Members of the Blacklow family (left and right of center) joined Charles Hatem (left) and Edward Hundert (right) for the presentation of the Leo A. Blacklow Award at Mount Auburn Hospital to assistant professor of medicine Mark Simone. Image: Steve Gilbert
Members of the Blacklow family (left and right of center) joined Charles Hatem (left) and Edward Hundert (right) for the presentation of the Leo A. Blacklow Award at Mount Auburn Hospital to assistant professor of medicine Mark Simone. Image: Steve Gilbert
Think out loud, stick to the basics and be kind.
Following those three tenets helps make a clinical teacher truly excellent, said Edward Hundert, the Daniel D. Federman, M.D. Professor in Residence of Global Health and Social Medicine and Medical Education and dean for medical education at Harvard Medical School.
Hundert was speaking at the 2015 Daniel D. Federman Teaching Award Celebration, held in the Carl W. Walter, M.D. Amphitheater at HMS, where about 75 HMS faculty, staff, students, awardees, nominees and former award recipients gathered to celebrate excellence in teaching at the School and its affiliated hospitals.
Hundert was quoting Daniel Federman, the Carl W. Walter Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, former dean for medical education at HMS and the educator for whom the awards were named.
Twelve teachers and two staff members were recognized at the May 11 ceremony.
“We are a great school, and there’s nothing more important to our greatness than having great teachers,” said Jeffrey S. Flier, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University. “The chance to celebrate that is a wonderful moment.”
Excerpts from student nominations and testimonials from fellow faculty members highlighted the award recipients’ exceptional skills and efforts in training interns and residents, establishing fellowships, coauthoring textbooks and participating in curriculum reform.
For example, students praised associate professor of neurology Bernard Chang, one of the two winners of this year’s Harvard Medical School Donald O’Hara Faculty Prize for Excellence in Teaching, for his ability to break down complex information into more easily understood basics.
“He has a gift for communicating with clarity and simplicity,” said second-year medical student Rachel Wood in a statement read by Hundert at the ceremony. “It is the simplicity that helps so much. Understandably, it is difficult for many specialists to teach at the level of a second-year medical student. Often they know so much that the fundamentals are lost. Dr. Chang not only showed us how to sift through overwhelming amounts of information about neurology and neuroscience but urged us to remember this pattern throughout the rest of our second year.”
Students had high praise as well for the second winner of the O’Hara prize, Ruth Ann Vleugels, an assistant professor of dermatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“She broke down big concepts into smaller pieces. She made it clear what was important to know and what was extra information that could be learned at later stages of training. She helped us mentally organize the information we were responsible for. She constantly quizzed us to reinforce our factual learning. And she took steps up Bloom’s taxonomy, getting us to apply our conceptual understanding to new problems,” said second-year student Benjamin Matthews in a statement read by Hundert. “As a former teacher myself, I found her style to be one of the most effective I’ve encountered in two full years at HMS.”
“There’s an incredible opportunity to learn from all of the people you’ve seen today,” said Hundert, who moderated the event. “These are people who take their teaching very seriously and very personally.”
The HMS Program in Medical Education has honored its most outstanding teachers—those who “influence the professional lives of students long after graduation”—since 1982. In 2012, the awards were renamed in honor of Federman.
Recipients of the 2015 Daniel D. Federman Teaching Awards were:
2015 Harvard Medical School Donald O’Hara Faculty Prizes for Excellence in Teaching
- Bernard Chang, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
- Ruth Ann Vleugels, assistant professor of dermatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
2015 Harvard Medical School Charles McCabe Faculty Prizes for Excellence in Teaching
- Mark Eisenberg, assistant professor of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital
- Celeste Royce, instructor in obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
S. Robert Stone Award for Excellence in Teaching at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
- Grace Huang, associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Senior S. Robert Stone Award
- Paul Spirn, assistant professor of radiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Leo A. Blacklow Award at Mount Auburn Hospital
- Mark Simone, assistant professor of medicine at Mount Auburn Hospital
The Bernard Lown Award for Excellence in Teaching at Brigham and Women's Hospital
- Sashank Prasad, assistant professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Robert P. Masland, Jr., Award for Excellence in Teaching at Children’s Hospital Boston
- Yee-Ming Chan, assistant professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital
Bulfinch Medical Student Teaching Award at Massachusetts General Hospital
- T. Bernard Kinane, associate professor of pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital
The Charles J. Hatem Award for Faculty Development at Harvard Medical School
- Hope A. Ricciotti, associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
AAMC Humanism in Medicine HMS Nominee
- Michael T. Watkins, associate professor of surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital
L. James Wiczai, Jr. Award
- Elizabeth Langley, program administrator for the Principal Clinical Experience at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Richard A. Gillis Award for Excellence in Medical Education
- Robert Coughlin, director of financial aid at Harvard Medical School
