Proceedings of the HMS Faculty Council

At the Faculty Council meeting on March 8, Joseph Martin, dean of the Faculty of Medicine, updated the council on his recent meetings with outgoing Harvard president Lawrence Summers and the senior leadership of the University, including former Harvard president Derek Bok. Bok will assume interim leadership of the University until a new president is chosen. Martin conveyed Summers’s hope that the work of the University and the schools would continue to move forward. The Harvard Corporation continues to support the major science planning efforts under way. Martin assured the council that he would provide continuing updates.

The dean commented on the Medical Education Reform Initiative and noted that its executive committee has endorsed a plan for funding the new curriculum, which was to be presented at the department heads’ retreat in late April.

Martin and Raphael Dolin, HMS dean for academic and clinical programs, have been meeting with the leadership of Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital regarding the search for a new head of the Department of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine. The search committee will have Harvard-wide representation and include faculty from the hospitals.

Martin also addressed the departmental review program, in which four of the nine basic and social science departments have already undergone reviews. In two cases, reviews have helped to identify new leadership. In addition, 30 of the 45 clinical departments have been reviewed so far.

Charles Hatem, director of the new Academy Center for Teaching and Learning at HMS, explained that the new center will develop and implement faculty educational programs, assess faculty teaching, and support the faculty in their educational activities as an element in academic advancement. Hatem discussed the strategies for effective teaching and the domains of faculty development.

Edward Krupat, director of evaluation at HMS, provided an overview of the activities of the Center for Evaluation. The mission of the center is to collect, provide, and utilize information about courses, clerkships, faculty, and educational programs at HMS to assist in decision-making. The center oversees faculty evaluations of students; student evaluations of faculty, courses, and clerkships; and the objective structured clinical exams.

The Center for Evaluation will be working with the new Center for Teaching and Learning to survey faculty attitudes about teaching, with the Advising Resources Office to identify students in need of support, and with the Promotions and Review Board. The center will also work with the clerkship directors to improve the grading process by developing new forms and providing feedback for the clerkships, and it will be involved in the evaluation of the current pilot clerkships.

Ellice Lieberman provided an update on promotions. In 2005, 356 promotions to assistant and associate professor were reviewed by the Promotions and Reappointments Committee. She noted a three- to four-month lag between receiving promotions and P&R review, citing a 33 percent increase in full-time faculty over the past five years and a 50 percent increase in proposed promotions since 2003 as reasons for the delay.

Actions taken to address the problem include creation of a second P&R Committee, consolidation of the promotions process in the Office of Faculty Affairs, and goal setting for efficiency.

Other initiatives planned include creating databases to track the promotion process; moving to a web-based promotion process that would also allow candidates to check the status of their promotion; improving guidance for preparing CV and promotion materials; revising the Purple Book; and creating a task force to review promotion criteria for clinical investigators and clinical teachers.

Clapham Named to NAS

David Clapham, the Aldo R. Castaneda professor of cardiovascular research at Children’s Hospital Boston and a Howard Hughes investigator, is one of the 72 members and 18 foreign associates newly elected to the National Academy of Sciences. The NAS, a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to the advance of science, chooses new members on the basis of their achievements in original research.

Clapham’s lab studies the elucidation of signaling pathways involving cardiac effector and receptor molecules. Recent studies have examined the role of ion channels, G protein–linked receptors, and intracellular calcium signaling in cardiac dysfunction. He has been widely honored for his contributions to understanding the structure and function of G protein–gated K+ channels.

News Brief

A group of HMS students received a $280 grant from the AAMC to host a series of events on campus as part of “Cover the Uninsured Week.” The weeklong program to raise awareness of the number of uninsured patients in the United States occurs at medical schools across the nation. Events at HMS include lectures and poster displays and are running from May 1 until May 8.

New Appointments to Full Professor

The following faculty members were appointed in February.

Richard Born
Professor of Neurobiology
Harvard Medical School
Born’s lab studies the brain circuits that underlie the ability to perceive visual motion and to use that information to guide behavior, such as the eye movements used to track a moving target. Recently his team has helped to discern how fine-scale motion measurements made at many different local regions of an image are integrated to provide reliable representations of the trajectory of a complex object.

Marsha Moses
Professor of Surgery
Children’s Hospital Boston
In her research, Moses focuses on the biochemical and molecular regulation of angiogenesis, particularly during early tumor establishment, progression, and metastasis. She has discovered and characterized several endogenous angiogenesis inhibitors and established the mechanism of action for a subset of these. The Moses lab is also trying to identify the molecular determinants of the acquisition of the angiogenic phenotype during early tumor growth. To complement these studies, she has established a proteomics initiative in her laboratory that led to the discovery of a panel of urinary cancer biomarkers that predict disease status in cancer patients and are sensitive and specific predictors of disease progression and therapeutic efficacy.

