Donald Ingber, HMS Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology in the Department of Pathology at Boston Children’s Hospital and core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, has been elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies, one of the highest honors in the field of medicine in the United States.
The IOM, with more than 1,700 members and foreign associates, recognizes individuals who have made seminal contributions to medicine, healthcare and public health. Its members serve on committees and boards that advise government agencies, policy makers and professionals on healthcare issues.
Ingber is being honored for his broad contributions to the field of biologically inspired engineering, and his pioneering interdisciplinary work in mechanobiology, angiogenesis and cell structure.
Stephen Elledge, HMS Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, will receive the American-Italian Cancer Foundation’s 2012 Prize for Scientific Excellence in Medicine in November. The award is for Elledge’s application of genetic approaches to address key issues in cancer, including cell-cycle control, regulation of protein stability and the stable maintenance of the genome. He discovered the first CDK inhibitor, the p53-regulated p21Cip1 protein, and the Beckwith-Wiedemann gene, p57KIP2. He pioneered the DNA damage response pathway as a signal transduction pathway that controls the transcriptional response to DNA damage through p53 and other factors and directly orchestrates DNA repair pathways. He discovered a family of modular ubiquitin ligases that control the stability of hundreds of proteins in response to signal transduction and regulate many proteins critical to cancer biology.
Ronald DePinho, the founding director of the Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a former professor of medicine at HMS will receive the American-Italian Cancer Foundation’s 2012 Prize for Scientific Excellence in Medicine. He is currently president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, HMS professor of global health and social medicine, was awarded the Silver Magnolia Award by the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government at an award ceremony held in Shanghai in September. The Silver Magnolia Award is given in recognition of outstanding contributions by foreigners to Shanghai’s economic, social and cultural development.
Representatives of the Shanghai Mental Health Center, commended DelVecchio Good and her collaborator, Byron Good, HMS professor of medical anthropology and professor in the department of anthropology at Harvard, for “their dedication to mental health services in Shanghai and to policy advice and capacity building of public mental health leaders. Through the years of their effort, they have made significant contributions to forming the city’s mental health policy.”
DelVecchio Good, Good and Arthur Kleinman, HMS professor of medical anthropology and psychiatry and Esther and Sidney Rabb professor of anthropology at Harvard have directed two research and training grants in collaboration with the Shanghai Mental Health Center. From 2002-2012 they directed the Training Program in International Mental Health as part of the International Clinical, Operational and Health Services Research Training Award, funded by the Fogarty International Center of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. In 2012, they began a new program, Building Research Capacity to Improve Mental Health in China across the Lifespan, also funded by the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health.
Benjamin Warf, HMS associate professor of surgery and director of the neonatal and congenital anomaly neurosurgery program at Boston Children’s Hospital, received a 2012 MacArthur Foundation fellowship, often referred to as the “genius grant.” This award is an unrestricted fellowship given to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.
Principles of Pharmacology (3rd edition) received first prize in the pharmacology category at the 2012 British Medical Association Medical Book Awards. This textbook is by David Golan, HMS Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and dean for graduate education; the late Armen Tashjian, professor of toxicology, emeritus, in the Department of Genetics and Complex Diseases at Harvard School of Public Health; and Ehrin Armstrong and April Armstrong at UC Davis.
