Richmond Award Announced

HSPH presented the 2006 Richmond Award to William Foege (below left), founder of the Task Force for Child Survival and Development, and Anthony Fauci (below right), director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The award, named for former U.S. Surgeon General and HMS professor emeritus of health policy Julius Richmond, is given to those who promote high public health standards among vulnerable populations.

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Foege, former director of the CDC, is best known for his smallpox vaccination containment strategy, which he implemented in Nigeria in the 1970s. This method is credited with eventually eradicating smallpox worldwide. He founded the Task Force for Child Survival and Development in 1984 with the goal of universal vaccination for all children. Currently, Foege is a senior adviser to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program.

Fauci’s work has focused on HIV and AIDS. His research demonstrating that HIV is never latent in the body and is never fully cleared by drugs changed the way HIV/AIDS was studied and treated. He has also done important work on the way HIV destroys the body’s defenses and on the development of an HIV preventive vaccine.

Appointments to Full and Named Professorships

Below are faculty appointed to professorships in August and September.

Jack Shonkoff
HSPH Professor of Child Health and Development
Children’s Hospital Boston
Shonkoff’s work has focused on early childhood development. He chaired a committee of the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council that produced From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood. This report on child development led to the founding of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, which Shonkoff chairs. The council is currently working with civic leaders and policymakers to shape policy based on their findings.

David Williams
Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health
Harvard School of Public Health
Williams recently joined the HSPH faculty from the University of Michigan, where his research has focused on individual and societal determinants of health. He has studied the contribution of residential segregation and neighborhood quality to disparities in death rates. He has also reported on the effect on physical health that encounters with discrimination have on African-American women. Williams’s work has taken him to South Africa, where he has studied the impact of religion, torture, and violence on health. He recently completed a national mental health study in South Africa and is now studying the data.

E. Francis Cook
Professor of Medicine
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Cook is a co-director of the Harvard Summer Program in Clinical Effectiveness. His major research interests include the application of multivariable methods to control confounding, the development and evaluation of instruments to measure health status and quality of care, data mining, and the development and validation of clinical prediction rules.

Alan Hilgenberg
Clinical Professor of Surgery
Massachusetts General Hospital
Hilgenberg’s research involves brain protection during aortic arch reconstruction and long-term results of pericardial tissue valve conduits for aortic root aneurysm repair. He has developed a method of cerebral monitoring and simplified antegrade selective cerebral perfusion used during hypothermic circulatory arrest for aortic arch repair. He has a long-standing interest in aortic root reconstruction, and he is evaluating the late results of his large series of aortic root repair with a unique tissue valve conduit. He is a co-director of the Thoracic Aortic Center at MGH.

Rosalind Segal
Professor of Neurobiology
Dana–Farber Cancer Institute
Segal’s research focuses on extracellular growth factors that regulate the developing brain. She helped define the multiple roles played by neurotrophins and Hedgehog proteins in the central and peripheral nervous system. Her work has identified pathways critical in regulating the proliferation, survival, and migration of developing neural precursors, and demonstrated that one of the parameters that determines the response is the subcellular location of stimulation. She has addressed the implications of these studies for neuro-oncology by analyzing ways growth factors that regulate the normal microenvironments of the developing brain can instead lead to growth of brain tumors in children and adults.

Honors and Advances

Robert Goldwyn, HMS clinical professor of surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, will be presented with Rofeh International’s Distinguished Service Award at a dinner on Nov. 19. The award is given to individuals demonstrating lifelong humanitarian service in patient care or medical research. Goldwyn is being honored for his active participation in the organization, which refers patients from all over the world to Boston doctors and offers them accommodations and assistance while in the city.

The Institute of Medicine has named Roderick King, HMS instructor in social medicine, as one of the first IOM Anniversary Fellows. The Anniversary Fellows Program, which was created to celebrate the IOM’s 35th anniversary, provides a two-year stipend of $25,000 so that fellows can devote 10 to 20 percent of their time to participating in an IOM study committee or roundtable. King was the youngest director of the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration and is currently the director of the Oral Health Foundation of Massachusetts.

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