Community (2/5/10)

Website Lets Faculty Track Their Promotion Process

The Office for Faculty Affairs has debuted a new website that will enable department heads, academic deans and candidates for promotion to track and review the professorial promotion process. The website provides weekly status updates regarding the achievement of key milestones in the process, a description of the activities associated with each, contact information for the Dean’s Office representative for each case and historical information regarding the typical time required to achieve each milestone.

The website can be accessed with an eCommons login at https://hms.harvard.edu/profpromotion. Only the key individuals associated with each case (the academic dean, the department head, the chief promotion administrator for the department head and the candidate) will have access to the site. The Office for Faculty Affairs will contact each candidate to inform him or her of the availability of the site at the start of the promotion review. The site will reflect only the promotion activities that take place at HMS and HSDM.

Changing of the Guard Comes to Ombuds Office

Melissa Brodrick has been appointed HMS’s new ombudsperson, effective Feb. 1. In this role, she will serve as a designated impartial and informal dispute resolution practitioner whose major function is to provide confidential and informal assistance to the constituents of HMS, HSDM, HSPH and appointees at the affiliated institutions.

Brodrick comes to HMS with 25 years’ experience in dispute and conflict resolution. She has worked in private practice, helping clients engage in effective communications and problem- solving while navigating high-impact workplace and family issues. She has also worked with academic institutions, including Harvard’s Law School, Kennedy School of Government and HSPH. She is the recipient of numerous awards in her field, including the Pioneer Award from the New England Chapter of the Association of Conflict Resolution and the Community Peacemaker Award from the Community Dispute Settlement Center.

Brodrick steps into a role that has been held for nearly two decades by Linda Wilcox, who will be retiring on Feb. 12. Wilcox has served as ombudsperson since the office’s inception in 1991.

Grants Advance Minority Health, Women of Color

The Center of Excellence in Minority Health and Health Disparities (COE), directed by Joan Reede, HMS dean for diversity and community partnership, has recently received a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services. The COE, under the direction of the Minority Faculty Development Program within the HMS Office for Diversity and Community Partnership, supports underrepresented minority students and faculty, provides training in cultural competency, and serves as a resource for students and faculty interested in minority health and health disparities research. The grant will provide more than $2 million over three years.

In addition, Reede has received a grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to study the career development of women of color in academic medicine. While previous research has identified barriers to the career progression of women and minority faculty, this study will seek to clarify the factors that influence the entry, progression, persistence and advancement of underrepresented minority female medical school faculty. The Office for Diversity and Community Partnership is conducting the research in collaboration with 12 other medical schools across the country. The goals of the study are to contribute to the understanding of factors that are crucial to the success of women of color in academic medicine and to provide a foundation on which to build policies and programs. The grant will provide $1.7 million over four years.

Candidates Sought for Rabkin Fellowship

The Shapiro Institute for Education and Research is pleased to announce the call for applications for the 2010–2011 Rabkin Fellowship in Medical Education. The Rabkin Fellowship is open to faculty with a primary appointment at HMS and who currently teach at a Harvard-affiliated institution. The goals are to help faculty develop and enhance their skills as medical educators; provide faculty with an opportunity to conduct research or undertake a project in an area of importance in medical education; support the fellows as educational leaders and change agents within the academic medical center; and create a community of educators who strive to improve the field of medical education. The deadline for receipt of applications is Friday, Feb. 26, at 5 p.m. Fellowship awards will be announced in April.

The request for applications and application instructions may be found at www.bidmc.org/rabkinfellowship. For more information, contact Jacqueline Almeida, education specialist, Shapiro Institute for Education and Research, at 617-667- 0908 or jmalmeid@bidmc.harvard.edu.

Proceedings of the HMS Faculty Council

Dean Jeffrey Flier began the Dec. 2 Faculty Council meeting by introducing Jack Szostak, HMS professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Szostak gave his Nobel acceptance lecture, concerning the winning discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.

Flier then introduced Nicholas Christakis, HMS professor of medical sociology in the Department of Health Care Policy and professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who gave a presentation on the genetic basis of social networks.

