Pulse Magazine Fall 2015

pulse Volume 13 Number 2

Fall 2015

NJMS Tops NIH Funding in NJ Researcher Amariliz Rivera wins her first big NIH award.

PLUS:

NJMS Fights Diseases Worldwide New Curriculum for NJMS Predators Versus Prey in an Academic Lab

Message from the Dean

W

e were delighted last April when three Rutgers New Jersey Medical School administrators were selected to lead various organizations within the Association of American Medical Colleges. In April, New Jersey Medical School’s Chief Operating Officer Walter L. Douglas, Jr., was elected National Chair of the AAMC’s Group on Institutional Planning, while Assistant Dean for Student Affairs Julie Ferguson was elected National Chair of the AAMC’s Committee on Student Records, and Assistant Dean for Admissions Mercedes Rivero was elected Chair of the AAMC’s Northeast Group on Student Affairs. The elevation of these remarkable individuals to such lofty leadership positions at the AAMC further demonstrates to the medical education community what we already know: New Jersey Medical School is a place where leaders and innovators abound.

Throughout the year, we have been celebrating the 60th anniversary of New Jersey Medical School’s existence. To mark this momentous occasion, we treated readers to dual covers for the spring issue of Pulse magazine. The response was so overwhelmingly positive, we are doing it again. For this issue, one cover features New Jersey Medical School researcher Amariliz Rivera, PhD; while the other spotlights brothers and New Jersey Medical School graduates Jean Daniel Eloy, MD, and Jean Anderson Eloy, MD. These stellar individuals are among the many gifted people who gather in our buildings to carry out the work that helps to further bolster our school’s reputation and solidify our position as a significant leader in education, patient care, research and service. On the pages that follow, you will read about these faculty members and other notable people who work and study here, including: • The scientists who continue to rack up NIH research grants • The globe-trotting physicians who set their sights on healing the world • The highly skilled and inventive orthopedic surgeons who take on some of the most confounding injuries • The medical students who represent the future generation of leaders and innovators.

John F. Kennedy once said “It is time for a new generation of leadership, to cope with new problems and new opportunities for there is a new world to be won.” Indeed, while we are more than 60 years old, New Jersey Medical School continues to represent a new generation of leadership because of our commitment to recruiting talented people and our willingness to take on the challenges and seize the opportunities that await us at every turn.

In health,

Robert L. Johnson, MD, FAAP’72 The Sharon and Joseph L. Muscarelle Endowed Dean Rutgers New Jersey Medical School

pulse Dean Rutgers New Jersey Medical School

Robert L. Johnson, MD, FAAP’72 Chief Operating Officer

Walter L. Douglas, Jr. Business and Circulation Manager

Iveth P. Mosquera Marketing Assistant

LaCarla Donaldson

VOLUME 13 NUMBER 2 Senior Editor, Pulse

Eve Jacobs Contributing Writers

FALL 2015

R U T G E R S , T H E S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W J E R S E Y

President NJMS Alumni Association

Paul J.P. Bolanowski, MD ’65

Merry Sue Baum Maryann Brinley Genene W. Morris Patti Verbanas

ALUMNI FOCUS

Design

Emily Birkitt

Sherer Graphic Design

Director

Dianne Mink Administrative Assistant

Keep in Touch

Pulse is published twice a year by Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. We welcome letters to the editor and suggestions for future articles. Send all correspondence to: Iveth P. Mosquera Business and Circulation Manager Rutgers New Jersey Medical School Medical Science Building, Room C -595 185 South Orange Avenue Newark, NJ 07103 or via email to njmsmarketing@njms.rutgers.edu

COVER PHOTO BY JOHN EMERSON

pulse FA L L 2 0 1 5

FYI

2 Notable A C LO SER L OOK AT

5 6 8 10

The Behavioral Addictions The Back Story of a Big NIH Award What It Takes To Be a Black Female Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeon A Med-School Curriculum Not Just About Academics

N JMS /GSBS PEOPL E… DO YOU KNOW ?

12 14 16 18

Gwen Mahon, new Dean of the School of Health Related Professions Jean Daniel Eloy and Jean Anderson Eloy: Med School of Brotherly Love Tina and Sylvia Christakos, Priya and Anuradha Patel: Daughters and Their Mothers Michael Sirkin, Mark Adams, and Mark Reilly: A Surgical Trifecta

FE ATURES

20 Have Need, Will Travel Fighting diseases worldwide becomes an even higher priority for NJMS faculty, residents, students, and staff.

24 Up-and-Coming Research Leaders Meet the first two Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences Chancellor’s Scholars at NJMS.

26 Predators Versus Prey in an Academic Lab An NJMS researcher and a School of Dental Medicine researcher collaborate to target drug-resistant bacteria and biofilms.

30 Rutgers’ New Supercomputer Takes Off Computer whizzes, researchers, and administrators team-up to win a major NIH grant.

A LUMNI F OCUS

34 35 36 38 39

Message from the Alumni Association President Alex Bekker: Giving Back Rudolph Wagner: At First Sight Oscar Auerbach: A Legend in His Time Class Notes, In Memoriam

R E S ID ENT LIF E

40 Ahmad Yousaf: Resident, Writer, Blogger of Distinction

Notable

FYI

Peering into Outer Space The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s space radiobiology research aims to lessen the harmful effects of the space radiation environment on astronauts’ health outside of the earth’s relative protection.

NASA is funding nine ground-based projects using beams of high-energy that simulate space radiation.

These studies will help enable human space exploration without exceeding limits of space radiation that could increase risks of cancer, heart and circulatory disease, and long-term cognitive function.

The selected proposals are from seven institutions in five states; researchers will receive a total of approxi-

NIH Grant to Study Syphilis Transmission

mately $12.5 million. Edouard Azzam, PhD, NJMS professor of radiology, was awarded $1.25 million for his research into cancer risk.

Nikhat Parveen, PhD, was recently awarded a $2.95 million, five-year U01 grant by the National Institutes

tion— will collaborate with a University of Wash-

atrics and director of the Division of Adolescent

of Health to promote

ington researcher to identify critical antigenic

and Young Adult Medicine. His clinical research

international collaboration

virulence factors of this bacterium and determine

focuses on the health of adolescents, including

on research into infectious

their potential as vaccine candidates.

HIV and violence prevention, and teen sexual-

diseases disproportionately

ity and family strengthening. He chairs the New

affecting people in resource-limited countries.

Jersey Governor’s Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS

Her project will investigate the molecular basis of transmission of syphilis-causing bacteria from pregnant mother to child (i.e., congenital syphilis), which is highly prevalent in Peru.

Parveen, an associate professor in the NJMS Department of Microbiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, and her collaborators will incorporate novel approaches to study the causative agent of syphilis, Treponema pallidum, which cannot yet be grown in the laboratory. The

Stepping Onto the Global Stage “Desmond Tutu Phelophepa Achievement Award

National Academies of Science.

for Excellence” at this year’s benefit gala of the American Friends of the Phelophepa Train.

These two “trains of hope” operate as mobile health care hospitals, bringing much needed medical and educational services to impoverished rural areas of South Africa. With more than 40 permanent staff and numerous volunteers, the trains have thus far reached 23.5 million people since 1994.

at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in

from Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, Michael

Peru, who will look into the immune responses

Bloomberg, and Bill Clinton. Money raised this

in pregnant women that either cause protection

year will help support the addition of a third

from syphilis or determine the severity of adverse

train dedicated to surgery.

Award” from the New Jersey Health Founda-

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member of the Board of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education at the

Major support for this project has come

recipient of the 2015 “Excellence in Research

of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a

Robert Johnson, MD, will be honored with the

NJMS team will work with a clinical researcher

pregnancy outcomes. Additionally, Parveen —

and Related Blood Borne Pathogens, is a Fellow

Johnson, The Sharon and Joseph L. Muscarelle Endowed Dean at NJMS, is a professor of pedi-

T O P L E F T: J O H N E M E R S O N ; B O T T O M L E F T: C D C ; T O P R I G H T: N A S A

NJMS in the News In the past few months, NJMS faculty, staff, and students were prominently featured in the media, and rightfully so. Here are just a few of the places they were seen and heard.

Compiled by Iveth Mosquera

NJMS Students Receive National Honors Divya Sharma, MD’16, and Kushyup Shah, MPP’15, MD’16 (l to r), are recipients of

“A Nurturing Presence for NJ Children with

“NIH director touts agency’s large investment

Life-threatening Illnesses” in The Star Ledger

in drug research and development” in philly.

on 9/22 features the work of James Oleske,

com on 6/19. Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD,

MD, professor of pediatrics.

director of the NIH, names NJMS the #1

Caucus: NJ and Steve Adubato on the Air

NIH-funded entity in NJ in 2015.

featuring: breast surgeon Ogori Kalu, MD,

“BPA Exposure linked to

assistant professor; Justin Sambol, MD,

autism spectrum disorder,

senior associate dean for clinical affairs; and

study reports” in Science

the American Medical Association (AMA)

Nikolaos Pyrsopoulos, MBA, MD, division

Daily on 3/2/15. Xue Ming,

Foundation’s 2015 Leadership Award.

director, gastroenterology and hepatology and

MD, professor of neuroscience

medical director, liver transplantation.

and neurology, collaborated

The award — given to just 15 individuals

on research that discovered

nationally — recognizes medical students,

BPA is not metabolized well

residents, fellows, and early career physicians

in autistic children.

for outstanding work in community service,

“On World TB Day 2015 Cepheid and NHLS

medical education, and public health.

Commemorate Global Shipment of the 10 Millionth Xpert MTB/RIF Test Cartridge” in “Doctors-to-be: Their journey begins with

Yahoo Finance on 5/14. Faculty member

a white coat and the Hippocratic Oath”

David Alland, MD, and Cepheid are collabo-

in The Star Ledger on 8/7. At this year’s

rators in a faster diagnostic test for TB.

White Coat ceremony, 178 NJMS students officially begin their medical careers.

“DNA Damage May Play a Role in Gulf War

“NJ Med School Professor Recounts Tale of

9/23 features Yan Chen, a doctoral student

Reattaching Girl’s Limbs in Former Soviet

at RBHS. Research was conducted with

Union” on NJTV News on 8/10. Ramazi O.

funding awarded to faculty member Michael

Datiashvili, MD, recounts his role in sav-

J. Falvo, PhD.

ing the life of a young girl whose legs were

Syndrome” in U.S News and World Report on

severed.

“Anthology Tells the Stories of 60 Female

“Physician Grows Primary Care Practice on

The book, entitled Being a Woman Surgeon:

his Farm” in Medical Xpress on 8/4. Ron

Sixty Women Share Their Stories, includes

Weiss, MD, assistant professor, and an NJMS

writing by faculty members Imani Jackson

tional Chair of the Association of American

alum, is the owner of Ethos Health, a farm-

Rosario, MD, and Anne Mosenthal, MD. The

Medical Colleges’ (AAMC’s) Committee on

based primary care practice.

editor, Preeti R. John, MD, completed a fel-

Student Records; NJMS Chief Operating

“Severe Burns May Let ‘Bad Bacteria’ Take

Officer Walter L. Douglas, Jr., was elected

Over the Gut” in Scientific American, 7/10.

“What It’s Like to Have Severe Lyme

National Chair of the AAMC’s Group on

Nikolaos Pyrsopoulos, MBA, MD, explains

Disease” in NYmag.com on 6/15. NJMS

what goes on in the gut of burn victims.

alumnus Neil Spector, MD, discusses his

NJMS Leaders Become National Leaders (l to r) NJMS Assistant Dean for Student Affairs Julie Ferguson was elected Na-

Institutional Planning; and NJMS Assistant Dean for Admissions Mercedes Rivero was

CBS News, San Francisco quotes Leonard

elected Chair of the AAMC’s Northeast

Cole, PhD, DMD, director of terror medicine,

Group on Student Affairs.

K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

on 7/10 on bio-weapons testing.

Surgeons,”in The Baltimore Sun on 3/11.

lowship at NJMS in 2008.

Lyme disease ordeal. Also interviewed by The Washington Post and twice on NPR.

RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

3

Notable

FYI

from the International Brain Research Foundation.

The Carmel endowed chair is supported by Department of Neurosurgery faculty, the Foundation for Pediatric Neurosurgery, Peter W. Carmel and Jaqueline A. Bello, gifts from friends of Carmel and the $1.5 million matching gift. Carmel is chair emeritus of neurosurgery.

Nature’s Choice A research paper by Diego Fraidenraich, PhD, FAHA, assistant professor in the NJMS Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine, and colleagues was recently published in Nature Scientific Reports.

“Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) pa-

Feng Shui for GSBS Students

tients suffer from muscle and cardiac disease.

The new and much-anticipated GSBS Student Lounge and Study Center— opened in April 2015 —

have been made to improve the muscle func-

features a spacious study room, a large and comfortable social lounge, a meditation room, and the Graduate Student Association office. Already an unofficial meeting place, it’s located in the 180 West Market Street Student Housing Complex, which is connected to the Medical Science Building, library and parking deck by an all-weather, enclosed walkway. The lounge is open to GSBS students and the study center is open to GSBS students as well as the residents of the 180 West Market Street Student Housing Complex.

Although the disease has no cure, great strides tion of DMD patients. However, heart disease frequently causes early death in DMD patients,” explains the investigator.

Fraidenraich found that a protein,

Abnormal connexin distribution (in green) in DMD hearts

Two New Endowed Chairs at NJMS

has an impressive record of research, clinical

Rutgers Board of Governors approved the

Trauma.

creation of two endowed chairs in the fields of

The Rush endowed

disturbances. This problem occurs even before

chair was established

the patient develops heart failure.

surgery and neurological surgery at NJMS and named their first holders. Anne C. Mosenthal, MD, chair of the Department of Surgery, is the first holder of the Benjamin F. Rush Jr. Chair in Surgery. Charles J. Prestigiacomo, MD, chair of the Department of Neurological Surgery, is the inaugural holder of the Peter W. Carmel, MD Chair of Neurological Surgery.

Mosenthal has served in numerous leadership positions since arriving at NJMS in 1992, and

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care, and honors, including election as a fellow of the American Association for the Surgery of

connexin-43, is abnormally dis-

tributed in the hearts of DMD mice and patients, and that this malfunction causes cardiac rhythm

with a bequest from

“We have also found that we can protect the

the Rush estate, pro-

heart of DMD mice by injecting peptides (short

ceeds from an event

proteins) that target the dysfunctional con-

in his honor, gifts from

nexin-43, ultimately restoring the cardiac rhythm

Department of Sur-

and protecting stressed mice from premature

gery members, and a

death,” he explains.

matching $1.5 million from an anonymous donor, who also supported

“We were amazed to see that targeting con-

the Carmel endowed chair with a matching $1.5

nexin-43 specifically could provide such a rapid,

million gift.

significant benefit in these animals,” states

Prestigiacomo has done extensive research leading to more than 120 refereed articles, 11 books, 51 chapters, and four patents. He was honored with the International Clinician of the Year Award

Patrick Gonzalez, first author. “We believe that this novel treatment will provide key resources to tackle cardiac disease in DMD.” Other contributors are Jayalakshmi Ramachandran, Lai-Hua Xie, and Jorge E. Contreras.

T O P L E F T: K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R . ; B O T T O M L E F T A N D C E N T E R : J O H N E M E R S O N

Harvey Ozer

Addicted to Food

Harvey Ozer, MD, a longtime NJMS faculty mem-

BY EVE JACOBS

ber, died on September 13. He earned his bach-

he young woman in the video vignette, playing a food-addicted patient, ponders her continued weight gain despite attempts at dieting. She’s concerned that her struggle may be something more serious than sporadic binge-eating. A 20-pound weight gain over several years has altered her appearance to the point where she thinks she looks pregnant, not just overweight. She is very unhappy.

According to current psychiatric thinking, this woman may be suffering from an addiction to food, a condition sharing intrinsic qualities with other behavioral addictions.

And because similarities between behavioral addictions and addiction to substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and opioids have recently been substantiated, promising avenues for treatment are opening up, according to Petros Levounis, MD, MA, chair of psychiatry at New Jersey Medical School.

