First Dean for Graduate Education Appointed

Photo by Graham Ramsay David Golan

This month, David Golan became the first dean for graduate education at HMS. The new position was the result of recommendations from the Strategic Planning Initiative along with recognition of the need for better communication, coordination, and partnership among the many different graduate programs at HMS and across Harvard. Golan works closely with Thomas Michel, dean for education, and Jules Dienstag, dean for medical education, to bring together graduate students, medical students, trainees, and faculty in shared education and research activities throughout the broad spectrum of biomedical investigation at Harvard.

Golan directs the newly formed Program in Graduate Education, which convenes leaders of graduate education across Harvard, including graduate program directors, chairs of Quadrangle departments, hospital-based scientists, graduate curriculum fellows, and other leading educators in the Harvard medical community. Under Golan’s leadership, the Program in Graduate Education will coordinate activities and develop new programs across the University to enhance graduate students’ engagement in all aspects of biomedical discovery.

As dean for graduate education, Golan continues his leadership of the Harvard Catalyst Research Education Program. In this role, he coordinates the design, development, implementation, and oversight of the master’s degree programs at HMS. He also acts as special adviser on global programs to Dean Jeffrey Flier.

Golan has served for many years as a leading scientist and educator at the Medical School. He is a professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, where his lab applies biophysical and cell-imaging methodologies to the study of membrane-targeted proteins in blood cells and the vascular endothelium. He is also a professor of medicine at HMS and a physician in the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he continues to see patients as a practicing hematologist and clinician-teacher.

After earning his AB summa cum laude in chemistry at Harvard College, Golan received his PhD in molecular biophysics and biochemistry and his MD degree from Yale University, followed by clinical training in internal medicine and in hematology at BWH. He is the principal author of the best-selling textbook Principles of Pharmacology. In addition to his many awards and honors for discoveries in red blood cell biophysics and cellular imaging, Golan received the Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges in 2005. He is a founding Scholar of the Academy at Harvard Medical School.

New Full and Named Professorships Announced

The following HMS faculty members were appointed to full or named professorships in September.

Jon Aster
Professor of Pathology
Brigham and Women’s Hospital and HMS
Aster’s principal research interest is basic and applied aspects of the Notch signaling pathway, with a particular focus on the role of this pathway in lymphoid development and neoplasia. He heads several active multi-institutional, multi-investigator grants that are using a broad array of experimental approaches to understand how increases in Notch function contribute to T cell leukemia, and how this pathway can be more effectively targeted in patients with Notch-related cancers. He also directs the Specialized Histopathology Services Core Laboratory for the Dana–Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and in this role has fostered a broad range of basic and translational research within the Harvard community. He also continues to serve as a staff pathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he attends on the hematopathology service.

Azad Bonni
Professor of Pathology
Harvard Medical School
Research in Bonni’s laboratory focuses on identifying fundamental mechanisms and principles that govern neuronal connectivity in brain development and disease. The Bonni laboratory has uncovered some of the first key cell-intrinsic ubiquitin and transcriptional pathways that orchestrate critical developmental events leading to the establishment of neuronal circuitry—from axon and dendrite morphogenesis to synapse formation to neuronal death.

Robert Friedlander
Professor of Surgery
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Friedlander’s major research interests lie in the study of the mechanistic pathways of the caspase apoptosis gene family. His work includes the evaluation of the treatment strategies for neurodegenerative diseases (Huntington’s disease and ALS), stroke, brain trauma, and spinal cord injury through the modulation of the caspase family apoptotic pathways. Several clinical trials are currently under way based on his work. Clinically, Friedlander specializes in the care of patients with complex cerebrovascular disease (aneurysms, AVMs) and brain tumors. He was recently selected for service as a member of the NINDS National Advisory Council.

Ernesto Gonzalez Martinez
Professor of Dermatology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Gonzalez’s interest and expertise in clinical research has included photomedicine, including developing laser applications and phototherapy for dermatologic diseases, and the development of reflectance confocal microscopy as a diagnostic tool to study contact dermatitis and occupational dermatology. He has received multiple awards from HMS for teaching and mentoring and for his advocacy on behalf of diversity. He has developed several philanthropic programs utilizing telemedicine to benefit underserved communities, locally and internationally.

Steven Greenberg
Professor of Neurology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Greenberg studies the causes, diagnosis, and treatment of cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a common age-related disease of the small blood vessels in the brain. This research has led to advances in detecting cerebral amyloid angiopathy in elderly patients and identifying its role as a cause of hemorrhagic stroke and vascular cognitive impairment.