The following speaker, Jules Dienstag, dean for medical education, gave an update on the site visit by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), to take place from March 6 through 11, 2011. Dienstag explained that the visit is preceded by an institutional self-study that will be developed by the School’s LCME subcommittees.

These subcommittees are the following: Governance and Administration, chaired by Nancy Tarbell, dean for academic and clinical affairs; Finances, chaired by Barbara McNeil, head of the Department of Health Care Policy; Medical Students, chaired by Richard Schwartzstein, director of the Academy; Research and Academic Environment, chaired by Lewis Cantley, HMS professor of systems biology and the William Bosworth Castle professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; Clinical Teaching Facilities, GME and CME, chaired by Michael Gimbrone, the Ramzi S. Cotran professor of pathology; General Facilities, Library and IT, chaired by Rick Shea, associate dean for physical planning and facilities; Faculty, chaired by Barrett Rollins, the Linde Family professor of medicine at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Educational Program, chaired by Dienstag; and the Steering Committee, co-chaired by Flier and Dienstag.

Dienstag also discussed the role of the students in a survey to precede the visit and during the visit itself. He noted that, although the LCME is interested in assessing the strengths of the School in all areas, their ultimate focus is on medical student education. He then gave an overview of the results from the previous LCME visit in 2001, including the areas of concern.

The presentation was followed by a discussion about how incidents in the hospitals are handled and the need for better lines of communication for reporting back to the Medical School.

The Broad Partners with Mexican Institutes to Explore Genetics of Cancer, Diabetes

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will partner with institutions in Mexico to launch a three-year research project in genomic medicine. The project will be carried out by the Carlos Slim Institute of Health in partnership with the Broad Institute and the National Institute for Genomic Medicine of the Mexican Secretariat of Health. The major goal is to understand the genomic basis of cancer in worldwide populations and of type 2 diabetes in Mexican and Latin American populations.

The project, called Slim Initiative for Genomic Medicine, will last three years and will receive $65 million from the Carlos Slim Institute of Health. It will make use of new technologies for sequencing DNA, which have made it possible for researchers to study DNA more rapidly and at a lower cost than ever before. In cancer, the scientists will create catalogs of the genetic mutations that occur across different cancer types. Such knowledge aims to reveal key genetic weaknesses that can be exploited by new cancer therapies and to identify which patients are most likely to respond to specific cancer drugs.

In type 2 diabetes, the researchers will assemble systematic descriptions of the genetic factors underlying the disease, with a special focus on Latin American populations. An understanding of these factors is needed to foster prevention, treatment and control.

•The National Institute on Drug Abuse has awarded one of four Avant-Garde Awards to Dana Gabuzda, an HMS professor of neurology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Avant-Garde Awards are modeled after the NIH’s Pioneer Awards and are intended to stimulate high-impact research that may lead to groundbreaking opportunities for the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS in drug abusers. Gabuzda’s project will investigate the mechanisms that determine CD4 T cell restoration in IV drug abusers and other people infected with HIV who are on highly active retroviral therapy. The grant provides $500,000 per year for five years.

• Louis Pasquale, HMS associate professor of ophthalmology and codirector of the Glaucoma Service at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, has been presented with the Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) Physician–Scientist Award. The award provides $60,000 for Pasquale to pursue his research on the interaction of genetics and lifestyle risks in glaucoma.
• The National Academy of Sciences has named Jeannie Lee the 2010 recipient of the NAS Award in Molecular Biology, which honors a young scientist in the United States for notable discovery in molecular biology. Lee, HMS professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital, was honored for contributions to our understanding of epigenetic regulation on a global scale, including the role of long, noncoding RNAs, interchromosomal interactions and nuclear compartmentalization.
• Designer Rachel Eastwood will be leaving Focus and joining the Harvard Catalyst Community Engagement Program next week. We congratulate her on her new position with all the exciting challenges it offers. Yet we will miss her creative leadership, design savvy, technical expertise and warm friendship. We’re sure her spark will catalyze public engagement with the clinical research enterprise.