The psychiatrist’s extensive experience providing therapy for substance abuse positions him as an authority in this burgeoning field. His newest book, The Behavioral Addictions, with co-author and editor Michael Ascher, MD, looks at the ways in which potentially addictive behaviors like gambling, internet gaming, kleptomania, exercise, sex, shopping, and yes, even working, bear distinct and definable similarities to substance abuse. The importance of this resides in the potential application of tried and true therapies for substance abuse to a long list of behavioral addictions.

Levounis says four major symptoms are shared by these two types of addictions: the need to “use” the substance or behavior more frequently, or at higher doses, to achieve the same

In Memorium

elor’s degree from Harvard and his MD degree in 1965 from Stanford. In 1966, he went to the National Institutes of Health, where he worked at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and then the National Cancer Institute, where he made notable discoveries on Simian Virus 40. In 1972, he moved to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, and then in 1977, to Hunter College / City University of New York.

For much of his career, he studied the mechanisms underlying cancer and aging. In 1988, Ozer came to NJMS where he served as professor and chair in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics; senior associate dean for oncology programs; and the first director of the cancer center. He was a mentor to many at NJMS. A memorial service was held at the medical school on October 20.

Be a Part of Rutgers Giving Day All Rutgers alumni, parents, friends, faculty, staff, and students are asked to participate in Rutgers Giving Day. The goal is to raise more than half a million dollars from at least 1,500 donors in a 24-hour period, from midnight to 11:59 P.M. EST on December 1.

There is $100,000 in challenge money; and you can see the numbers of gifts and dollars raised in real time on the Giving Day website.

Come on NJMS: Help meet the challenge!

For more information, contact NJMS Giving Day Coordinator Walter Douglas at 973-9729135 or douglawa@njms.rutgers.edu.

L E F T: A N D R E W H A N E N B E R G

T

effect (called tolerance); “withdrawal” after abruptly stopping the substance or behavior; an obsession with the addictive agent, leaving little interest in anything else; and the disregard of external consequences such as health, finances, and relationships.

“We all turn to food sometimes to spice up our day, quell boredom, feel comforted, but that’s not addiction,” he comments.

However, there are patients whose relationship with food is more complicated. For instance, Levounis says, “A young woman recently came in to my office saying: ‘My masochism has gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years. I’m always taken advantage of by good-for-nothing boyfriends, and I’ve gotten into a pattern of eating an entire big box of chocolates at one sitting to deal with my anxiety.’” But once someone is in a pattern, talking with a therapist about bad boyfriends may not be enough, he explains.

“Once the person is addicted, that in itself is the primary problem that needs to be addressed,” he states.

Levounis says the addiction medicine angle offers a helpful perspective to both patient and therapist.

Impulsivity and compulsivity are often at the root of both substance use disorders and the behavioral addictions, making the underlying machinery similar. In addiction the “pleasurereward mechanism of the brain has been hijacked and has a life of its own, and so needs an independent treatment of its own,” he explains.

However, there are obvious differences. While abstinence may be a goal in substance abuse, clearly that’s Continued on page 17

RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

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a closer look at the back story of a big nih award

The First Big Award Amariliz Rivera, PhD, wears many hats at the medical school. As an integral member of the Institute for Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases (i3D), she heads-up a lab studying fungal infections, lectures on immunity and the host defense to NJMS and GSBS students, serves on thesis defense committees, publishes research papers, and continues to write new grant proposals to support her investigations.

T

BY EVE JACOBS

he distance from the small mountain town of Lares, Puerto Rico, to the cosmopolitan West Coast city of Mayaguez is just 18 miles as the crow flies. But for Amariliz Rivera, that short journey— from hometown to university— proved transformative in all of the usual, and some unusual, ways.

The biology major, who thought she was headed to a career in medicine, was one of just five students hand-picked to participate in the first Minority Access to Research Careers program at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, which provided her with financial support for all four college years, 6

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a mentor to guide her progress, and experiences she had never even dreamed of. “I took extra classes, had hands-on training and research experiences, changed my major to microbiology,” she says, “and found out that I love working in a lab.”

It certainly isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time to perform manual DNA sequencing to study the telomeres of Drosophila (the common fruit fly), but for Rivera it was “a great time.” Her 10 weeks in the summer of 1992 spent working in the lab of Mary-Lou Pardue, PhD, an internationally recognized geneticist, cell-biologist, and then-chair of the department of microbiology at the Mas-

sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), cemented her career decision. “By the end of that summer, I knew for-sure that I wanted to do a PhD.” And when she was ready to apply to doctoral programs, her stand-out talent, once again, did not go unnoticed. Rivera was singled out for a minority training program at UMDNJ (now Rutgers) Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) in Piscataway

by Michael Liebowitz, MD, PhD, director of Graduate Academic Diversity, who was visiting the Mayaguez campus to recruit students underrepresented in the field of biomedical research. She came to New Jersey in the summer right after graduation from college, initially training in Liebowitz’s lab. “GSBS was a very good fit,” she says.

After rotating through three labs as part of her first year in graduate school, Rivera joined the research team of Yakov Ron, PhD, a professor of pharmacology, to study autoimmunity in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis. “Our work focused on gaining a better understanding of how the immune system attacks the body and coming up with potential therapeutic avenues — to modify the autoimmune process,” she explains.

For 10 years — from 1993 to 2003 — she persevered. “These were challenging times for technical reasons,” she says. “This work takes persistence, and you can’t quit when it doesn’t work out.”

Throughout, Rivera applied and won NIH fellowship and post-doctoral fellowship awards for qualified minorities. “I would not have made it without that financial support,” she says.

She had planned to return to Puerto Rico after earning her doctoral degree to become a professor at a small undergraduate college and do some research on the side. However, during graduate school she met her husband and also fell in love with New Jersey. “It feels like home to me,” she says. Her husband, Michael Correa, MD, a graduate of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, is an internist with a solo practice in Morningside Heights, and they have two sons, Samuel and David, ages 10 and 7.

PHOTOS BY JOHN EMERSON

In 2003, Rivera moved on to the lab of Eric Pamer, PhD, chief of infectious diseases at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and her life as a professional researcher was off and running. She had discovered a driving interest in what has become the abiding theme of her work: achieving a better understanding of how the immune system recognizes and fights infection with the ultimate goal of assisting the body in that battle. Pamer’s lab was studying the response of CD8 (infection-fighting) cells to bacteria.

Rivera landed in the right place at the right time. Pamer wanted to launch a new project and proposed that Rivera head it up.

She willingly accepted the challenge.

The focus of the new investigation would be Aspergillus—a fungus “whose spores are present in the air we breathe, but does not normally cause illness,” according to the official Aspergillus Website. “In those with a weakened immune system, damaged lungs or individuals with allergies, Aspergillus can cause disease…Commercially many plant diseases and food spoilage may be due to Aspergillus infection. Sources of high numbers of Aspergillus spores include air conditioning units, composting, damp or flood damaged housing, and hospital building projects,” it states.

Not only did Rivera accept the project, but she succeeded in effecting a major coup—she created a new mouse model with fungus-specific T cells. While this may sound ho-hum to the uninitiated, a new animal model to better study a specific disease is a major achievement in the science world, often moving research forward far more quickly.

“Fungal infections have not been studied nearly as much as viral and bacterial infections,” she explains. “They had not been considered that dangerous because they had not been thought to cause much disease.

This was a neglected area of study.”

Rivera worked in the Sloan Kettering lab for seven years, and when she was ready to move on, she found her spot in the growing research program of NJMS Senior Associate Dean for Research William Gause, PhD,

who recently launched the Rutgers Institute for Infectious and Inflammatory Diseases (i3D) at the school. “I brought my mice and I brought my program here, and he gave me everything else to take my research to the next level,” she says.

And clearly, the relationship is on a positive trajectory. In March, Rivera won her first big NIH research grant, a five-year

$1.25 million RO1 award to study “how monocytes talk to neutrophils and how neutrophils talk back.”

Rivera explains that her current research grew out of her prior investigations of how monocytes and neutrophils (two types of immune cells) function. “Our findings have taken us to this next step — looking at how these two types of cells signal to each other,” she explains.

Rivera’s primary work continues to be aimed at a better understanding of how the body fights fungal infections at the molecu-

lar level; and her ultimate goal is to enhance the immune system’s fight by boosting the body’s own efforts. “These findings may also be applicable to other lung infections,” she states.

What does she see as she looks into her future? “I hope to make new mouse models,” she says. “Aspergillus is a type of mold and molds are very common in our environment.

They are particularly abundant indoors.”

An impaired immune system can allow these infections to become very serious, she continues. “I want to know if our exposure to molds is generally harmless or whether it frequently contributes to disease processes.

When there is flooding and there are many fungal spores in the air, is that exposure affecting people’s health?”

Rivera says that a molecular picture detailing how molds are recognized by their host, which cells react first and which cells react next— down to specific genes, is what is needed. “If we enhance expression of these genes, can we improve health?” she asks.

As Rivera and the three GSBS students in her lab tackle these big questions, she is preparing an NIH program project grant proposal (P01) with Gause and others in the infection and inflammation group. “We are basically looking at the same question — how the body gears up to respond to infection —but we are looking at it from different angles,” she explains.

She is working on a new mouse model to help answer these new questions. In the meantime, the mouse model she developed to study fungal infection continues to serve as a useful research tool, recently traveling abroad to a lab in Japan and also stateside to another in Wisconsin.

Rivera ponders whether houses flooded by Hurricane Sandy may be incubators for disease-causing organisms and what potentially could be done to prevent this from happening in the future. Hailing from an island that is no stranger to damaging storms, she hopes that her long years of research may soon yield answers that will impact the wellbeing of flood-ravaged communities from New Jersey to Puerto Rico and beyond. ● RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

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a closer look at women in the or

Yes, This Woman is an Orthopedic Surgeon Few women choose the specialty of orthopedic surgery. But for those with mechanical aptitude, persistence, and a pioneering spirit, the doors are wide open.

BY EVE JACOBS

J

ust 3 to 4 percent of orthopedic surgeons are women and that figure has remained constant for years. Why don’t more women choose this specialty? Fourteen years of study post high school, long workdays, a necessary aptitude for mechanics, a perception that physical strength is a prerequisite, and the specialty’s reputation as an all-male bastion where the opposite sex may not be welcome are the most frequent reasons given. So what inspired Folorunsho Edobor-Osula, MD, MPH, to happily and without reservation first jump into orthopedics and then specialize further in the pediatric side of things?

There were a lot of reasons. For one, she says, the perception that you have to be big, burly, and super-strong is “a misconception.

You have to think stronger, not be stronger.”

But let’s add one more factor to the mix.

Osula is African-American and black women represent less than 1 percent of orthopedic surgeons nationally. So she knows that tough-mindedness is absolutely necessary to break new ground.

Osula grew up in Queens, NY, the oldest of four children. (She has one sister and two brothers.) Her father was a high school chemistry teacher for 30 years before retiring and her mother was a day care center inspector. She describes herself as “a city girl.” But 8

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Folorunsho Edobor-Osula visits a patient at University Hospital prior to surgery.

what she fails to tell until prompted is that she was really good in math and science and a standout at Bryant High School who went on to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she played varsity basketball for all four undergraduate years— and excelled in academics. “I always had an interest in musculoskeletal health,” she says.

But she will also tell you that role models are critical when choosing a profession and she had a great one. As an undergraduate, Osula met and “shadowed” Claudia Thomas, MD, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, who was the first woman to graduate from the Yale–New Haven Hospital Orthopaedic Residency Program and the first black woman to become an orthopedic surgeon in the entire U.S.

“I credit her with my choice of profession,” says Osula. “I did not think this was a field a minority woman could do. But I learned that if it’s something you really want, you can push through.”

And push through she did. Osula was awarded a BA in 2001 in Public Health-Natural Science. She then earned the prestigious Axelrod scholarship from the University of Albany and began a Master’s degree in Public Health, specializing in epidemiology (this is another interest of hers). She started Cornell Medical School in 2002, and took one year off between years three and four to conduct orthopedics research and complete her master’s degree.

During her last two years of medical school, Osula discovered her love of pediatPHOTOS BY JOHN EMERSON

rics and the operating room. “I knew right away that I was a surgery-type but I liked many of the surgical subspecialties and had some trouble choosing,” she says. Orthopedics rose to the top for her “because you can really see people get better.”

She was the only woman in the orthopedics residency program at North Shore-LIJ for all five years and the only African American. “But it was a great surgical experience,” she says, “and I felt like I really fit in.”

She married during her intern year of residency, became pregnant during her year as chief resident, and gave birth to their daughter during her fellowship year. When is the right time to get pregnant during medical training? “It’s never the right time,” she

“I did not think this was a field a minority woman could do. But I learned if it’s something you really want, you can push through,” states Folorunsho Edobor-Osula, MD.

answers. “You have to decide on your priorities and do what’s right for you.”

Osula’s priorities led her to specialize in children, although she also considered a career in hand surgery. “Kids have a remarkable ability to heal and remodel. If I do the surgery well, the kids will do well,” she says.

“They also have an innocence. If they have knee pain and then the knee pain goes away after surgery, they just move on. There’s no malingering.”

Correcting congenital deformities related to clubfoot and spina bifida, repairing sports injuries, and treating the sometimes devastating effects of trauma are all part of her practice. “I see a lot of trauma,” Osula comments. “Pedestrians of all ages are often struck in Newark.”

Osula actively sought a position in an urban area and Newark fits her needs. “I benefited from growing up in an underserved area,” she says, “and I choose to work in an underserved community. I want to give back.”

Yes, there are issues — other than the complexity of successfully treating muscles and bones — that she encounters every day. Patients have financial issues, trust issues, and educational issues, she states, and access to medical care is a constant challenge. “How do you keep a child’s cast clean if you have no place to live? How do you keep a medical appointment if you have no transportation?” she asks.

The pediatric orthopedic surgeon tries to find remedies for all of these problems; and as a parent of young children (she also has a son who turned 1 in October), she understands and doesn’t dismiss a mother’s worries about “how to cut the toenails of a child with a clubfoot or change the diaper of a baby with a cumbersome cast.” She finds the time to talk with parents about their everyday worries.

All of the “cases” are interesting to Osula and all are gratifying. Her young patients come from Newark—and also from many other places, sometimes quite distant. Some have been treated elsewhere and either the treatment was not successful or there

were insurance issues. She and her partner, Sanjeev Saberwahl, MD, are among the few pediatric orthopedic surgeons in the area who accept Medicaid. “We’re it!” she says.

Clubfoot is a condition she treats often.

“It’s relatively common,” says Osula. “About 1 in 1,000 children are born with it.”

When treatment begins early, the success rate is high, she explains. While club foot used to be treated surgically, the current treatment — called serial casting and bracing— is oftentimes nonsurgical. It should begin when the infant is as young as three days old, which is when the bones are most malleable, according to Osula.

But there are challenges. Treatment must continue for years. “The baby has to wear the casts 23 hours a day at first and at the 3-month mark, moves on to night-time braces that have a big bar between the feet,” she describes. “In Newark, where many babies do not have cribs and sleep with their parents, this can be a big problem.” The nighttime bracing has to continue for years in order to prevent recurrence of deformity.

In other cases, children are not brought in for medical treatment until they are several months old. The delay can cause significant complications. “We’ve had babies come in as late as 9 months old with untreated or undertreated clubfeet and the success rates are not as good,” she says.

Osula says it’s all part of her job — and it’s a job she loves dearly. “I love getting up in the morning and coming to work,” she says. “But it’s tough being a surgeon and a mother. Both jobs come with challenges that are not always recognized or appreciated.”

However, once she reaches home, she puts the worries of her long workday aside and “it’s all about my kids,” she says.

While she manages “two very demanding jobs,” the orthopedic surgeon says it’s well worth it. She hopes other women—who may think the training and the job are too daunting—will reconsider a field that gives Osula the “great satisfaction of impacting young lives every single day.” ● Dr. Folorunsho Edobor-Osula • edoborof@njms.rutgers.edu

RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

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a closer look at the new curriculum

Time for a Change How do you teach a future doctor about doctoring? With such an enormous volume of information to learn and retain, how can students also learn to respond to the demands of an evolving health care system?