Jo-Anne O’Malley Shepard
Professor of Radiology
Massachusetts General Hospital
Shepard’s research focuses on thoracic imaging and intervention. Her interventional research has investigated the techniques and complications of diagnostic percutaneous biopsy of the lung, resulting in implementation of procedures for the appropriate selection of patients, improvement in diagnostic technique, and improved postprocedural care. Her current research involves collaboration with MIT engineering students in the development of a patient-mounted robotic device for aiding percutaneous biopsies and the investigation of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) for treatment of medically unresectable lung cancers. Shepard has researched the imaging findings of pulmonary embolism by CT angiography, including participation in the Prospective Investigation of Pulmonary Embolism Diagnosis (PIOPED) II study, a multicenter trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. A major focus of her clinical investigations has been the imaging of thoracic surgical conditions, including the post-pneumonectomy syndrome, lung transplantation, and diseases of the airways.

David Sinclair
Professor of Pathology
Harvard Medical School
Sinclair, who is also a co-director of the Glenn Laboratories for Aging Research, seeks to understand the genetic and biochemical mechanisms that allow the body to fight disease and the natural process of deterioration known as aging. His laboratory has discovered genes and small compounds that extend lifespan in diverse organisms and linked them to the effects of diet and exercise. His work has helped spark the development of drugs targeting pathways that control aging, with a view to broadly treating age-associated diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease. In the Pathology Department he will continue his investigation of longevity genes with a view to improving human health.

Rudolph Tanzi
Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology and Mental Retardation
Massachusetts General Hospital
Tanzi isolated the first familial Alzheimer’s disease (AD) gene, amyloid precursor protein, and later co-discovered two other familial AD genes, presenilin 1 and presenilin 2. He has isolated the gene responsible for Wilson’s disease, and he has collaborated on the identification of several other genes linked to neurological disease, including some causing familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Along with collaborators, Tanzi formed the “metal hypothesis of Alzheimer’s disease,” which proposes that zinc and copper are necessary for the formation of neurotoxic assemblies of the AD-associated amyloid-beta protein. He also serves as director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at MGH. (This appointment was made in April.)

Longwood Symphony Benefits Artists For Alzheimer’s

Longwood Symphony Orchestra, which is made up largely of musicians from the Boston medical community, will perform an all-British program to celebrate the orchestra’s successful tour to London this past June that combined medicine and music. Artists for Alzheimer’s (ARTZ) will be the concert beneficiary.
Under the direction of music director and conductor Jonathan McPhee, the concert will feature Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance No. 1 and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony. The orchestra will be joined by the New World Chorale, directed by Holly McEwan Krafka and John Zielinski, and vocal soloists Aaron Engebreth and Valerie Nicolosi.

The concert takes place at 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 6, at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, 290 Huntington Avenue. For more information or tickets, visit www.longwoodsymphony.org or call 617-667-1527.

Grant Backs Science Education for Native Students

HMS is one of 16 institutions to receive a Science Education Partnership Award from the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health. The awards provide two to five years of support to stimulate scientific curiosity and encourage hands-on science education activities among K–12 students and teachers. HMS received a two-year, $538,000 grant for a project titled “Opening the Pipeline for Native High Schools: Phase II,” whose goal is to increase the probability that students at high schools in four Native American communities will pursue undergraduate and graduate training in biomedical sciences and medicine at leading institutions. Teams of 10 students and two teacher-chaperones, selected by each of the four participating Native communities, attend a three-week Native American High School Summer Program at Harvard University that examines abuse of alcohol and cocaine or methamphetamine through lectures, conference sections, and small-group tutorials. Afterwards the students produce a presentation for their home communities. The principal investigator of the project is David Potter, the Robert Winthrop professor emeritus of neurobiology at HMS.

Grant Bolsters Global Disease Surveillance

Children’s Hospital Boston has received a $3 million grant from Google.org, Google’s charitable foundation, to combine the hospital’s HealthMap digital detection efforts with the International Society of Infectious Diseases ProMED-mail global network of human, animal, and ecosystem health specialists.

HealthMap is a multistream and multilingual disease-mining system that trawls the Internet, including news reports, blogs, and chat rooms, for information on infectious outbreaks. It provides a bird’s-eye view of global health and sounds warnings about outbreaks well before they are reported by official sources. During the past two years, HealthMap and ProMED have worked together to produce a mapping system for ProMED-mail reports, automatically parsing reports, recognizing disease names and geographic locations, and placing them on an online interactive world map. The map may be customized by individual disease, time range, and language of report. The gift supports three main goals of the collaboration: the identification of hot spots, earlier detection of disease, and faster response.

“We are immensely excited about Google.org’s generous grant,” said John Brownstein, co-founder of HealthMap and HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at CHB. “The gift will enhance HealthMap and ProMED-mail’s ability to use information and technology to empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local, regional, or global crises.”