Extraordinary Number from HMS Elected to IOM

Nine faculty members from HMS are among the 65 new appointees to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the National Academy of Sciences. The IOM is both an honorific-membership organization and an advisory group that analyzes health issues and makes recommendations on national health policy. The new members from HMS are listed below (pictured at right, alphabetical from left to right, top to bottom).

Alfred Goldberg
Professor of Cell Biology
Harvard Medical School
The Goldberg lab studies why protein breakdown is important for the body’s immune defenses, why the destruction process goes into high gear in certain disease states such as cancer and how this excessive destruction can be controlled.

Daniel Haber
Kurt J. Isselbacher/Peter D. Schwartz Professor of Medicine  
Massachusetts General Hospital
Haber’s laboratory is interested in the genetics of cancer, with primary emphasis on the characterization of tumor suppressor genes implicated in breast cancer and Wilms tumor, and the identification of somatic mutations linked to drug susceptibility in lung cancer. He is a Howard Hughes investigator and director of the MGH Cancer Center, The MGH Center for Cancer Research, and the MGH Center for Cancer Risk Assessment

Isaac Kohane
Lawrence J. Henderson Professor of Pediatrics
Children’s Hospital Boston
Associate Professor of Medicine
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Kohane, who is also director of the Countway Library, leads multiple collaborations at HMS and its hospital affiliates in the use of genomics and computer science to study cancer and the development of the brain, with an emphasis on autism, and his work has led to the development of cryptographic health identification systems, automated personal health records and peer-to-peer pathology information networks.

Joan Reede
Dean for Diversity and Community Partnership
Harvard Medical School
As head of the Office for Diversity and Community Partnership, Reede oversees a variety of programs designed to increase the number of minority faculty at HMS; increase the number of minority physicians and scientists who undertake their postgraduate medical education at one of the 17 HMS-affiliated institutions; establish model programs for the development of minority faculty with an emphasis on mentoring and leadership; and create programs designed to reach out to young people with the goal of bringing outstanding, underrepresented minority students into the pipeline. 

Gary Ruvkun
Professor of Genetics
Massachusetts General Hospital
Ruvkun, who played a role in the discovery of microRNAs, currently investigates longevity and fat storage and has shown that C. elegans uses an insulin-signaling pathway to control its metabolism and longevity and that insulin signaling in the nervous system is key to lifespan.

Clifford Saper
James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
The focus of the Saper laboratory is on the integrated functions maintained by the hypothalamus, which include the regulation of wake–sleep cycles, body temperature, and feeding, with the goal of identifying the neuronal circuitry that is involved in regulating these responses and how specific neurological and psychiatric disorders can disrupt these responses in the human brain.

Megan Sykes
Harold and Ellen Danser Professor of Surgery 
Professor of Medicine
Massachusetts General Hospital
Sykes’s research program aims to utilize blood or bone marrow transplantation as immunotherapy to achieve graft-versus-tumor effects while avoiding rejection, and her lab is investigating clinically feasible, nontoxic methods of re-educating the T cell, B cell and natural killer cell components of the immune system to accept transplants from the same or different species without requiring long-term antirejection therapy.

Bruce Walker
Professor of Medicine
Massachusetts General Hospital
Walker researches the cellular immune response to human viral pathogens, particularly HIV-1 and hepatitis C virus, with a focus on the immune control of acute viral infections, viral evolution under immune selection pressure, antigen processing and immunodominance, and “elite controllers” of HIV, who are people able to live with HIV without the need for medications.

Ralph Weissleder
Professor of Radiology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Weissleder studies in vivo molecular imaging, which has led to the development of novel technologies such as magnetic nanoparticles for MRI and enzyme activatable probes for the detection of early cancers by minimally invasive techniques such as laparoscopy. He is currently investigating the use of molecular libraries and screens and nanomaterials and exploring ways of imaging and tracking individual cell populations in vivo, especially stem cells.

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