BY EVE JACOBS

C

hange is inevitable and often exhilarating. This was certainly the case with New Jersey Medical School’s curriculum overhaul. All signs pointed to go. The medical school’s new strategic plan was approved in 2012 and the self-study required for reaccreditation was simultaneously ongoing, while throughout the nation, massive changes to the health care system were in the works. It seemed like precisely the right time to launch a major revision to the NJMS curriculum.

But time is in short supply among medical school administrators and faculty. The added duties of the process would likely prove daunting; and pulling together a cohesive team would require masterful leadership.

Who could take this on and succeed?

NJMS Vice Dean Maria Soto-Greene, MD, chose Sangeeta Lamba, MD, associate dean for education and a practicing emergency and palliative care physician, and Marian Passannante, PhD, professor of epidemiology, to assemble a task force. They, in turn, engaged a broad cross-section of students, faculty, and staff, and also brought together multiple committees of health care providers from dentistry, nursing, public health, the health-related professions, and research from many institutions, including the affiliated hospitals where the students do their clinical training.

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First-year medical students plant flowers to help beautify Newark during their first week of school.

Soto-Greene obviously chose her leaders with great forethought. When it comes to super-charged energy for their work, these two take the prize. Their enthusiasm for a project that many would have deemed “mission impossible” never wavered; and after three years, the team delivered a brand new curriculum this past fall that has, so far, earned stellar grades.

“It’s innovative, collaborative, a major change for the school,” says Lamba, using all of the current buzzwords. But coming from her, they sound fresh and genuine.

“Service learning, interprofessional education, cultural competency, early patient skills, a learner-centered approach,” she states emphatically when asked about the team’s priorities for the new curriculum. The ultimate goal, Lamba explains more simply, was to align the curriculum with the needs of the current health care system, where doctors practice in teams that include nonphysician members.

“The old silos are no longer effective,” she observes, “so we introduce an inter-professional approach early on through activities that bring together students from various Rutgers schools to work closely together.”

Lamba’s personal goal, she says, was “to give the students a voice.” She took to heart the questions that students asked her over and over again: “Why am I learning this?” and “How will I use this when I practice?”

The approach to teaching the basic sciences rose to the top of the critical task list.

“We moved from a somewhat traditional format to an integrated organ systems curriculum starting in year one,” she explains.

“For instance, in the classes about the heart, a cardiologist, an anatomist, and a physiologist are the co-leads. They designed the course together.”

How different is that? “Quite different,” Lamba answers. “Now, students learn the basic sciences, which include normal and abnormal functioning of the heart, along with the patient-centered clinical skills that they will need to treat the patient with heart disease.” Also, every four weeks or so, during “Integration Week,” the curriculum focuses more on how the science applies to patient care in the real world using clinical scenarios that teach essential critical thinking skills to students.

Krista Blackwell, PhD, the physiologist who co-teaches the section about the heart, P H O T O S B Y K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

explains that their teaching-team paid “close attention to the application of basic science principles in order to help students really understand what goes wrong in a disease process and how to restore a patient back to normal body function.”

Lamba explains that the “important core attributes of the medical profession—such as ethics, patient safety, humanism, and culturally competent care—apply to all aspects of health care. Therefore, a major emphasis of the new curriculum includes threads of these core topics, woven both horizontally and vertically, through all four years of medical school.”

One “learner-centered” change that firstyear students will certainly applaud is the student wellness time that is built in to the

curriculum. “Although the well-being of students has always been very important at the school, changes in the curriculum will allow us to focus on this even more,” says James Hill, PhD, associate dean of student affairs.

“Learner-centered” will also mean “the expansion of elective time. This will allow early career exploration opportunities for

faculty member David Cennimo, MD, who co-directs Phase 1 of the curriculum with Sophia Chen, DO. “The responsibility of a medical student is to learn how to help people and it should start early,” agrees Lamba.

With the new curriculum, students will get there by learning clinical skills earlier;

The new curriculum features “service learning,” which connects students with the surrounding communities and helps them better understand the social determinants of health care.

During Week 1, first-year students engage with Newark’s children and work at a community garden launched and maintained by NJMS students.

all students in their third year and will give fourth-year students the opportunity for a capstone experience to ensure their readiness to provide good patient care right from the start of residency training in their chosen discipline,” states Christin Traba, MD, director of clinical education.

But student-success also means learning the prescribed information. “So we are helping students learn about their own learning styles in order to be conscious of where they may need help. We are also providing them with early real-time feedback using assessment tools to help them identify their weaknesses in various subject areas,” says Lamba.

According to Hill, this will supplement the work being done by the Center for Academic Success and Enrichment, and ensure that all students achieve their academic potential.

Students spent part of their very first week in the clinical skills center, where they practiced patient care activities, mastered life-saving skills, and earned Basic Life Support certification. “We wanted students to hit the ground running,” says alumnus and

by studying integrated body systems; by working more closely with non-physician health care teams from the get-go; by being introduced to the “patient perspective” and “patient-centered skills” early on; through “service learning” opportunities that connect and engage the students with surrounding communities and help students better understand the social determinants of health care; and by learning to pay attention to their own well-being.

And what will Lamba do now that the new curriculum is up and running? Go back to school, of course. She will take the organ system classes — along with the first-year students — so that she can see with her own eyes how the new approach is working; and, of course, she will also teach.

“This curriculum continues to embody what is so special about NJMS. It brought together the medical school family in our shared commitment to forge ahead with optimism and a sense of positive change,” says Soto-Greene. “The enthusiasm for the new curriculum has actually proved infectious.” ● RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

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gsbs people…do you know?

10 QUESTIONS for

GWEN MAHON

Gwen Mahon, who was recently named dean of the Rutgers School of Health Related Professions (SHRP), earned a PhD from Rutgers Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS), Newark, in 2006. She discusses the value of a

What first interested you in science/ research?

I love trying to understand how things work and am fascinated by biology. I worked with my parents on mechanical things as part of family businesses while growing up. I was raised to not be afraid to break things down and figure out how to fix them. I started off wanting to be an astronaut, but in Ireland at that time, hard sciences (physics, technology, engineering, chemistry) were not offered in girls’ schools—only biology. I was told it was not a realistic choice of career for me, one because I was a girl, but two, because I was too short. I am only five feet tall, but am still puzzled by that supposed limitation. Around that time, I got interested in medicine, nature, and biology.

We moved to Vancouver when I was 16 and I finished high school there and went on to the University of British Columbia (UBC) to study zoology. I was the first person in my family to have the opportunity to go to University. My first day at UBC was like a dream, and I discovered quickly that I wanted to spend the rest of my life at a university. I am an eternal student.

doctorate in basic sciences and what her plans are for her new role.

How did you get your start in the research world?

What in your personal history has led you to where you are in your professional life?

This position is a dream-come-true for me.

I love working with people, networking, and bringing people together. As the dean, one of my goals will be to build partnerships and bridges for faculty and students. While I have a passion for science, I am an eclectic person. SHRP is an amazingly diverse school with 42 programs spanning many different fields. This position affords me the opportunity to work with people from many different backgrounds, helping them to succeed.

My family moved a lot while I was growing up and I attended different schools every three years in Canada, Ireland, and the U.S. 12

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So I am comfortable with change and enjoy the challenges of navigating new situations.

This is a time of great change for our school, which provides immense opportunity but also requires adaptation to a new environment. I hope to help the school navigate through that change.

Which five adjectives would you use to describe yourself?

Determined, for sure Eclectic—just look at my resume Inquisitive Goal-oriented Sentimental

In the summer of my third year in college, I started working in a Drosophila genetics lab and discovered that I love doing research.

I was fortunate to be mentored by several outstanding scientists at UBC. When I graduated, I worked in another genetics lab before starting my master’s degree in the Terry Fox Laboratories studying leukemia.

After earning my degree, I moved with my husband, Ian, to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. There I worked in the Department of Pharmacology and Radiation Oncology at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. I learned a lot about research, but also about the politics of science, how you get grants, and the administrative workings of a university.

P H O T O S B Y K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

Why did you choose GSBS for your doctoral degree?

My kids were 2, 3, and 13 when I started and 6, 7, and 17 when I finished. I wanted them to have a role model, and I wanted to have a family life as well as pursue my career.

Happily, it all came together. Over the last four years, I have been honored to serve as the GSBS Alumni Association president.

In 1998, we came to the Newark campus. I became a research associate in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. Harvey Ozer was department chair. He later became the NJMS senior associate dean for research and then the director of the NJMS Cancer Center, and was a faculty member at GSBS. He was a major influence in our lives. After working there for five years, I expressed an interest in academic administration and he mentored me every step of the way. He got me started — writing grants and working with senior administrators at NJMS. It was a whole other world, and I liked it.

I decided that I would like to be a dean one day. I discussed it with Harvey and decided to pursue my PhD. I chose GSBS because he, and the Dean of GSBS, were so supportive of my goals, and because GSBS faculty do fantastic science and graduates go on to have strong careers. Harvey was my PhD mentor. That was a little more than 10 years ago. Sadly, Harvey passed away recently. I will be forever grateful to him and will miss him dearly.

In 2006, after graduating with my PhD, I became director of the research program at the NJMS Cancer Center. My job was to bring faculty together, to build infrastructure for research and research training programs, and to help get the research center up and running. It was a phenomenal experience.

Then, from 2008 to 2011, I was assistant dean for research administration at NJMS, and in 2011, I joined the administration of SHRP as associate dean. I wanted to be more involved in education. For me, there were a lot of new things to learn at SHRP, and I fell in love with the school — its diversity, the phenomenal faculty, and the school’s big impact on the health care community both locally and nationally.

How did the doctoral degree from GSBS impact your career?

What attracted you to your current position and what do you hope to accomplish?

GSBS and my PhD have been integral to my career and my life. Kathleen Scotto, PhD, the Dean of GSBS, is a great role model for women in science. She understands that students are not just researchers; they have lives.

SHRP is already tremendous — both in size and scope. It is patient- and family- centered, has a team approach, and does a lot of interprofessional education. I believe we can play a big role in building a new health care model. I also want to help the faculty be as good as they can be. Sometimes it can feel as though administrators hold faculty back. I do not want to be that kind of administrator.

I want to help faculty network within the school and with faculty from other schools.

I want to be the liaison between this school and the central administration. I want to put systems in place to help all faculty members reach their potential and all students to excel and feel supported.

How did you become interested in administration?

What are your hobbies and outside interests?

I love jazz, classical, big band, rock, all kinds of music. I love to paint. I own a violin and want to learn to play it. I grow veggies and love to cook. Most of all, I like hanging out and chatting with my teenage kids, ages 14 and 16. Our oldest child is grown up and married and lives outside Seattle. Teens have a fresh perspective—they keep you honest.

I love to run, especially with my family. We just did a half marathon together. Most of my spare time is spent with my husband going to the kids’ cross country and track and field events, soccer games, band competitions, plays and musical performances, and getting them involved in community service.

There is rarely a quiet moment in my life, but I would not have it any other way.

Do you have any advice for current GSBS doctoral students?

When I was involved in lab research, I absolutely loved it. However, for the students, there was a sense that the faculty would feel that you “sold out” or “didn’t cut it” if you did something other than a traditional faculty research path. I want GSBS students to know that they should never feel that way.

Funding is tight for research, but I encourage students with a passion for it to pursue it.

But bench research and the pursuit of grant funding are not for everybody. People get a PhD for many reasons. For me, the PhD is the most valuable thing I have ever done. You learn critical thinking. It prepares you to write policy, work on patents, write grants, and be an academic administrator.

The PhD prepares you for anything. It’s a huge accomplishment. Finish it and keep an open mind about what’s next in your life and then use the degree to get there. ●

RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

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njms people…do you know?

T HE ELO Y BROTH ERS

Med School of Brotherly Love

Jean Anderson Eloy (l) and Jean Daniel Eloy (r)

BY EVE JACOBS

P

hiladelphia was founded on a concept of brotherly love, but New Jersey Medical School can boast the real thing. Two brothers, both highly esteemed NJMS faculty members and alumni, credit their deep brotherly connection with bolstering them through years of rigorous training and challenges on their way to becoming highly respected physicians in their adopted country.

Jean Daniel Eloy, MD, a 2004 graduate of 14

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NJMS and the older of the two, actually followed in the footsteps of his younger brother, Jean Anderson Eloy, who earned his MD from NJMS in 2002; and he states that fact proudly. His warm smile and self-effacing manner are not exactly what you might expect from an anesthesiologist who spends long hours in the operating room. But it is precisely these traits, and, of course, his hardwon knowledge and skills, that help defuse the anxiety of patients facing surgery — and residents learning the skills of their trade.

When he came to this country from Haiti in 1995, Jean Daniel was 24 years old. His parents, Bertin and Roselle Eloy, immigrated to the United States in the ’80s to earn a better living with the end goal of quickly relocating their five children — two boys and three girls — to New Jersey. The children all went to private schools in Haiti and Jean Daniel says they were well cared for by their grandmother in Croix-des-Bouquets, just north of Port-au-Prince. Unfortunately, financial realities dictated a far longer separation for the Eloy family than what they had planned. It was not until 1993 that the three youngest children were reunited with their parents; and the two oldest were not able to join their siblings in the U.S. until 1996.

“That was a time of great political instability in Haiti,” says Jean Daniel.

He spoke French and Creole, but little English, when he came to this country and entered Bloomfield College to begin his undergraduate studies in the basic sciences.

“I studied chemistry and biochemistry,” he says. Obviously he excelled since he was hand-picked to become a teaching assistant in chemistry, physics, and math after just one year at the school.

A summer spent at NJMS between his junior and senior years convinced Jean Daniel that doctoring would be his profession of choice. And although he was accepted at several, there was a magnetic pull to the Newark-based medical school. Not only would he be following in the footsteps of his only and well-respected brother, but he had established a strong connection with Lonnie Wright, then-director of admissions, and Maria Soto-Greene, MD, vice dean of NJMS and a noted advocate for recruiting minority students into medical school and mentoring them along this difficult path.

Family ties are important to Jean Daniel.

“My entire family was living in Bloomfield by then, and if I went to NJMS, I could live at home,” he says. “Also, Dr. Soto-Greene made a promise to mentor me, which meant a great deal.” And, once again, his talents and hard work did not go unnoticed. After just one year at NJMS, this up-and-coming physician P H O T O S B Y K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

was chosen as a teaching assistant in anatomy and physiology, and excelled at his teaching.

Jean Daniel thought he was headed into a career in surgery (just like his brother), but after one year of residency at NJMS, he decided to switch. “I got married after my first year as a resident and I thought anesthesiology would be a better fit,” he says. “I have no regrets.”

The NJMS faculty took notice of this rising star and he had multiple mentors in the Department of Anesthesiology through his resident years. At the end, he was invited to join the faculty— and accepted the offer. After a two-year stint (2008 to 2010), Jean Daniel decided to do a fellowship at Pittsburgh University in acute pain management in order to launch that specialty at NJMS and University Hospital, its principal teaching hospital. In 2011, he returned to Newark, “working every day, every weekend, every holiday” to establish the new service.

Although he initially managed the service solo, it now includes four other physicians.

But teaching has always factored in the life of Jean Daniel. When he returned to Newark, he was named assistant program director for the residency program in anesthesiology, which was quite an honor; and he took over the program as director in 2011.

“I love teaching,” he says simply, and it’s evident that not only do the residents love him, but he is a highly successful educator.

Under his watch, the residency program has grown. In 2011, there were 27 residents; in 2015, 33 residents; and next year the program will accept a total of 36. And as a testament to his teaching skills, “there’s been a 100 percent pass rate on the licensing exam since 2011,” he states. Add to that the honors that have been bestowed by residents and faculty of the medical school: In 2012, the Golden Apple award for excellence in teaching; in 2013, the subspecialty Golden Apple award, given by the NJMS Student Council; and in 2015, the New Jersey Health Foundation Excellence in Teaching Award.