Gregory Stahl
Professor of Anesthesia (Physiology)
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Stahl’s research centers on the role of the innate immune system, particularly the complement system, in cardiovascular disease. His research addresses the role of specific complement components and the activation pathways involved in the initiation of inflammation, its resolution, and tissue injury during myocardial and gastrointestinal abnormalities. Another area of his work involves high-throughput screening of samples to establish the role of the innate immune system and outcomes in various clinical abnormalities. He is also involved in cardiovascular-related collaborations in basic science and medicine.

Christopher A. Walsh
Professor of Pediatrics
Children’s Hospital Boston
Walsh’s research focuses on the development of the brain’s cerebral cortex, especially development of the features that distinguish the human cerebral cortex from that of other animals. His laboratory identifies genes that are disrupted to cause neurological diseases of children such as mental retardation, epilepsy, and autism, and it analyzes the mechanisms of action of these genes in animal models. He is also the Bullard professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and director of the MD–PhD Program basic sciences track at HMS.

The following faculty members were appointed in March.

Christopher Baker
Professor of Surgery
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Baker investigates sepsis in the ICU, focusing on immunologic issues following trauma. Recently, his academic interests have involved trauma in the elderly and trauma system development. In addition to being chief of Trauma and Surgical Critical Care at Beth Israel, Baker is the hospital’s program director for the surgery residency.

Thomas Glick
Professor of Neurology
Cambridge Hospital
As a neurologic clinician-educator and patient safety activist, Glick has concentrated on issues that have confused learners and affected outcomes, such as erroneous diagnoses of hysterical conversion disorders, communicating about memory disorders, preventing drug toxicity, and identifying inefficiencies in the neurologic examination. In general medical education, he has explored the use of patient outcomes to guide curricula and drawn from New Pathway experiences in neuroscience education to inform teaching in the United States and abroad through Harvard Medical International.

Jack Gorman
Professor of Psychiatry
President and Psychiatrist-in-Chief
McLean Hospital
Gorman’s research involves the neurobiology and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders. His current NIH grants deal with neuroimaging, endocrinology, cardiovascular physiology, and treatment of patients with panic disorder. He has also done extensive research into the neurobiology of schizophrenia and the central nervous system consequences of HIV infection. His work is aimed at translating basic neuroscience findings into treatments for patients with psychiatric disease.

Massimo Loda
Professor of Pathology
Dana–Farber Cancer Institute
Loda’s research focuses on the application of molecular pathology techniques to the study of carcinogenesis, specifically biomarker discovery in human solid tumors. His group discovered, for example, that the loss of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p27 is associated with aggressive biologic behavior of colon cancer. His more recent work addressed the role of deubiquitinating enzymes in prostate cancer as regulators of apoptosis. Loda has clinical responsibilities as a senior surgical pathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, with subspecialty interest in genito-urinary pathology.

Alvaro Pascual-Leone
Professor of Neurology
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Pascual-Leone’s research aims at understanding the mechanisms that control brain plasticity across the life span. Pascual-Leone combines various brain imaging and brain stimulation methodologies to establish a causal relationship and a precise chronometry between regional brain activation and behavior. He uses noninvasive brain stimulation techniques to modulate brain plasticity, suppressing some changes and enhancing others, to gain a clinical benefit and behavioral advantage for individual patients. Such noninvasive approaches can lead to clinically relevant therapeutic effects in neuropsychiatry and neurorehabilitation, and serve as proof-of-principle prior to more invasive neuromodulatory interventions.

Charles Serhan
Professor of Oral Medicine, Infection, and Immunity
Harvard School of Dental Medicine
Serhan’s research centers on structural elucidation of novel bioactive chemical mediators and regulation of the acute inflammatory response. His recent research efforts have uncovered three new families of lipid mediators—resolvins, protectins, and neuroprotectins—that are biosynthesized in vivo and act as endogenous anti-inflammatory chemical mediators as well as novel proresolving mediators. At HSDM, he will focus on mapping the resolution pathways critical in inflammation and specifically in the resolution of oral inflammation. His goal is to map the unique molecular terrain in active resolution to provide new directions for the clinical management of oral inflammation and related inflammatory disorders. Serhan is also the Simon Gelman professor of anesthesia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Bruce Yankner
Professor of Pathology
Harvard Medical School
Bruce Yankner is the co-director of the new Glenn Aging Laboratories. He is also the director of the training program in neurodegeneration at HMS. His research involves molecular, cellular, and genomic approaches to understanding the aging of the brain, and the interface of aging with the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Yankner is also an HMS professor of neurology.

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