.Shore reported that a substantial proportion of the faculty at lower ranks are part-time: 43.2 percent of instructors, 19.9 percent of assistant professors, 14.3 percent of associate professors, and 8.4 percent of professors. More men than women hold part-time positions: 61.9 percent of part-time instructors, 78.6 percent of part-time assistant professors, and 88.5 percent of part-time associate professors are men. The four departments with the largest number of part-time faculty are psychiatry, medicine, pediatrics, and obstetrics and gynecology. Part-time faculty are subject to conflict-of-interest policies but are not subject to compensation guidelines. Heffner expressed concern about whether the contributions to the academic mission of the School by part-time and annual appointees are adequately tracked and whether the teaching resources of these groups in the clinical departments are made sufficiently available to the Medical School. Observing that an unknown number of part-time faculty make use of their Harvard titles and of the Harvard logo (which may convey prestige and help to attract patients), she expressed concern that some of these individuals may be providing little in return to the School. Further, since the large instructor population is reappointed annually by departments, there is little School-wide accountability once these appointments are made. Heffner pointed out that the HMS System of Titles and Appointments (the Purple Book) states that clinical faculty in clinical departments, including instructors, are expected to teach medical students at least 50 hours per year as an obligation of their faculty appointment, when asked to do so. Department heads are responsible for deciding the relative contributions of different faculty, but the needs of medical student courses, as determined by the Council of Masters, must be met. Other contributions, including teaching of residents and fellows, may be used by department heads to offset the obligation to medical student education. If the entire faculty were held to a 50-hour teaching obligation, many more hours than needed would be available. Despite this potential excess, course directors routinely have great difficulty getting faculty to make a commitment to teaching medical students in certain prescribed courses. Heffner reminded the council that documentation of teaching and research activities is scrutinized by the Promotions and Reappointments Committee when assistant and associate professors are brought up for promotion or appointment, to ensure that they fulfill their academic obligations. However, the vast majority of faculty, who are instructors and lecturers, do not undergo a facultywide review of the documentation for academic activity since the appointments are renewed annually. Questions that need to be addressed include, How can department chairs be assisted in documenting academic contributions of annual appointees? How can these appointees be made accountable for their academic obligations to the Medical School? Should annual appointments be terminated for lack of academic contributions?
Junior Faculty Receive Biomedical Awards >Junior faculty members Charles Weitz (left) and Jim Kim were each awarded an Outstanding Achievement in Biomedical Science Award in November, underwritten by Gulf Oil Limited Partnership. This second annual award recognizes outstanding scientific achievement by junior faculty at HMS. It provides recipients with support for career enhancement: funding for a piece of essential research equipment, a laboratory technician, a stipend for a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow, or support for the exploration of an innovative research idea. Weitz, an HMS associate professor of neurobiology, focuses his research on the molecular biology and genetics of circadian clocks, endogenous oscillators that drive daily rhythms in behavior and physiology. Kim, an HMS assistant professor of medical anthropology in the Department of Social Medicine at HMS and chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at Brigham and Women's Hospital, is recognized as one of the world's leading experts on drug-resistant tuberculosis and is executive director of Partners in Health, a Harvard-affiliated nonprofit that supports health projects in poor communities in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. (Photo by Jeff Thiebauth)
Beth Israel and Takeda Chemical Join Forces For Metabolic Disease ResearchTakeda Chemical Industries and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center announced a research agreement to investigate the molecular basis of diabetes and obesity and to develop new therapies for these metabolic diseases. Takeda, Japan's largest pharmaceutical firm, will fund the research at Beth Israel Deaconess with $13.7 million over the next three years. The agreement could be extended for an additional two years and be worth another $10 million. As part of the research agreement, Takeda will have an exclusive option to negotiate a license to new intellectual property derived from the collaboration. BID will gain resources to develop important core facilities in animal metabolic physiology, mass spectrometry, and proteomics. The multidisciplinary research team will be led by Jeffrey Flier, chief academic officer at BID and the George C. Reisman professor of medicine at HMS. Principal investigators are Barbara Kahn, chief of endocrinology at BID and HMS professor of medicine; Bradford Lowell, genetic specialist and HMS associate professor of medicine; Joel Elmquist, neurologist and HMS associate professor of medicine; Anthony Hollenberg, thyroid specialist and HMS assistant professor of medicine; and Lewis Cantley, chief of the Division of Signal Transduction at BID and HMS professor of medicine. BID and Takeda researchers will collaborate on several specific projects designed to elucidate the biological mechanisms of diabetes and obesity, with the overall goal of discovering novel proteins and drug targets.
Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women's Rename Collaborative Cancer ServicesTo better reflect the collaborative, fully integrated services they provide in adult cancer care, Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have newly named these services the Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center. The services each offers as part of the DFCI/BWH Cancer Center will remain the same: DFCI provides outpatient oncology services including infusion, radiation therapy, and multispecialty clinics, and BWH offers inpatient oncology through the jointly managed DFCI and BWH inpatient beds, as well as outpatient surgery, radiation oncology, and selected specialized outpatient-clinic and ancillary services. The two institutions have been providing services jointly since 1997 as part of the Dana-Farber/Partners CancerCare collaborative program in adult oncology, which was established in 1996 and includes services at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Tosteson Award For Leadership in Medical EducationThe Carl J. Shapiro Institute for Education and Research at HMS and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center has named Ruth-Marie Fincher, vice dean for academic affairs at the Medical College of Georgia, as the recipient of the 2003 Daniel C. Tosteson Award for Leadership in Medical Education. The award will be presented May 2 during the Millennium Conference III on the continuum of clinical training in graduate and undergraduate medical education, cosponsored by the Shapiro Institute and the Association of American Medical Colleges. Named for the former HMS dean of the Faculty of Medicine, the award recognizes an individual for major contributions to medical education at a national level.
Honors and AdvancesThe Radiologic Society of North America has honored Barbara Weissman, HMS professor of radiology, and Ferenc Jolesz, the B. Leonard Holman professor of radiology, both at Brigham and Women's Hospital, with the 2002 Outstanding Educator and Outstanding Scientist Awards, respectively. These lifetime achievement awards were presented at the society's meeting in December. For the second consecutive year, eHealthcare Strategy and Trends, an online monthly on Internet strategies, has awarded Aetna InteliHealth (www. intelihealth.com) with its Platinum Award in the category of "best health/ health care content of a consumer general health site." The medical content for the site is provided by HMS through Harvard Health Publications under the direction of Howard Lewine, chief editor of HMS Internet publishing for Intelihealth. The Inflammation Research Association has awarded the 2002 C. Gordon Van Arman Award to Elvire Gouze-Decaris, HMS instructor in orthopedic surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. The annual award encourages exploratory and applied research in inflammation. Robert Friedlander, HMS associate professor of surgery and associate director of cerebrovascular surgery in the Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital, is the recipient of the Charcot Young Investigator Prize for his research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and related disorders. Four residents were honored during the eighth annual John A. Mannick Award ceremony held by the Department of Surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Recipients of the award were Tippi MacKenzie, Caprice Christian, Saeid Farivar, and Lynn Chang. Stephen Corn, HMS associate professor of anesthesia at Brigham and Women's Hospital, received the first Brigham and Women's Physician Organization Recognition Award for clinical innovation. He also received a 2002 Partners in Excellence Award from Partners HealthCare. Anders Näär, HMS assistant professor of cell biology at Massachusetts General Hospital, has been chosen to receive a Damon Runyon Scholar Award from the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation. The award carries a cash prize of $100,000 per year for three years to help outstanding scientists establish their own research labs. Kristian Olson of the Internal Medicine Department at Massachusetts General Hospital was named the first Thomas S. Durant, MD, Fellow in Refugee Medicine. Olson will go to London to study tropical diseases, then travel to the Thailand-Burma border to care for refugees. The fellowship is named for the MGH physician and humanitarian who offered compassion and care to refugees and victims of war and disaster. Steven Kalkanis, HMS clinical fellow in surgery and chief resident in neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, won first place in the 2002 American College of Surgeons Best Resident Paper Competition. His research project, "Stereotactic Intraspinal Stem Cell Transplantation as a Novel Therapy in ALS," described increases in survival after stem cell transplantation in transgenic mice with the spinal degeneration syndrome of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Kalkanis performed this work in collaboration with Robert Brown, HMS professor of neurology, in the Day Neuromuscular Laboratory at MGH. The Plastic Surgery Educational Foundation presented Robert Goldwyn, HMS clinical professor of surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, with the 2002 Distinguished Service Award, its highest honor. Goldwyn was recognized for his 30 years of contributions to the National Archives of Plastic Surgery, which he founded at the Countway Library. He continues to chair the committee of the archives, the largest collection of material relating to the origin and development of plastic surgery in the world. eHealthcare Strategy and Trends, an online monthly on Internet strategies, chose the Brigham and Women's Hospital women's health website (www.brighamandwomens.org/womenshealth) to receive the gold medal for 2002 Best Overall Site in the hospital subsite category. The American College of Rheumatology presented its 2002 Award of Distinction for Clinical Research to Matthew Liang, HMS professor of medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital and HSPH professor of health policy and management. It is the highest award given by the organization and recognizes clinical research that has led to a direct impact.
In Memoriam Paul New, former HMS associate professor of radiology and former chief of neuroradiology at Massachusetts General Hospital, died Dec. 31, 2002. He was 80. A British citizen, New was born in Kobe, Japan and graduated from Guy's Hospital College at the University of London in 1945. He served as chief of neuroradiology at MGH from 1964 until 1975, retiring from both MGH and HMS in 1992. New helped advance the use of computer-aided tomography and magnetic resonance imaging as regular parts of diagnostic testing. He was influential in bringing the first CAT scanner to MGH in the early '70s. He also was the first to organize an international medical symposium on computer tomography. In 1975, New cowrote with W.R. Scott Computed Tomography of the Brain and Orbit, the first textbook of its kind and for several years the standard in the field. He served for seven years as associate editor of the American Journal of Neuroradiology and was a member of the editorial boards for several other journals. He is survived by his wife, Ann; two daughters, Christina Pandapas and Stephanie Berube of Holliston, Mass.; a brother, Eric of Halifax, Nova Scotia; and four grandchildren. |