Although 60 percent of his time is devoted to patient care, the other 40 percent is all about teaching. “I am in charge of these

residents’ education,” he says. “I oversee their didactic curriculum, prepare them for their anesthesiology boards, review them clinically and academically, and make sure this program is in compliance with accreditation standards. My job is to figure out what the residents need and to set them up to succeed.”

“I love teaching,” says Jean Daniel. “I am in charge of these residents’ education. My job is to figure out what the residents need and to set them up to succeed.”

NJMS has become a second home for Jean Daniel — a place he finds “very comfortable. People here have invested greatly in my success. I trust them and they trust me,” he says. “They care about my growth and that’s invaluable. I would never have gotten that by moving away.”

You might think that Jean Daniel could

not possibly find time for even one more professional commitment, especially with a 3-year-old son and a wife, and his lifelong hobbies of playing soccer (currently with a league in Sparta) and devoting time to classical piano, which he has enjoyed since he was a young child. But each year, he carves out about 10 days to volunteer his services abroad with a surgical team traveling to Haiti. In 2010, eight days following the devastating earthquake, he traveled with five colleagues from NJMS and University Hospital on a trip organized by the International Surgical Health Initiative (ISHI), which is headed up by Ziad Sifri, MD (see article, page 20).

Volunteering is very important to him.

“We did back-to-back surgeries for five days in three different operating rooms,” he remembers. “But teaching is an important part of these trips. We teach locals different ways to do the surgeries, how to better use the equipment they have, and how to better organize their equipment. We also teach our residents that they can do a lot with minimal equipment.”

Trust and success are bywords of the entire Eloy family. All five siblings are standouts in their chosen careers; four are involved in health care professions and one in teaching. Jean Anderson Eloy — a highly reputed head and neck surgeon — is now the vice chair of the NJMS Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery and director of rhinology and sinus surgery.

For both brothers, the medical school has played — and continues to play — a leading role in their lives. Jean Daniel sees the medical school as a unique institution whose singular characteristics — most importantly the creation of an environment of trust and caring and focus on each individual patient, student and resident— should be preserved in a rapidly changing health care world. He would like to be among those who continue to build and support NJMS, which has given him and his brother “so much for so many years.” ● Dr. Jean Daniel Eloy • eloyje@njms.rutgers.edu Dr. Jean Anderson Eloy • eloyj1@njms.rutgers.edu

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njms people…do you know?

SY LVI A CHR I STAKOS & A NUR A D HA PATE L

Daughters and Their Mothers Two esteemed faculty members celebrate their daughters’ successes at NJMS and watch expectantly as they make their way into the wider world.

BY EVE JACOBS

I

t can be hard to follow in the footsteps of a very successful parent. But for two recent New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) graduates, that’s not the case at all. Priya Patel, MD’15, and Tina Christakos, MD’15, are well on their way to doing just that. Both are members of Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honor Society (AOA) and both have earned places in highly competitive residency programs. And both daughters of esteemed female faculty members at NJMS will soon take their places in traditionally male-dominated specialties.

Sylvia Christakos, PhD, professor of microbiology, biochemistry, and molecular biology, joined the faculty in 1980, became a full professor in 1990, and has attracted 35 years of uninterrupted NIH funding for her lab, among the top worldwide for Vitamin D research. When she was awarded a doctorate in endocrinology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973, there were few women in the field. That was never a problem for her. In addition, her warmth and love of teaching have made her a favorite with students, who have showered her with 13 Golden Apple awards for excellence. Proud of her lineage, she tells of a grandmother who left the Greek island of Chios in the early 1900s and established the first Greek school in New York City; and an entrepreneurial mother who established floral businesses in Queens, worked 14 hours a day, read The Wall Street Journal, and invested in the stock market “at a time when most women stayed at home.” She 16

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gives students the same advice she gave her children: “Never become complacent.

Maintain your ideals. Don’t lose sight of why you chose your profession. Do it your way.”

She and husband Manny, a surgeon, have encouraged all three children to do just that, and two have chosen professions unrelated to medicine.

Only Athena (Tina), who loves music, plays several instruments, exceled in sports, and spent a semester in Greece, chose medicine after much soul-searching. “She’s seen that my husband and I work all the time and she didn’t know if she would want that,” says her mother. However, three years after gradu-

ating from Stanford with a degree in biology, she chose medicine and then NJMS, and discovered that she loves the operating room.

She recently began a residency at the University of Pennsylvania, where she will specialize in urology (including urological surgery), a field where only 8 percent of practitioners are women. But like her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, she looks forward to breaking new ground.

The word “determined” can’t begin to describe pediatric anesthesiologist Anuradha Patel, MD, as she pursued her career path across three continents. From the University of Jabalpur in India, where she earned

Sylvia Christakos (l) and Anuradha Patel (r)

K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

Priya Patel

“My parents have always been my role models.

They are so happy and satisfied with their jobs.”

her medical degree, to England, where she completed training in anesthesiology, to Philadelphia, where she spent nine years retraining, taking U.S. licensing exams, and specializing in pediatric anesthesiology, she stayed focused on her goals. She joined the NJMS faculty 16 years ago.

Actually, her goals changed midstream. “I first wanted to be an ophthalmologist,” she says, “but I was in the operating room when there was a surgical emergency. I saw the anesthesiologist take charge, and I thought, ‘That’s the person I want to be—the one in charge in a crisis.’”

Despite playing that critical role in so many young lives, and having just a short amount of time to interact with her patients — before and right after surgery, and before they leave the hospital — Patel’s research addresses her concern about kids’ anxiety before surgery and frequent agitation after anesthesia. In 2004, the results of her clinical trial upended current practice, showing that when kids ages 4 to 12 are given Game Boys 30 minutes before surgery, their stress levels take a dive. “We found that distraction with interactive media was superior when compared with a commonly prescribed sedative, and also often better than a parent’s presence,” she comments.

It may have been the lively dinner-table conversations about medicine that inspired Priya to follow in the footsteps of her mother, surgeon-father, and brother, currently a resident in neurosurgery. “Although our careers are very demanding time-wise, we

love what we do. That must have showed,” says Patel.

Although Priya did not feel the call to medicine early on, “The thought was always there,” she says. In the summer before her junior year at Duke, she was awarded a Gates Foundation grant for a project she had designed on preventable blindness. She worked in rural villages in India, teaching young children how to prevent loss of sight caused by Vitamin A deficiency. “I think the nutritional education and supplements made a difference,” she says. (The local hospital carried on her efforts.) Her mother worried about Priya working alone in such remote locations, but for the college student it was a turning point. She had found her calling.

NJMS drew her with so many “strong positives—its location close to family, the

Tina Christakos

Like her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother before her, she looks forward to breaking new ground.

humanism center, the variety of patients and experiences, the Cross-Cultural and Integrative Medicine Organization, and some amazing faculty,” she says. Currently in a one-year internship in internal medicine at George Washington University, she will begin an ophthalmology residency at NYU next September. (According to the AAMC’s 2012 Physician Specialty Data Book, 20 percent of practicing ophthalmologists are women, a 5 percent jump in five years.)

“My parents have always been my role models,” she says. “They are so happy and satisfied with their jobs. I know my career will excite me in the same way.” ●

Addicted to Food Continued from page 5

not possible with food addiction. “When you have a food addiction, you can’t lock the tiger in the cage and walk away. You have to walk the tiger three times a day,” he says.

“Most food-addicted patients wish for will power, but will power only works occasionally,” he says. The majority will need psychological, and sometimes pharmacological, support. Levounis often prescribes six months to one year of cognitive behavioral therapy for mild-to-moderate behavioral addiction, along with participation in a 12-step program, such as Overeaters Anonymous, and nutritional consults.

“We don’t usually prescribe drugs,” he explains, “unless there are co-occurring disorders, such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or obsessivecompulsive disorder.” A medication called naltrexone, which directly affects the reward circuitry of the brain and is used to treat alcohol dependence and opioid dependence, is currently under study.

“But a patient can’t let her or his guard down,” he says. “You have to keep your eye on the beast.”

When patients slide back, an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drug—lisdexamfetamine—sometimes reduces the frequency of binge eating episodes.

“We are only now starting to delve into the world of psychopharmacology for bingeeating disorder, but currently we don’t have any FDA-approved medications for food addiction or the other behavioral addictions.”

In the companion video to The Behavioral Addictions, the food-addicted woman who plays her part so convincingly is NJMS student Ragha Suresh. She is one of several students whose short stints as actors on the American Psychiatric Association website will likely impact their approach to treating patients with behavioral addictions for years to come. ● Dr. Petros Levounis • levounpe@njms.rutgers.edu

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njms people…do you know?

M AR K ADAMS, MAR K R E I LLY & M I C HA E L S I R K I N

A Surgical Trifecta Three highly skilled surgeons use teamwork to put broken bodies back together again. BY

MERRY SUE BAUM

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hen it comes to the three orthopedic trauma surgeons at New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) and University Hospital (UH), they are a great example of the old adage: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Don’t misunderstand; each is highly skilled in his own right and highly regarded by peers around the world. It’s their unique synergy, however, that makes them a phenomenon.

Michael Sirkin, MD, Mark Adams, MD, and Mark Reilly, MD, all faculty members in the NJMS Department of Orthopaedics,

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are the trio that makes up the orthopedic trauma service at UH, the primary teaching hospital of the medical school. It’s their job to treat patients who have been in industrial, pedestrian, or vehicular accidents (and, of course, other types of accidents) and have suffered traumatic injuries of the limbs, pelvis, and where the spine connects to the pelvis. Working at the University Hospital Level I Trauma Center— the only one in northern New Jersey and the busiest in the state — they see a lion’s share of extremely complex and unusual cases.

“Sometimes, it’s like putting Humpty Dumpty back together,” says Sirkin, acting assistant dean of clinical affairs at NJMS. “We often have to make immediate decisions to save a limb or even a life, and we have to adapt quickly to the current situation.”

None of that, however, really sets them apart from orthopedic trauma surgeons at other busy, inner-city hospitals. What is different is that all three are involved in the care of every single patient who comes through the doors. “Ours is the only orthopedic trauma service we know of that functions this way,” explains Sirkin, a 1991 graduate of NJMS. “At other hospitals, physicians own their patients. Each doctor has his or her own patient list. We don’t; we share the list.”

And that, they say, hones their skills more than anything else. Every day they discuss recent cases, including the ones they completed. “We look at x-rays and ask each other, ‘Why did you do it this way, instead of that JOHN EMERSON

way?’ We bounce ideas off one another, and then we adopt what we believe are the best techniques. You can’t do that alone,” he says.

Even when outcomes are favorable, they still challenge one another. “Some doctors might high-five each other after a success, but we don’t,” says Reilly. “We look at how we can do it even better, or perfectly, especially the very complex cases.”

They all trained at different hospitals, so each brings a different perspective to the table, which is another plus. Sirkin completed an orthopedic surgery residency at NJMS and a fellowship at the Florida Orthopedic Institute; Reilly earned his MD from Chicago Medical School and completed orthopedic surgery training and a fellowship in orthopedic trauma at Harbor–UCLA Medical Center; and Adams — who joined the team in 2011— earned his MD from SUNY Downstate Health Sciences Center, and completed a residency at NJMS. His fellowship was with the faculty at the University of Washington orthopedics department at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.

Although they all take care of complicated injuries anywhere from the pelvis to the foot and shoulder to the wrist, each surgeon has a specific area of interest: Adams’ subspecialty focus is foot and ankle injuries, Reilly’s is hip and pelvis, and Sirkin’s is bone infections.

Sirkin explains that the most common model of care for orthopedic trauma surgeons is to have each member of a group manage one list of patients. Another is to have each doctor manage the patients who come in during his or her 24-hour shift, and a third model is to have each member of the group take care of one specific part of the body. “We’re so integrated, I don’t think I could practice that way,” says Sirkin. “The thing I like most about my job is the other two guys I work with.” Adams and Reilly immediately and wholeheartedly agree. They also thrive in the academic environment at NJMS. Because of the emphasis on problem solving, thought, and teaching, the priority is to have the best possible outcome, no matter how difficult that may be.

What they do and how they do it works.

A Patient’s Story

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anet Perlman doesn’t remember much of what happened that June day in 2014 when she was hit by a Chevy Tahoe. The South Orange resident was in a crosswalk when a heavy SUV plowed into her.

She remained conscious, although fuzzy, but she recalls the EMTs telling her she was going to University Hospital’s Trauma Center. There, they said, she would get the expert care she was going to need.

Perlman, who is in her 70s, says she had a broken femur and tibia on her right leg, a severely broken left ankle that required two surgeries, and a left knee injury that almost reached the bone, a fractured left shoulder, and displaced toes, not to mention a multitude of cuts and bruises. She doesn’t remember anything that happened during the first three and half weeks of her hospital stay, but when she came around, she recalls seeing someone in a pair of scrubs at the foot of her bed. It was Michael Sirkin, MD. He told her that he and his team had been taking care of her and would continue to do so.

And they did. “It was a long haul,” she says. “In the beginning I had to go to his office on a gurney.

I couldn’t bear any weight.” There were numerous operations and a long stint at Kessler Institute, a major affiliate of NJMS and UH. Through it all, she says, Sirkin kept her laughing and encouraged her, telling her she was a fighter and could come back from this.

“He told me the day would come when I would walk into his office,” she says. “I wasn’t sure that would ever happen, but it did.” Over the course of a year, she went from a gurney to a wheelchair and eventually to a walker. Today she only needs a cane.

“Could another doctor have put the pieces back together as well as Dr. Sirkin did?” she poses. “I’ll never know. But it was more than his skill that made me whole again.

It’s his persona, his sense of humor, and his extreme sensitivity. He’s my hero.”

She uses just one word to describe Sirkin: a mensch. “That’s a Yiddish word,” she explains. “It means a really great person, with a capital P. That is Dr. Sirkin.”

When other surgeons have nothing more to offer their patients, or have performed surgeries “that didn’t turn out so well,” as Sirkin puts it, they send the patients to this group. And the three are continually being invited to teach and speak to other physicians all over the world. They enjoy sharing their experiences of “putting the pieces back together” in some of the extremely complex cases they’ve seen.

The most rewarding part of their job, however, is helping patients become functional again. “We enter their lives at a very critical moment,” says Adams. “They really need us. We are the team that gets them to walk again, gets them back to work, and returns them to their lives. Our patients are so appreciative. It’s an honor to serve them.” ● Dr. Michael Sirkin • sirkinnms@njms.rutgers.edu

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Have Need G l o b a l H e a l t h T a s k f o rc e W o r k s t o P u t N J M S “ o n t h e M a p ”

Will Travel

By Genene W. Morris

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ew Jersey Medical School’s physicians and scientists have long been leaders in the global health arena. From inventive researchers who have revolutionized how diseases like tuberculosis (TB) are diagnosed and managed worldwide to enterprising clinicians who lead challenging medical missions to far-flung regions of the planet, faculty members have shown remarkable resolve in combating diseases, easing suffering, and saving lives.

The formidable task of curing the world takes more than just an overwhelming drive to help others. It requires resources, reliable collaborators, and a network of skilled people who willingly make the sacrifices necessary to carry out this labor of love, says Ziad C. Sifri, MD, NJMS associate professor of surgery.

As chair of the medical school’s Global Health Taskforce — a multidisciplinary group created last year by Dean Robert L. Johnson, MD — Sifri is leading the charge to develop a plan to support and bolster the global health activities of faculty members. Many use weeks of their own vacation time and spend their own money to lend a hand in poor and underdeveloped countries.

“There is a lot of global health activity here,” says Sifri. Yet, he adds, each program is run independently, which limits collaborations, information sharing, and opportunities for others to get involved. The taskforce’s mission is to solve those problems by laying the groundwork for the creation of a central unit devoted to marshaling all global health activities under one umbrella. By facilitating partnerships and information sharing; developing initiatives that complement the school’s educational, research, and service programs; and removing barriers that deter participation in global health endeavors, “this will support and promote the activities of faculty, and put us on the map,” Sifri says.

In forming the 14-member taskforce, Johnson empowered Sifri and then-co-chair and former NJMS faculty member Torian J. Easterling, 20

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MD’07, to hand-pick a group of people to study the issue. Sifri and Easterling assembled a team comprising medical students, faculty members from six NJMS clinical departments, a representative from the VA New Jersey Health Care System, and advisers from Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers University.

The group first convened in December and immediately established subcommittees covering education, local and international service, research, and funding, and an institute of global health. The team then issued a report to the dean.

A trauma surgeon, Sifri is no stranger to creating an entity from the ground up. He co-founded the International Surgical Health Initiative (ISHI) with fellow surgeon Asha Bale, MD, and photographer Vishnu Hoff to provide free surgical care to underserved communities worldwide. Since its first surgical mission in 2009 to Centro de Salud Clinic Barbara in San Juan Sacatepequez, Guatemala, ISHI’s more than 250 volunteers — including surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, residents, medical students and non-medical logistics volunteers — have made possible more than 1,000 surgeries ranging from gallbladder and mass excisions to hysterectomies and hernia repairs in Peru, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Ghana, Guatemala, and the Philippines. “And we’re trying to organize missions to Ecuador and Tanzania as well as some other countries in Southeast Asia,” says Sifri, who has led 10 of the 15 ISHI missions.

Sifri grew up in war-torn Beirut, Lebanon, where his passion for being of service to disenfranchised individuals took root. He earned a medical degree from the McGill University Faculty of Medicine, completed a general surgery residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a fellowship in trauma and critical care at NJMS, and then joined the medical school’s faculty in 2003.

“At a very young age, I had a passion to try to help those in difficult circumstances, whether it resulted from natural disasters, wars, or living in remote areas. It’s something that is a part of who I am,” says Sifri.

PHOTO COURTESY OF ISHI

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“Most people have those thoughts when they’re younger but those ideals tend to disappear as they mature. I guess I haven’t matured enough to lose interest.”

The challenges of bringing medical missions to remote locations are real but not insurmountable. In many areas there’s no functioning operating room, meaning missionary physicians often have to bring their own supplies, including sutures, scalpels, retractors and, sometimes, their own ultrasound equipment. In ISHI’s case, each volunteer is asked to check, along with their own belongings, a 50-pound bag of supplies to ensure they have what they need for a successful venture.

Patients sometimes find unique ways to say “thank you.” In fact, during one ISHI mission to Ghana, surgical oncologist and NJMS faculty member Kevin O. Clarke, MD, was installed as a sub-chief as part of a special ceremony.

The increased interest by medical students is not surprising when one takes into account the very thing that drives most people to pursue careers in medicine, says Amy Gore, MD, a surgical resident at NJMS. “Medical students are generally idealistic. It goes along with the mindset they have entering medical school. They want to help people,” says Gore, who, since becoming a resident in 2011, has been on medical missions to Kenya and Haiti. It’s an experience she recommends.

“It’s rewarding and a good way to give back. I could go on vacation and sit on a beach, but I would rather go somewhere and do something good,” the NJMS alum from Summit says. She has met people who “live completely differently than we do, particularly in more rural areas where many don’t have shoes and their homes are made of mud. But they’re strong and respectful and have great communities.”

Surgical resident and NJMS alumnus Anthony Scholer, MD, was

(l) Jacob J. Lindenthal (center) organizes trips to Peru for students and faculty as part of the MiniMed International program, which he created at NJMS. (p 23) Ziad Sifri (seated, second from r), who organizes medical missions to remote locations, is chair of the NJMS Global Health Taskforce.

As personally rewarding as the work is, Sifri says the missions are not just about providing sorely needed surgical and non-surgical services in places where health care professionals are in short supply. It’s also about providing local doctors with crucial training so that citizens can get the care they need after the team has left.

Medical missions to remote locations throughout the world are nothing new. In fact, according to an article appearing in the AMA Journal of Ethics, “There were about a dozen medical missionaries worldwide in 1850.” However, in recent years, interest has increased, especially among incoming medical students, 65 percent of whom report that they would like to pursue global learning opportunities during their four years to round out their medical education, according to the AAMC Reporter, May 2013.

At NJMS, where Sifri and colleagues are seeking to establish a global health lecture series, there are already ISHI, global surgery, and international medicine electives; an ISHI student organization; and a newly established global surgery fellowship program. “The number of students who are reaching out with interest in global health, whether it’s learning about it or participating in international electives, has grown from year to year,” he says.

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preparing in August to go on an ISHI surgical mission — his first — to Ghana. Global surgery falls in line with “the kind of man I want to be,” he says. “It’s kind of a calling. When I come back and look at myself in the mirror, I want to say to myself that I did the right thing.”

As the NJMS Department of Surgery’s inaugural global surgery fellow, the Nutley, NJ, native spent the first few months of his fellowship learning how to organize a mission. From establishing contact with collaborators in remote locations, booking flights, and getting the necessary governmental approvals and visas to recruiting volunteers, keeping them apprised of which vaccines they need, and identifying which supplies to bring on the trip, Scholer will use this knowledge in a future that he hopes will include his own nonprofit organization.

The fact that people in other parts of the world still die from things like appendicitis and that most of the world’s population do not have access to surgical care should be enough to mobilize others to act, Scholer says. A bright spot is that as global medicine comes to the forefront, more people are answering the call for help, which he says is a reflection on today’s health care professionals. “I think it shows that medical students and new doctors in general now have more altruistic and humanistic views.”

K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

One such student is Harsh Shah, a second-year NJMS student who, in June, endured a seven-and-a-half-hour plane ride and eight-hour bus journey with three other NJMS students for a three-week immersive global health experience in Huancayo, Peru. The trip was organized as part of NJMS’s MiniMed International program, which was created by Jacob Jay Lindenthal, PhD, DrPH, professor of psychiatry, for students and faculty to learn the rudiments of health care delivery in a country that is burdened with many preventable diseases. During the trip, Shah explains, students went on rounds and interacted with Peruvian doctors and medical students in two different hospitals. The students also took part in community service initiatives.

Shah believes global health should be a required part of the curriculum. He says the experience in Peru helped build his confidence and gave him insight into the challenges that many people face in

vaccines into child immunization programs in the U.S. and abroad.

One such project, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, looks at the costs and health consequences of introducing a vaccine against sepsis and meningitis caused by Group B streptococcus in low-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa, where the burden of these conditions is particularly high.

“Traditionally, childhood immunization programs have been a central part of low- and moderate-income countries’ efforts in public health. And they’ve been, historically speaking, very inexpensive on a per child basis, with the traditional vaccine antigens in a classic immunization program costing well under $2 to $3 per immunized child,” says Sinha, who is a faculty member at the Rutgers School of Public Health and NJMS. But over the last 15 to 20 years, adds Sinha, important lifesaving vaccines have entered the market, carrying a price

accessing health care. “It also gives students an ability to gain language skills; and by learning how medicine is practiced in other countries, it allows them to see there’s no cookie-cutter way to get it done.”

The trip also put Shah in an enviable position among his peers.

“I have friends in medical schools across the country and many are so jealous that I had the opportunity to do this,” says the Rutgers College graduate.

In addition to student participation in MiniMed International, NJMS faculty travel annually to Huancayo to consult with and provide lectures to the community as well as to residents and medical faculty of the Universidad Nacional del Centro del Peru and the Universidad Continental.

But NJMS’s international work is not limited to medical missions.

The school is home to powerhouse research programs like the Public Health Research Institute Center, which strives to overcome infectious diseases worldwide, and the Global Tuberculosis Institute, which works to cure TB around the world. It also boasts the likes of David Alland, MD, whose revolutionary research led to a rapid diagnostic test for tuberculosis, and physician-scientist Anushua Sinha, MD, MPH, who looks at the value, costs, and health consequences of bringing new

tag that — while relatively modest — exceeds the traditional $2 to $3 per immunized child mark. “So the question has been, ‘Is investment in these newer vaccines an efficient use of limited resources?’ In the balance is the fact that every year you delay introducing new vaccines, there are more children at risk and more lives lost.”

For Sinha, who works with collaborators in the U.S. and worldwide, global health research boils down to one simple truth: “A child’s life is valuable no matter where in the world the child is born. As physicians, our training leads us to want to save lives and reduce human suffering.”

What’s more, says Sifri, in our increasingly interconnected world, health issues have implications that extend beyond geographical borders. That fact was never more apparent than in 2014, during the height of the Ebola outbreak. This demonstrates how important it is for health care professionals and researchers to have global health experience so they can deal with infections once deemed relegated to distant lands, Sifri states, noting “Once Ebola starts, you don’t have time to go and study it because it’s already knocking on your door.” ●

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ISHI

Dr. Ziad Sifri • sifrizi@njms.rutgers.edu Dr. Jacob Lindenthal • lindenth@njms.rutgers.edu

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Meet Mark Siracusa & Karen Edelblum

Up-and-Coming

No matter what path these scientific stars took into the world of medical research, their motivation looks very personal. Years of hard work, countless hours of study and training, as well as strong support systems have put them at the top of their games. But there is something else you’ll detect when you read their stories: a youthful optimism so critical to the world of medicine. Both are Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) Chancellor’s Scholars and both are among the best in their fields.

By Maryann Brinley

Mark Siracusa: The Power of Discovery Ask Mark C. Siracusa, PhD, why he does experimental science. Go ahead. Lots of people ask, especially family members and friends back in Massachusetts where he grew up. No one in his circle is a scientist although his father is an engineer and his mother is a retired nurse. “I don’t think anyone expected me to end up where I am.”

So why did he choose his career path? To answer, this assistant professor in the NJMS Department of Medicine describes the thrill of discovery and the importance of advancing therapeutic strategies.

“Essentially, clinicians have a toolbox of treatment options for their patients. When they exhaust all the tools, the options become very limited. In science you realize that it takes discoveries to advance that toolbox. It may not happen often but when it does, it’s amazing.”

The very first RBHS Chancellor’s Scholar appointed, Siracusa is already well-known for his discoveries of the immunoregulatory role of innate immune cell populations during infectious disease. He has first-authored papers in Nature and Immunity and his own National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding but perhaps even more important is his passion for this science. “The immune system has multiple modules that it initiates. One is the type 1 response, basically pro-inflammatory, anti-bacterial or anti-viral. But another module and we know so little about it, is the type 2, an immune response originally meant to fight parasitic infections that might be triggering off randomly when it sees benign, really non-dangerous things like pollen.” Think asthma, eczema, food allergies, hay fever, all sorts of allergic inflammation, and inflammatory disorders. “There has been a real increase in developed 24

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countries, where parasitic infections have been eliminated, and this type 2 immune system, kind of an artifact with nothing real to fight” might be to blame.

Siracusa earned his PhD in 2008 at Johns Hopkins University and then did post-doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania, all the while following his fascination for biology and immunology. “I always come back to the aspect of discovery,” he explains. “Once you start doing research at a high level, there is no more captivating feeling than discovering something that will work across animal model systems and into human patient populations,” he says.

He remembers his early intellectual encounters with type 2 immunity. “It was crazy. I’m a fairly well-educated person but I knew so little about this. How is it initiated? Why is it initiated? How is it regulated? I was a graduate student working in cancer immunology and had been in multiple labs studying the immune system but had never really been exposed to the incredible parasitic infections that devastate the majority of the world’s population. For type 1 immunity, we had identified all these receptors and immune cell populations but in contrast, there was really nothing known about type 2.”

By concentrating on this immune module, Siracusa realized that he could “inform therapeutics to treat two devastating disease states: parasitic infections and allergic inflammation. My studies have taken us into the really early events that your body initiates in both.” He has developed new ways to understand how epithelial cell-derived cytokines regulate innate immune cells and mediate protective immunity to helminth worms in the gastrointestinal tract. His earlier work focused on understanding acute pulmonary inflammation in response to hookworm infection. And while at Penn, he was on a team studying what is known as the “allergic march,” or the gradual overlapping of allergic diseases that can begin in childhood. “We worked very closely with clinicians and allergists who knew that the kids who develop early eczema were going to have substantial allergies down the road.” Those research results were published in Nature in August 2011.

Perhaps no experience was as motivating as a trip to Peru with his mother right after completing his PhD. “You are burned out. You’ve written your thesis. Grad school is a long, hard process,” he admits.

His parents sponsored a group of children at a Peruvian orphanage PHOTOS BY JOHN EMERSON

Research Leaders and his mom wanted to fly down to meet them. When his father couldn’t make the trip, “I said I’d go because I thought it would be a nice vacation. I wanted to see Machu Picchu,” Siracusa recalls. However, while visiting the villages outside Lima, he finally came into contact with the small children who had “the horrible parasitic infections” he had been studying. “It was incredible to see the manifestations, the stunted growth, for instance, of what I had been reading about. This reinvigorated my reasons for going back to my research.” Clinicians down there described “a never-ending cascade” where children were treated, sent home, and immediately reinfected. “You realize the importance of what you are doing.”

Students taking his “Advanced Concepts in Infection, Immunity and Inflammation” and listening to his take on innate immunity, mucosal immunology, or parasitology are in for a treat. Siracusa explains that what most students have learned about immunology is dogma. Old stuff. Not in his classes, however. “Fundamental discoveries were made in this area just two or three years ago. To be here at the ground floor in science where discoveries are being made in their time frame grabs them. This is an area of great opportunity in science and one of great need.”

Siracusa believes he is in the right place to make these discoveries happen. At NJMS, he joined the interdepartmental Center for Immunity and Inflammation and couldn’t be happier. “I was recruited here because we are on the tip of an explosion.” The Center is part of the two-year-old Institute of Infection and Inflammation (i3D) that has brought world-class scientists together to build upon cutting-edge facilities located in Newark. “These next few years will be incredible.”

Karen Edelblum: Personal Best For basic scientists like Karen Edelblum, PhD, being able to put a face on the disease they may be studying is crucial. “It is so easy to get caught up in doing the science, writing the papers, and applying for the grants that you don’t think about the medical impact of your work on the bench. I’ve known principal investigators who have inspiration walls in their labs so they can actually see patients’ faces,” says this new

assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the NJMS Center for Immunity and Inflammation (CII).

“You become more passionate about the science when you have that face and those stories,” she adds. CII is a division of i3D (Institute of Infection and Inflammatory Disease). Having arrived just last summer, Edelblum is happy to be here. In her case, finding a face for her research wasn’t difficult. It’s her own that she sees, along with all the other IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) patients and friends she has known since she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at age 13. “I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve been in remission for 13 years.” A graduate of Emory University, Edelblum earned her PhD in cell and developmental biology at Vanderbilt University in 2008 and completed a post-doc at the University of Chicago in 2011, where she stayed on as a research associate. She’s been looking at the synergy between immunological, epithelial, and microbial factors during the pathogenesis of colitis and, in particular, gamma delta intraepithelial lymphocytes (IELs). “They are a poorly understood subset of T cells and after 30 years of study, we still don’t fully understand what they do.”

Since there is no known cause for IBD, there is also no cure.

Usually diagnosed in the pre-teens to mid-20s, 1.6 million Americans are battling this gastrointestinal (GI) nightmare. Inside the intestines, a single layer of cells, the epithelium, protects the host from the harsh environment of the gut. Imagine a place with a constant onslaught of pathogens, toxins, waste by-products and cytokines. In IBD, this essential barrier is compromised, contributing to the overactivation of the mucosal immune system.

“I’ve known since I was a teenager what I wanted to be when I grew up,” Edelblum says. “I became single-minded about pursuing this research, looking at epithelial biology, mucosal immunology, and trying to understand the complex components that go into the development of this disease, both on the epithelial as well as the immune side. I was always good at science and I like to think that things happen for a reason. All of my career and academic decisions have been put into motion by my diagnosis and involvement in the IBD community.”

Edelblum grew up in Houston where her parents liked the fact that she turned what most people would see as a negative into a positive. “As a scientist, I trained in the GI community. Its small circle of investigators has become my role models and mentors.”

Edelblum likes science she can see, “as opposed to looking at proteins on a blot,” she laughs. She figured that if she could “watch the Continued on page 29

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Bdellovibrio attacking a biofilm

PREDATORS VERSUS PREY IN AN ACADEMIC LAB

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A Rutgers team—whose members come from the School of Dental Medicine and New Jersey Medical School—are collaborating on research to target and ultimately wipe out drug-resistant bacteria and biofilms currently so prevalent in hospitals and so dangerous to human life.

By Eve Jacobs

I

t’s a jungle out there, and nature’s laws dictate that powerful predators destroy and devour their less powerful prey— nature’s system of checks and balances. In the social sense, the word “predator” has come to mean a person or group that causes harm, ruthlessly exploiting others.

But in the labs of two savvy Rutgers researchers — and their collaborators — this concept is being turned on its head. Here, predators are the good guys and may possibly prove to be superheroes in a battle where the stakes are dizzyingly high.

Ever since the 1940s, when penicillin was discovered and then mass produced, antibiotics have been killing off dangerous infectioncausing bacteria and have saved the lives of millions. But these bacteria, which have mutated and acquired new genes over time, are regaining the upper hand; and as antibiotics lose their punch, these germs “pose an urgent and serious threat to public health,” says Nancy Connell, PhD, NJMS professor of medicine and director of the Biosafety Level 3 laboratory at the Center for the Study of Emerging and Re-Emerging Pathogens at NJMS. Her concern is confirmed by statistics posted on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) website. “Each year in the United States, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections.” While pharmaceutical companies push forward to try to produce new and more potent antibiotics to fight infection, it’s evident to scientists that this approach will have only limited success. What’s needed, explains Connell, is “a totally new strategy.”

With a $7.2 million grant to support their work, co-investigators Daniel Kadouri, PhD, and Connell are leading a multi-site team in the U.S. and abroad in their quest to bring about a “completely novel way to fight infection,” she says. The U.S. military is particularly interested in their work, since infected wounds — often a consequence of battlefield injuries — are more often resulting in amputation of limbs.

This happens because potent bacteria enter through a wound and then march through the body with lethal repercussions. When all antibiotics fail to stop the onslaught of the infectious organisms, cutting off the affected limb(s) is the only life-saving action left.

“This was the method used to save soldiers’ lives a century ago, before the discovery of antibiotics,” Kadouri observes. “We’ve been forced backwards 100 years.”

Their project is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Pathogens Predators program; and is managed through a cooperative agreement with Rutgers University, DARPA, and the Army Research Office. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are collaborating.

Kadouri, an associate professor of oral biology at the dental school, has focused his research for the last decade on the predator-prey relationship among particular bacteria, and how this relationship could be used in treating patients with bacterial infections. The researcher has demonstrated that particular bacteria act in a predatory manner and will target and kill-off other bacteria (the prey) that are known to produce serious, and often multi-drug resistant, disease.

His findings demonstrated that Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus and RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

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Micavibrio aeruginosavorus kill-off numerous strains of Gram-negative, disease-causing bacteria known to be antibiotic resistant, among them Acinetobacter baumannii, Escherichia coli (E.coli ), Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Pseudomonas spp, which often infect hospital patients, causing serious respiratory and intestinal disease. These organisms are particularly dangerous to those who are immune-compromised. His lab results indicate that “even strains of infection-causing bacteria resistant to multiple drugs cannot defend themselves against these predators.”

“Live antibiotics,” Connell calls the predatory bacteria. “That’s our weapon. Our team is going back to nature to harness the knowhow of these two types of predatory bacteria.”

Kadouri, who earned an MS in the field of virology and a PhD in microbiology from the University of Jerusalem in 2003, completed three years of post-doctoral studies in microbiology and immunology at Dartmouth Medical School and then joined the dental school’s Department of Oral Biology in 2006. He is also a faculty member of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) in Newark.

In addition to multi-drug resistant bacteria, his research focuses on biofilms, a slimy build-up of bacteria. “Biofilms form when bacteria adhere to surfaces and begin to excrete a glue-like substance that

Nancy Connell and Dan Kadouri (bottom step) and members of their team

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protects and anchors them to materials and tissues,” explains Kadouri.

“One of the major difficulties in controlling surface-attached bacteria is their enhanced resistance to drugs.” Biofilms also cling to catheters and implants used in medical procedures and are difficult— and sometimes impossible — to remove.

“Most oral infections involve biofilms,” states the researcher.

“Infectious bacteria attach to surfaces in the mouth.”

Connell is a tuberculosis (TB) researcher by training and directs a lab that continues to delineate the basic biology of the TB bacillus, responsible for millions of deaths worldwide each year. She directs one of five “discovery cores” that are part of a $26 million grant awarded to David Perlin, PhD, director of the Public Health Research Institute (PHRI) at NJMS. Her group does the initial testing of newly discovered drugs in varied combinations on 30 different organisms, some of them weaponized agents. Her primary research focus has been bacterial antibiotic drug discovery.

Together with their collaborators, the Rutgers investigators will use the funding to more quickly delineate the potential and the limitations of their new “technology.”

“It’s quite disturbing to think that 85 years after Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, we are returning to a pre-antibiotic era where simple infections sometimes do not respond to treatment, and ‘routine’ infections, operations and interventions can become life-threatening,” Kadouri comments. He says that hard-to-combat infections started spreading in hospitals around 2006, and in 2009, “we started seeing military people coming from war zones with infections that were not treatable. The only treatment now in many cases is amputation. We see this in hospitals all the time.”

The Kadouri-Connell team brings together the talents and skills of two distinct laboratories. He has worked on understanding the biology of the predatory bacteria, the mechanisms of predator-prey interactions, the role of biofilms, and how to use and enhance the abilities of the predatory bacteria to control drug-resistant bacteria and microbial biofilms that cause infection. Her lab is proficient in conducting next-step animal studies to test the safety of introducing these selected bacteria to prey on other bacteria.

“We have already established that these predatory bacteria have the capacity to successfully attack a variety of bacteria regardless of their antimicrobial resistance, so we think they may be effective therapeutic agents where antimicrobial drugs have failed,” Kadouri states. What is not known is whether the predators will have the same effect in the human body as they do in the lab, since the immune system may have the ability to neutralize the predators before they can do their beneficial work.

Ensuring the safety of a new medical procedure or drug is the crucial first step. In the past four months, the team has demonstrated that when mice are given two species of predatory bacteria —Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus and Micavibrio aeruginosavorus — introduced through their respiratory system and intravenously, these bacteria cause the mouse no harm. Their findings were published online in Scientific K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

Reports, posted on nature.com on August 7. Kenneth Shatzkes, a third year doctoral student at GSBS in Newark who works in Connell’s lab, played a leading role in the study.

According to Kadouri, the team has two chief goals during the three years of DARPA-funded research: first to establish that introducing these predatory bacteria is non-toxic; and then to show that their approach works to control biofilms and almost any Gram-negative organism that causes human infection. “We are continuing to verify the safety of this approach,” he says. “Safety is key.”

While Kadouri and Connell are the principal investigators of the project, each of the other teams is “working on a different model,” says Kadouri.

The Rutgers team will also tackle the critical question of whether the predatory bacteria can counteract resistance if it happens. “Will the prey become resistant?” asks Connell. “And if so, can the predator bacteria generate counter-resistance?”

“The predators’ survival relies on gobbling up other bacteria,” she says. “They will find a way to do that — even if it means using brute force.”

Connell sees their research group as “the vanguard.” In situations where people are dying because there are no treatments for their infections, “they will soon be asking us, ‘Why didn’t you do anything?’”

“As responsible scientists, we need to do something — quickly,” she says.

Kadouri agrees: “We need to extend the arsenal against these infectious organisms before a time when we have nothing left to fight back with.”

He predicts that infectious disease treatment will be more successful when it patterns itself after cancer therapy. “There is no single magic bullet,” he says. “Cancer specialists understand that they need to use drug cocktails because of resistance.

“Infectious disease experts will also need to use two or more therapies in tandem to be effective. We have to understand the limitations of any one technology.”

Kadouri observes that we have abused our current technologies such as herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics. “We have placed too much pressure on them,” he states.

The team is barreling forward at incredible speed. “This is like doing science on speed,” he says. “Work that might ordinarily have been completed in a year, we have done in just a few weeks. We’re not sleeping much.”

So, when will this research hit the marketplace?

“That’s hard to say,” says Kadouri. “It’s science. It’s intriguing — it’s thrilling. We’re learning things we never knew before.”

“At the end of the day, we’ll come up with answers,” he says confidently, “and the answers will be a mix of all the new knowledge.”

For those of us watching and waiting on the sidelines, there’s no doubt that what these “think-out-of-the-box” scientists discover over the next three years will likely impact mankind’s fight against infectious disease for decades to come. ●

Research Leaders Continued from page 25

behavior” of these gamma delta T cells in the gut, she might find clues to their function. Some scientists believed that these T cells migrated along with the epithelium and were eventually shed into the intestinal lumen during regular turnover inside the GI tract. “Everybody thought the IELs went along for the ride, as if they were standing on an escalator and just got off with the others.” During her post-doc, she developed technology “to watch the trafficking of these T cells in the gut of a live mouse. They work like surveillance, effectively patrolling for pathogens.

When they find something, like Salmonella, they hone in on the area near the bacteria, acting like bloodhounds and migrating toward the epithelial cells where the pathogen is attached.” Now, she is trying to understand what this relatively small number of T cells—they are outnumbered at least 5 to 1 in the gut by epithelial cells—are actually doing to prevent the bacterial invasion. Funded by grants from the NIH, Edelblum’s research was published recently in Gastroenterology.

The first time she saw IELs in action was a “eureka” moment. She had been optimizing her imaging and suddenly saw “all these little green cells running around. At first I thought it was just background.

Then, I thought, ‘Wow, these things are actually moving.’ I could slow down the resolution and study their behavior.” Her goal now is to understand the mechanisms regulating this process. In IBD, the patient’s body is reacting to trillions of different bacteria. “You always have bacteria in your gut,” or microbiome, she explains. By starting with one pathogenic organism in a mouse model, Salmonella in this case, she could learn more about the mechanisms behind IEL interactions with the epithelium and “apply it to further studies of the body’s response to the microbiota… at least from the mucosal and immunological perspective, and hopefully, contribute to finding a cure.”

Edelblum has written a blog in the past and participated in online chat sessions about IBD. As a scientist, she is “able to do the science but I am also able to tell patients what the science can do for them. ” A longtime counselor for the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America’s Camp Oasis in Georgia, Edelblum believes in giving back. “I hope to turn a diagnosis that may be perceived as a negative in these kids’ lives into a positive experience.”

Last year, one of her campers and former co-counselors, Alexandria Davidson, passed away as a result of complications from Crohn’s disease. “I promised Alex that I would keep her memory alive. You would have no idea looking at me that I’ve ever been sick but the things I’ve gone through are unbelievable,” she admits. Thanks to Alex’s family, her website entitled “Beautiful Beyond the Pain,” is still available for patients with difficult illnesses that are not outwardly apparent.

“I’ve always worked towards this point in my life,” Edelblum says, “to bring other people’s experiences here with me. I’m here to push their dreams along.” ● RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

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Les Michelson

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RUTGERS’ NEW SUPERC0MPUTER TAKES 0FF

BY EV E JACO B S

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hen we talk about research tools, computers are right up there in the top five pieces of necessary equipment.

While your everyday desktop model may answer the call for everyday work, the super-challenges of biomedical investigators pushing the envelope require the power of a computer of a whole different magnitude.

It took a man with vision — and a knowledge of science — to build a core group of computer whizzes capable of collaborating with researchers on particularly challenging computational problems. And it will take all of a recent $1.71 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to realize that vision of a computational facility that can give New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) scientists — and other Rutgers researchers — a giant boost.

First, who is this “visionary” and how did he win a large federal award? Les Michelson, PhD, has been a known entity on the Newark campus for many moons. His experience with computers dates back to the early ’70s; and in 1975, the experimental high energy physicist left Brookhaven National Laboratories to begin his career in academia at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ).

Over the ensuing years, he built a department that serves as the interface between the computational needs of academic researchers/educators JOHN EMERSON

and the ever-evolving computer technology that has become critical to their work. Understanding computers from the ground up and trained as a scientist himself, Michelson has been able to bridge the generally wide gap between lab researchers and computer gurus, and speak the language of both.

Perhaps you recognize his name from The Huffington Post. In August 2014, he contributed to a long article about the history of email. In 1978, right in his Newark-based offices, a 14-year-old intern by the name of V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai created a multi-campus, data-base-driven electronic mail system, “the first electronic replication of the interoffice mail system, which he named email,” writes Michelson. “I had the idea we could automate interoffice memorandum and make them usable to the average user. Shiva wrote the code and got the system up and running.”

Ayyadurai went on to earn four degrees from MIT, become a Fulbright Scholar, Lemelson-MIT Awards finalist, Westinghouse Science Honors Award recipient, and a systems scientist and entrepreneur, and was granted the copyright for email. His computer code, artifacts, and papers were acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in February 2012; and, by the way, he married Fran Drescher (star of the once popular TV program, The Nanny) in 2014.

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The environment that supported the young email innovator is the kind of operation Michelson has created and is so proud of. In the “old days,” when the personal computer was just starting to establish itself, he saw that computers could do more if they were harnessed together into a network. Until 2005, he was director of academic computing services for UMDNJ, and afterwards, began to build a “high performance and research computing group,” which he says “applies powerful computer systems to demanding problems that are completely intractable on normal desktop computers.”

Michelson envisioned his group as a centrally funded organization that could collaborate with scientific investigators on computational problems. “People at this institution are interested in moving forward quickly to find solutions to problems,” he says. “We understand their research questions, can work with them as peers, and have meaningful scientific discussions; and by helping them find solutions to vexing problems, we can accelerate their research.”

Vlad Kholodovych, PhD, a member of the High Performance and Research Computing group (HP&RC) since 2011, has been actively engaged since 2002 with medicinal and organic chemists at the University in multiple anti-cancer, antimicrobial, and preventive heart failure drug discovery projects. He introduced Raymond Birge, PhD, an NJMS cancer researcher, and William Welsh, PhD, a complex and small molecule researcher at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS). That introduction resulted in the threeway collaboration — including Kholodovych as a partner — that won a recently funded $100,000 research grant.

Peicheng Du, PhD, a member of the group since 2009, was trained as a computational biologist at Rutgers and subsequently at IBM Research. He has worked with numerous university researchers in genomics, proteomics, and high performance computing, including NJMS researcher David Alland, MD, who has revolutionized TB diagnostics with a recent discovery.

The team that helped make the supercomputer-dream a reality: (l-r) Theresa Policastro, Denise Romano, Vlad Kholodovych, Donald Smith, Les Michelson, Peicheng Du, Charles Hedrick, Jeffrey Rosenfeld, Deborah Lazzarino, Janet Chang

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Jeffrey Rosenfeld, PhD, is a bioinformatics specialist now working at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. He also provided guidance to investigators on experimental design involving high throughput genome sequencers and collaborated with them on the analysis and interpretation of the huge amount of data that stream from these relatively new and revolutionary instruments.

“We don’t initiate original research,” explains Michelson, “but we are frequently the catalyst for collaborations — often among researchers who did not previously know each other— and we are part of the research.”

“We were elated when we heard the good news.

We had been awarded the largest NIH S10 award ever received by Rutgers by more than a factor of two,” says Les Michelson.

With divergent scientific backgrounds and interests, the members of Michelson’s group can fan out and provide a broad range of services to scientists in many different fields. Genomics, proteomics, molecular modeling, drug design, gene expression, bioinformatics, data mining, and software development all fall within their purview; and they are frequently co-authors on published papers, co-presenters at professional conferences, and co-inventors on patents.

A year or so ago, Michelson worked with Michael Mathews, PhD, Bin Tian, PhD, Patricia Soteropoulos, PhD, and Deborah Lazzarino, PhD, to establish the NJMS Genomics Program. This new core facility offers state-of-the-art wet lab services and attendant data analysis and interpretive services to investigators incorporating cutting-edge high throughput genomic sequencing into their research. “We felt we had the talent and computational resources to give the Genomics Program a real edge,” Michelson says.

It was Lazzarino, NJMS assistant dean for research, who approached Michelson with a proposal to “amp-up” the pace of research at the Newark medical school and other units of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences. Her suggestion was to apply for a Biomedical Research Support Shared Instrumentation Grant (often called an S10)—for shared equipment and instrumentation— from the NIH. “We have a community of NIH actively funded investigators,” she said, “who could clearly benefit from a piece of equipment that will enable our scientists to accelerate their research.”

“Would you be interested in applying in the super-computer category?” she asked.

JOHN EMERSON

LENOVO LINUX CLUSTER COMPUTER • Estimated 100 teraflop/sec (10**14) compute capability (LINPACK benchmark) • 140 compute nodes (3,360 cores), 128Gbyte ram/node; Intel Haswell processors • 1.5TB ram, 48 core large memory node • 8 compute nodes with twin NVIDIA K80 GPU • Infiniband FDR Node Interconnect Network • 2.0 Petabyte IBM GPFS High Speed Parallel Storage System (26 Gbyte/sec aggregate throughput)

Lazzarino gave Michelson a list of 16 investigators at RBHS who might be interested in participating in the grant; and he sent out an email asking whose work was currently funded by the NIH and who wanted to join in on this project. “The proposal requirements for the award are very tough,” he says. “We had to understand the computational needs of each of the NIH-funded research projects and translate them into computational equipment utilization.”

In other words, you don’t just tell the NIH that you need a supercomputer. You have to prove it. “Among other things, you have to show what your current equipment can handle and demonstrate that it falls far short of the computational demands of the NIHfunded research. In addition you must show that these needs cannot be satisfied with equipment elsewhere in the university or neighboring institutions,” explains Michelson.

The first proposal was submitted in September 2011 and the answer came back in March 2012 that the impact score was good, but not high enough for funding. That was disappointing news, but not terminal to the project. The group “regrouped,” so to speak. Michelson and his staff went back and thoroughly researched and documented the computer needs and computer hours for each project, and then resubmitted the grant application in September 2013. (This opportunity is only offered by the NIH every two years.) The UMDNJ–Rutgers integration on July 1, 2013, gave the project a boost — providing more NIH-funded investigators who could collaborate and benefit from the grant.

Although the group’s members were feeling more hopeful, they were out-and-out elated when on February 18, 2015, the good news was delivered. “We had been awarded the largest NIH S10 award ever received by Rutgers by more than a factor of two,” states Michelson.

“For this program, the range of awards is $750,000 to $2 million. It is a single-year award to bring in a piece of equipment, in this case a supercomputer, get it up and running, and have people using it in ways

that accelerate research in many areas.”

Twenty-four investigators — some in groups, such as the genomics program — will now have access to the most powerful computational research facility at Rutgers dedicated to the health sciences. In fact, as Michelson likes to point out, this machine would have made the top 500 supercomputer list just a few years ago. “One of the primary reasons I think we were successful is the stellar reputation of our scientists,” he says.

The researchers from NJMS and the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences (GSBS) who were part of the grant proposal and will have immediate access to the new computer include: David Foran, PhD; Raymond Birge, PhD; Annie Beuve, PhD; David Alland, MD; Andrew Harris, PhD; Utz Herbig, PhD; Barry Kresiworth, PhD; David Lukac, PhD; Hong Li, PhD; Teresa Wood, PhD; Stephen Vatner, MD; George Yap, PhD; Joel Freundlich, PhD; Marila Gennaro, PhD; and Amariliz Rivera, PhD. That list of researchers will certainly grow as word of the supercomputer and its super capabilities gets out. “You don’t have to have an NIH grant to use the equipment,” says Michelson. “Other scientists will be able to tap into it, too, as the NIH permits a portion of the instrument’s utilization to be available to other life science research.”

The amazing piece of equipment was purchased in mid-July to be installed at the Rutgers Hill Research Data Center in Piscataway.

Although its potential for work is enormous, “physically the cluster is fairly compact,” he says.

Rutgers’ new computer has the capacity to help the University’s biomedical researchers move their work forward far more quickly.

“Computations that heretofore were intractable will now become a reality and enable exploration along new and promising avenues,” says Michelson. This will ultimately speed up the translation of lab research into usable therapies that will benefit us all. ● RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

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ALUMNI FOCUS

news of special interest to njms and gsbs graduates

Message from the

Alumni Association President

PAUL BOLANOWSKI, MD’65 ALUMNI ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT

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his summer, the Alumni Association awarded International Study Scholarships to 14 first-year medical students. These students are provided with the opportunity to gain exposure to medical care in other countries. Upon their return, they are required to submit summaries of their experiences in various locations including India, Ghana, and the Himalayas. As President, it is with great pleasure that I have the responsibility to review each of the essays.

India One student’s interest in the operational aspects of a free health care center, including the challenges to success, led her back to her cultural roots in India. For approximately two weeks, the student volunteered at a health care facility that offers free and discounted services to a low-income, rural population in India. Her first and most notable observation was the shortage of both physicians and other medical staff at the 34

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health center. As all physicians there provide services as volunteers, it was clear that attracting sufficient doctors was a challenge.

Another observation was that the patients who received medical services were unaware of their health conditions and did not have a full understanding of the treatments and recommendations made by their physician.

Finally, strict government regulations seemed to restrict the expansion of medical services provided by the health center. With the facility already functioning with limited resources and staff, the additional responsibilities to complete paperwork as required by new regulations have impaired the efforts of the center.

Ghana One of the most notable problems that the student encountered while working at Saint Dominic’s Hospital in Ghana was the high rate of patients who “defaulted,” or did not follow and adhere to their treatment. Although the reasons for this are widely varied, the student believed that was due to their lack of understanding of the diagnosis and treatment. This can be attributed to doctors not communicating on an intellectual level with the patients.

Other contributing factors include the shortage of accessible transportation and prioritization of family obligations. Even if patients were fortunate to have access to a car, many of the roads are poorly maintained and in bad condition. Most of the locals performed farm work or housework in order to provide for their families, leaving little time to schedule and attend their doctor appointments.

International Study Scholarships awarded by the Alumni Association provided 14 first-year medical students with the opportunity to gain exposure to medical care in faraway places, including the Himalayas, Ghana, and India.

Himalayas The student participated in the Himalayan Health Exchange program, located in the remote Pangi Valley of northern Indian state.

Over the course of the next three weeks, the student, along with 32 other members of the medical team, trekked through the remote, mountainous region and provided free medical services and supplies to the region. As they travelled, they set up mobile clinics in five different villages and brought muchneeded health services to more than 2,000 people.

One of the most significant challenges during the trip was patient communication.

With more than 20 different languages and dialects used in the region, language barriers were ever-present. Many patients could not afford, and had little or no exposure to, routine medical care.

The students learned a great deal about the inadequate delivery of medical care in the various locations. I am confident that they gained valuable exposure to the disparities in health care delivery in different parts of the world. ● T O P L E F T: A N D R E W H A N E N B E R G

ALUMNI PROFILE AL E X Y. B EKKER , MD ’9 1

Giving Back to a School that “Gave Me a Lot”

BY GENENE W. MORRIS

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hen Alex Y. Bekker, MD, PhD, graduated from New Jersey Medical School, he knew he would someday return to the institution as a member of its faculty.

So when, in 2012, he was offered the opportunity to chair the medical school’s Department of Anesthesiology, he jumped at it.

“I had prospects to be chair in other departments (at different schools) but I never truly considered any of them because ultimately I wanted to come back to NJMS,” says Bekker, who left his post as vice chair of research and chief of the division of neurosurgical anesthesia at the New York University School of Medicine’s Department of

Anesthesiology. For him, the offer from his alma mater represented a chance to give back to an institution that helped make so many of his dreams a reality.

“This school gave me a lot,” says Bekker, noting that the clinical skills he acquired as an NJMS student helped to make him a standout resident at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. “I was a top performer there because NJMS prepares students to be very good clinicians.”

When Bekker joined NJMS, he says there was a lot of enthusiasm about the school’s future. Robert L. Johnson, MD, had been selected as its dean, ushering in a new era.

Bekker capitalized on the excitement by pushing forward ambitious plans to make his

department a preeminent force in academia by clearly communicating his vision for the group; emphasizing the importance of teambuilding; promoting diversity; recruiting new talent, while recognizing and developing existing ones; and supporting the career goals of faculty. “We encourage people to spend time creating an atmosphere of camaraderie,” says Bekker, who annually hosts a themed gathering at his house offering cuisine from a featured culture.

One of his early moves was to rename the “Department of Anesthesiology” the “Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care.”

It was a change that reflects a trend in medicine, he says. “People realize that anesthesiologists should be seen not just as intraoperative but more like perioperative physicians. We can oversee all kinds of care of patients, from the moment that patients sign up for surgery to their discharge,” says Bekker, who chaired the perioperative steering committee and currently co-chairs the OR committee at University Hospital in Newark. He also continues to practice clinically.

In the three years since joining NJMS, Bekker has also revitalized the department’s clinical research program with the help of the department’s Vice Chair of Research Yuan-Xiang Tao, PhD, MD, a widely respected authority in neuroscience and pain research, recruited from Johns Hopkins University. The department of 27 faculty members has seen its level of participation in research increase and watched its national NIH ranking grow from 49 in 2011 to 24 this year. “In the tristate area, we are above similar departments at NYU, Mount Sinai, Cornell, and Montefiore,” he says.

Furthermore, he notes, the department’s residency program has expanded from 27 spots to 33 and residents are passing their boards “at 100 percent for the third year in a row.” Also, medical students who rotated through the department and applied to anesthesiology residencies matched to competitive programs, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital and ColumbiaContinued on page 39

K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

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ALUMNI PROFILE R U D OLPH WAG NER, M D’7 8

At First Sight

Rudolph Wagner with Emily Birkitt and her son Jalen

BY MARYANN BRINLEY

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aking a 2-year-old to the doctor can be a nightmare for parents. Tears and fears often go wild…but not if the physician is Rudolph Wagner, MD. A pediatric ophthalmologist for more than 25 years and clinical professor at the Institute of Ophthalmology and Visual Science (IOVS) at New Jersey Medical School, Wagner says, “I really enjoy working with kids.” It shows. In fact, everyone, especially his young patients, can see and feel the warmth and charm.

Take Emily Birkitt, a young mother who works in the NJMS Alumni Affairs office.

She, in fact, has not one but two patients’ stories to contribute. Diagnosed with strabismus when she was 2, her parents sought multiple “second” opinions about what to do before finding Wagner. Her right eye was crossing and other doctors disagreed about the best treatment with some recommendations really alarming her parents at the time.

“My memories of going to see Dr. Wagner are all wonderful. I loved him. He was so calm and natural. I distinctly remember drawing him pictures of rainbows, lots of rainbows. His walls and bulletin board were always covered with drawings from other kids, too.”

Consistently honored as a “Best Doctor” by numerous national and international organizations, magazines and associations, Wagner was once named “Most Compassionate Doctor” by Castle Connolly. “I chose this subspecialty because it deals with all ophthalmic disorders in children and not just one thing,” he explains. Though he specializes in strabismus (any misalignment of the eyes), eye disorders caused by premature birth, tumors near or around the eye, and newborn cataracts are all in his area of expertise. “If I were a cornea specialist, I’d only be taking care of diseases of the cornea.

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I’m like a pediatrician to kids for their eyes.”

This also gives him opportunities to work with other specialists. Genetic disorders have manifestations of ocular disease and so does sickle cell anemia and diabetes, for instance.

He explains, “The interesting aspect of ophthalmology is that so many conditions overlap with other medical diseases. I like this because I can take care of the whole child.” His practice also includes some adults with strabismus who may have eye muscle disorders or require treatment for injuries.

Wagner recalls Emily Birkitt easily. “She had a particular type of strabismus and her parents brought her in because her eyes were crossed. Some children require surgery to correct this while others just need corrective glasses for a refractive problem. She was very far-sighted,” he explains. He treated her until she was 10 and at one point, she required

patching, or occlusion therapy, which is one of the mainstays for curing amblyopia, also known as lazy eye. Covering the seeing eye forces the patient to use the weaker eye so it becomes stronger.

Eventually Birkitt switched to contact lenses and another doctor recommended by Wagner. Today, he says, “You would never know Emily ever had a problem. Her eyes are in good alignment and she sees very well.” He should know because he’s been seeing more of her lately. He smiles, “How many years later, in comes Emily with her little baby boy.”

She laughs. “I have a 4-year-old son, Jalen, and when he was about 18 months old, his eye started crossing, just like mine.”

The genetic link is unmistakable. Like his mother, Jalen wears corrective glasses now and loves his eye doctor, whom he sees twice K E I T H B . B R AT C H E R , J R .

a year. Before visits, “He is never scared and can’t wait to go, always telling me what he is going to draw for Dr. Wagner.”

Along with his busy practice in both the IOVS in the Doctors Office Center in Newark as well as the Children’s Eye Care Center of New Jersey at Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville, Wagner enjoys teaching medical students and residents at NJMS. “During the summer, I am really busy because so many fourth-year med students take my elective course. They need to make a decision about specialties in the fall. And these are the very best students because ophthalmology is a tough residency choice to get into,” he explains. “They go into the operating room with me and sometimes assist along with the residents whom I’m also teaching. I lecture and mentor them and I’ve been doing it a long time.”

Wagner has published more than 140 scientific articles and has contributed to many chapters for textbooks but he’s most proud of his recent book, Curbside Consultation in Pediatric Ophthalmology: 49 Clinical Questions, published in 2014 and available at Amazon.com. Aimed at pediatricians, it offers quick answers to tricky questions. How do I make the diagnosis of amblyopia? How can I differentiate a true strabismus from a pseudo-strabismus? How do I diagnose and treat corneal abrasions? Does patching remain an important component of therapy?

What is a naso-lacrimal duct obstruction?

How is it managed? When should I refer these children? How can I determine if a “red eye” is caused by a bacterial infection, viral infection, or an allergic reaction?

Clinical research is also part of his busy professional life and he’s been studying alternative treatments for strabismus, including Botox. “We have been injecting Botox right into the muscle” especially for unique situations in people who have had injuries to eye muscles. Wagner was involved in the original studies for this option done by a California investigator, Alan B. Scott, MD. “It’s been approved and I’ve been able to use it on a regular basis. I also lecture on this topic a lot.”

Sharing his expertise, in fact, gives him unique pleasure, no matter where it happens…Hanoi in North Vietnam, Mongolia or even Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He’ll go anywhere. Working with Orbis.org, a service organization, this ophthalmic surgeon has traveled the globe in their flying eye hospital performing procedures and teaching local physicians. “You aren’t just going there, doing something and leaving. You give these doctors the information and skills to carry on with more patients after you are gone,” he explains. Last year, before leaving for the Hanoi trip, physicians in North Vietnam used the Orbis’ tele-medicine technology to send Wagner images of patients they thought might need a particular type of strabismus surgical correction to the vertical muscle. “It was really cool. We could discuss back and forth. When I got there, the patients were already lined up. You get more benefit from teaching when you have the right patients.”

A member of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Stra-

bismus, he’s been very active on the International Affairs Committee since 2012. Once a year, this doc is off somewhere teaching and trying to benefit people in other countries.

A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Wagner considers himself fortunate to have been able to return to his native New Jersey for medical school. “It was the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey then,” and he had classes in the low buildings across from what was once Martland Hospital. “I was here when we transitioned into the brand new hospital and medical school. The classrooms and facilities were so much nicer. It’s been exciting to watch the school grow and get better.” He also remembers being taught and mentored by Anthony Caputo, MD. “He’s still a clinical professor here. In fact, I have to give credit to all the good teaching I had here at New Jersey Medical School. This teaching carries over and on,” especially for a doctor who may never retire. He is just too busy. ● Dr. Rudolph Wagner • wagner@njms.rutgersedu

O CTO B E R 29, 20 1 5

JA N / F E B ( T B D) 20 1 6

J U N E 3– 4, 20 16

Alumni Association– NJMS Annual Scholarship Awards Dinner

Career Nights

Save the Date

A part of the Careers in Medicine program at NJMS, Career Nights offer second-year medical students a look into the various fields of medicine. Faculty and alumni are invited to participate in this informal, round-table event, and share with students their experiences in practicing their specialty.

If you would like to volunteer to participate in this event, please contact the Alumni Office for more information (973)972-6864.

Annual Alumni Reunion Weekend

The Scholarship Awards Dinner, a large gathering of students, families and donors, is an opportunity for the Association to acknowledge the generosity of those who have supported the scholarship program.

This year the Alumni Association– NJMS awarded over $175,000 in scholarships.

Alumni lectures will be held at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School on Friday, June 3.

The reunion celebration will be held at The Westin Hotel, Jersey City, NJ, on Saturday, June 4.

We hope to see you there!

DEC E M B E R 9, 20 1 5

NJMS 4th Year Students Holiday Party The Association will sponsor a festive evening for the fourth-year medical students to celebrate the holidays.

alumni calendar RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

37

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

O SCAR AU ERBACH , M D

A Legend in His Time

BY EVE JACOBS

O

scar Auerbach, MD, was a pulmonary pathologist with heart, whose life and times garnered 72 lines of attention in the coveted annals of The New York Times when he died at the age of 92 on January 15, 1997. He worked right up until the end. His work was his life and his passion, and he did much of that work at New Jersey Medical School for more than three decades.

You may already recognize his name as among the medical research greats of the twentieth century. Auerbach is credited with the science that irrefutably linked cancer and smoking, producing the pivotal data that inspired the first Surgeon General’s warning label on cigarette packages: “Caution: Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” He impacted the lives of millions, 38

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and certainly saved hundreds of thousands from chronic lung disease and early death.

Remember that this was not just a research coup but one that caused a political upset of immense proportions. The tobacco lobby was powerful beyond what we can imagine in 2015; and this New Jersey-based researcher from a lesser known medical school in Newark took on the powerbrokers and won.

At a time in history when cigarettes are known to be carcinogenic, and children are instructed from toddlerhood that smoking can be a killer habit, it is easy to forget the long, hard struggle that preceded this knowledge. Although Auerbach never graduated from high school or from New York University, which he attended for several years, he earned his MD from New York Medical College in 1929; and worked in hospitals on Staten Island in the ’30s and ’40s with a focus on tuberculosis research. In 1952, he accepted a position as a pathologist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in East Orange, a major affiliate of NJMS, and began teaching at the medical school in 1966, remaining there as a teacher and researcher until one week before his death.

His dedication to teaching is legendary.

Well into his 80s and recovering from a car accident that fractured his hip, he asked to be wheeled to a classroom so he could deliver his weekly lecture, which he did — while still in his hospital gown. He was beloved by students and colleagues alike, who described him as: “wise, gentle, kind, and inspiring.”

But it was Auerbach’s research-diligence that earned him a place in history. It was at the VA Medical Center that he first became interested in the damaging effects of smoking, having noticed a high number of lung cancer deaths among heavy cigarette smokers who had been patients there. He went on to analyze 28,000 slides of lung tissue from 150 cadavers, and established that the smoking habits of the subjects were definitively linked to tissue changes in the lungs, leading to cancer. His research gained national attention in 1964, although he had been featured in Life magazine eight years earlier in an article entitled, “NEW CIGARETTE-CANCER

LINK, Study Shows That as the Smoking Rate Rises, Lung Damage Rises Too.” The New York Times stated: “By using slides of individual patients, Dr. Auerbach convinced doctors that the cancer-smoking connection could not be discounted. Earlier studies had taken large groups of people and found statistical links between smoking and cancer patterns: the more smoking, the more cancer. Dr. Auerbach took the detective work a step beyond statistics. What he found was the more cigarettes smoked, the greater the degree of lung damage, as seen in the tissue.”

This pathologist and teacher is also credited with research that determined that passive smoke can cause lung damage, too, and that filtered cigarettes can reduce lung damage caused by smoking.

While Auerbach’s focus as a pathologist was to improve human life and longevity, he, himself, was neither a political activist nor a sermonizer, according to those who worked with him. But a study released in 1989 stated that more than 750,000 lives had been saved because of the Surgeon General’s warning on smoking. How many more lives have been saved in the more than 25 years since that study?

And it doesn’t stop there. Auerbach’s research also showed that lung damage is reversible when patients quit smoking— that even the effects of a long-term habit can be turned around, which was a novel concept at the time.

Auerbach himself was known to sleep just five hours a night, eat what he wanted, and rarely exercise. Genetics, he said, is the most powerful determinant of health and longevity. Yet, ironically, he demonstrated how impactful behavioral changes can be.

As we witness the changing panorama of the health care environment, certain truths remain irrefutable. Dedicated research often yields positive changes. It’s clear that Auerbach was a notable researcher who was also dedicated to preparing the next generation to carry on.

The alumni of NJMS salute the man and his invaluable work, which has greatly benefited us all. ● NJMS ARCHIVES

CLASS NOTES 1960s Marinos A. Petratos, MD’60 received a “Certificate of Appreciation” for active military service during the “Cold War,” issued by the Governor of the State of New York.

Harry E. Turse, MD’69 writes that his daughter, Sarah, is a third year pediatric resident at the University of Virginia.

1970s Albert Ray, MD’70 received The Felix Linetsky Award for Excellence in Medical Education in 2012 and recently received the 2015 Florida Academy of Pain Medicine Distinguished Service Award.

He edited the Integrative Approaches section of the

IN MEMORIAM Elizabeth A. Lincoln, MD’87 of Evergreen, Colorado, passed away on January 5, 2015 at the age of 54. She is survived by family members including her husband James Lyndon, son Thomas, parents Thomas and Renee Lincoln, and sister Catherine Lincoln. She dedicated her career to serving veterans as a primary care provider for the Veterans Health Administration in Boston, Salt Lake City, and Denver. She was an accomplished musician and singer.

Joanne Mambretti, MD’73 passed away on June 21, 2014. She practiced pulmonary and internal medicine in Worcester, MA; was a medical consultant for Paul Revere Life Insurance, and moved to Minneapolis, MN, in 1966, where she worked for Prudential Insurance. Dr. Mambretti retired in 2013 as Vice President and Medical Director of that organization. She is survived by her children Ann, Mark, and Matthew Zumwalt.

John J. McMahon, IV, MD’88 passed away on June 7, 2015 at the age of 54. He resided in Brooklyn, NY. Dr. McMahon was a member of the cardiothoracic surgery staff at Queens Hospital, NY. He is survived by his parents, John J. and Joyce McMahon, and his children, Robin, Angela, and John V. McMahon.

Mrs. Alice J. Tassoni passed away at the age of 86 on July 18, 2015. She was married to the late Dr. Joseph P. Tassoni, Sr, who was the Dean of Students and Director of Admissions at New Jersey Medical School. Mrs. Tassoni is survived by her children Elizabeth Jerlinski, Pamela Russo, and Joseph P. Tassoni, Jr, and four grandchildren.

Comprehensive Treatment of Chronic Pain by Medical, Interventional, and Integrative Approaches — an American Academy of Pain Medicine textbook on patient management, and authored three chapters in 2013.

Rudolph S. Wagner, MD’78 writes that he is pleased to be a member of the Alumni Association and has joined, thanks to the helpfulness of Emily Birkitt.

1980s Luis E. Rios, Jr, MD’82, MPH, FACEP retired from private practice in emergency medicine and accepted a full-time faculty position in the Department of Emergency Medicine, Division of Field Operations at UF Health College of Medicine/Jacksonville.

Dr. Rios is the current Chief Medical Officer of the Disaster Medical Assistance Team FL-4 in DHHs/ ASPR/OPEO/NDMS and the Department of Health Florida State Medical Response Team FL-3.

Vincent J. Palusci, MD’84 will publish his fifth book entitled Diagnosis of Non-Accidental Injury: Illustrated Clinical Cases with the CRC Press this fall. He is professor of pediatrics at NYU School of Medicine and is a child abuse pediatrician at Bellevue Hospital.

2010s Melissa Martin, MD’13 shares that she and her husband Chris welcomed their first child, Emily Ann, on February 7, 2015.

Join the Alumni Association of

New Jersey Medical School General Membership

$75.00

Resident in Training

$15.00

Lifetime Membership

$1,000.00

Visit njms.rutgers.edu/alumni, click on Alumni and Alumni Association and then Online Membership Payment to pay your membership online.

The Lifetime Membership is being offered to our alumni as a means to perpetuate the goals of the Alumni Association and enable its members to sustain their support in a more meaningful way.

All categories of membership will afford you the opportunity to keep connected with us. You will continue to receive all membership benefits, including Pulse magazine, information about upcoming events and reunions, and on-site library privileges.

Alumni Association of NJMS, 185 South Orange Avenue, MSB–B504, Newark, NJ 07101–1709.

Photos are welcome. You can also send your news via e-mail to: njmsalum@njms.rutgers.edu or fax us at 973-972-2251.

Bekker Continued from page 35

Presbyterian. And “clinically speaking,” Bekker adds “last year was our highest earning in the history of this department.”

This chair’s life and career have been defined by bold moves. Growing up in a region of the Soviet Union now called Georgia, he dreamed of working as a scientist in academia. He earned a degree in chemistry from Tbilisi State University and began working.

But when advancement eluded the young researcher in his homeland, he turned his sights to America.

Once in the U.S., Bekker pursued a master’s in chemical engineering and a doctorate in biomedical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He later went to work for AlliedSignal, where he earned six patents related to ways to recover oil. Though he was successful in the private sector, Bekker decided to pursue a medical degree.

“When I went to medical school, I was older than most people. I already had a PhD,” Bekker says. He chose anesthesiology because “it’s a very technology-intensive field.” With the support of his wife, Karen, he finished medical school — during which time his three children, Andrew, Tatiana, and William were born.

Today, a distinguished scientist, anesthesiologist, and educator who has served as principal investigator on numerous studies and has published scores of peer-reviewed articles, Bekker is living out his dreams. He is broadly known for his research on understanding the effects of surgery on the central nervous system and frequently presents at conferences. Last August, he presented two lectures at an international conference on brain disorders and therapeutics in London.

Now Bekker is focusing his attention on helping others at the very place where he got his start. “I always felt I was fortunate to have graduated from NJMS,” he states. “A lot of things in my life worked out very well.” ● Alex Bekker • bekkeray@njms.rutgers.edu

RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL

39

resident life Ahmad Yousaf, MD’11, has been selected to be a residency blogger for the New England Journal of Medicine website, an honor and a great compliment. He was born and raised in New Jersey, studied biomedical engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and graduated from New Jersey Medical School. He stayed at NJMS to complete a residency in Internal Medicine and Pediatrics and has elected to stay one more year to be the Ambulatory Chief of Internal Medicine. Yousaf says that his major life accomplishments include marrying a beautiful orthodontist who provides him with free dental care and having a rambunctious daughter who occupies most of their free time. He plans on staying within academic primary care or hospitalist medicine. He has been chosen “most humanistic resident” for two years running — in 2013 and 2014 — by his fellow residents. He enjoys spoken word poetry, sports, and teaching.

This piece is reprinted with permission from NEJM Journal Watch (http://blogs. jwatch.org/general-medicine) and the Massachusetts Medical Society.

Insights on Residency Training Ahmad Yousaf, MD July 24th, 2015

Heroes Do Exist

W

e live in a time of great cynicism and skepticism. We seem to see only the mundane and boring in even the most interesting and spectacular things. The electrical rhythm of the heart that pulses through cardiac tissue and results in a coordinated muscle contraction that effectively ejects blood to the rest of the body for appropriate oxygen delivery is just…a bland grouping of chemical/physical terms that relay information, without the awe that should accompany it. Perhaps it is the overload of data hurled at us from all different technologies that make everything seem ‘blah.’ Or maybe the cultural barrage of the age of ‘enlightenment’ that comes with modernity has left us so intellectually arrogant that we refuse to allow our hearts and minds the satisfaction of wonderment. Either way, it is as though we have lost the ability to appreciate the magnificence of existence around us and we have instead replaced it with dull expectation and assumed banality.

I was recently watching a debate between a few friends about which comic book super40

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hero had the most depth. One of my friends claimed Batman was the most layered character, and his reasoning was as follows: Bruce Wayne was actually the costume and he was only himself (in his own voice and character) when he donned the Batman suit and cape. Anytime he was Bruce Wayne to the people of Gotham, he was just acting and putting on a show. It was only when he was Batman that we could see what the real man was all about. I mulled over the argument in my mind and could not help but think of the child-like awe comic book heroes still elicit from me, even as an adult. I thought: “Could it be that the heroes I adore are all around me already in suit and cape?” I began to think of the men and women that have affected how I think, act, and work.

There is the one physician who carries so much medical knowledge in his superhuman mind that he nullifies the suspense of case conference by simply stating the rare diagnosis before anyone else can even process the differential. And the one doctor whose very intellectual prowess can result in the collective anal sphincter tightening of an entire intern class…And one whose eyes are surrounded by dark circles formed over a multitude of sleepless nights as he mulled over what else he could do for his ill patient. They all don their capes every day.

The ICU doctor who conveys bad news like

soft kisses or the one who seems to restlessly pace the halls of the cancer ward deep into the night like a vigilante there to stomp out any chance of pain and misery. There is the doctor who has been serving long enough to walk the corridors like a sentry, protecting the hospital from inappropriate care or unneeded costs.

They move among us and look like us… but they are so much more. They are what we aspire to be. The one who doles out chocolate like justice or the one who holds the weight of the academic program solely on his shoulders. They uphold the honor and dignity of a profession that has turned to bitterness, misanthropy, and the bottom line.

They live for this. For their patients. For their Robins. They are the heroes we need, if only we could see past the darkness of our preconceived notions of medicine. They are there. On the proverbial rooftops of our hospitals…watching over us…teaching us… making sure that someone is ready to replace them when they are gone.

But then, they remove their white coats and return home to their families to continue their ‘normal’ lives as they try to convince the world that they are but mere mortals like the rest of us. — Yousaf

UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL THE PRINCIPAL TEACHING HOSPITAL FOR RUTGERS NEW JERSEY MEDICAL SCHOOL EXCELLENT MEDICINE. EXCELLENT CARE. UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL IS PROUD TO BE RANKED A TOP HOSPITAL IN NEW JERSEY AND TO RECEIVE SPECIAL RECOGNITION FOR THE TREATMENT OF n

Breast Cancer

n Congestive Heart Failure

n High Risk Pregnancy & Birth

n Pediatric Cancers

n Neurological Disorders

n Stroke

n Hip & Knee Replacement Surgery

n Coronary Artery Bypass Surgery

n Prostate Cancer

IN ADDITION, WE HAVE BEEN INDEPENDENTLY RECOGNIZED FOR EXCELLENCE By the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association for Performance Achievement for the treatment of Stroke and Heart Failure n By HealthGrades® with a 5-Star rating and its Neurosurgery Excellence Award n

n

In Trauma Care as northern New Jersey’s Level 1 Trauma Center

n As one of only two sites in the State for Liver Transplantation n For treatment of the deadliest form of Heart Attack by our

EMS, the only such recognition in the State

We’re very proud of this recognition and what it means for the care of our patients. It also means an exceptional opportunity for the education of the next generation of physicians in our role as the flagship teaching hospital for Rutgers New Jersey Medical School and the other schools of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences. This partnership ensures highly trained professionals to meet the healthcare needs of New Jersey and beyond.

For more information about University Hospital, please call us at 973-972-4300 or go to our website at: www.uhnj.org 1

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Non-Profit Organization U.S. Postage Paid Rutgers University Permit 5287

185 South Orange Avenue Newark, New Jersey 07103 http://njms.rutgers.edu

O N D E C E M B E R 1 S T, You Can Make an Impact

Rutgers Giving Day—on December 1—gives New Jersey Medical School alumni, students, and friends a unique opportunity to show the world what they can do when they join together for a cause.

This first-ever 24-hour university-wide fundraising day gives NJMS supporters an opportunity to impact a wide range of initiatives— whether it’s improving health across the state, supporting the next generation of students in their growth, or backing leading-edge research.

M A K E A N I M PA C T. GIVE TH R O UGH R UTGER S.

GivingDay.Rutgers.edu R U TG E R S U N I V E R S I T Y F O U N DAT I O N R A I S E S F U N D S TO S U P P O RT R U TG E R S , T H E S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W J E R S E Y.