The Society of Scholars was created on the recommendation of then university President Milton S. Eisenhower and approved by the board of trustees on May 1, 1967. The society—the first of its kind in the nation—inducts former postdoctoral fellows, postdoctoral degree recipients, house staff, and junior or visiting faculty who have served at least a year at Johns Hopkins and thereafter gained marked distinction elsewhere in their fields of physical, biological, medical, social, or engineering sciences or in the humanities and for whom at least five years have elapsed since their last Johns Hopkins affiliation. A selection committee, whose members are equally distributed among the academic divisions, elects a limited number of scholars from the candidates nominated by the academic divisions with postdoctoral programs. The scholars are presented with a certificate and a medallion on a black and gold ribbon at an annual induction ceremony, which this year was held on April 7 at the Peabody Institute. Their induction brings to 611 the total number of members in the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. The following listing of the new members is accompanied by a short description of their accomplishments at the time of their election.
James C. Anthony
East Lansing, Michigan
James Anthony is chairman of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine and director of the department's NIH/NIDA drug dependence epidemiology training programs. Before his move to Michigan State in 2003, he was for many years a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he arrived as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mental Hygiene in 1977. He joined a pioneering group of epidemiologists and social scientists who were moving beyond clinical descriptions of neuroscience disorders by introducing quantitative analyses. Anthony became a leading faculty member who expanded quantitative analyses of these disorders and broke down many of the silo patterns that traditionally separated epidemiology, biostatistics, and demography. He held academic appointments in the Bloomberg School's departments of Epidemiology and Mental Health and the School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Andreas D. Baxevanis
Bethesda, Maryland
Andreas Baxevanis holds several positions in the Division of Intramural Research at NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute. He is the assistant director for Computational Biology in the division, and in its Genome Technology Branch, he is director of the Bioinformatics and Scientific Programming Core and head of the Computational Genomics Unit, where his bioinformatics approaches to central problems of molecular-developmental biology and evolutionary biology are revolutionizing both fields. He has made seminal discoveries of physicochemical aspects of the chromosomal proteins (histones), as well as pioneering contributions to the emergence of, and medical applications in, the field of bioinformatics. At Johns Hopkins, he completed a PhD in the Department of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences, and as a postdoctoral fellow in that department, he performed the first bioinformatics analysis of the newly discovered histone fold motif of protein folding and chromosomal assembly. As deputy director of the NIH intramural Genome Project, he helped extend the applications of bioinformatics methodologies in the emerging area of individualized medicine.
Belinda Edmondson
Montclair, New Jersey
Belinda Edmondson is a renowned professor of African-Caribbean and African-diasporic literatures and cultures. For the past 20 years, she has taught in the departments of English and of African-American and African Studies at Rutgers University–Newark. She is the author of two books—Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative and Caribbean Middlebrow: Leisure Culture and the Middle Class. Edmondson has recently been awarded a residential fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, and is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. She is on the editorial boards of the journals Signs and Anthurium. Edmondson received her PhD in English from Northwestern University in 1993; in 1993–94, and again in the spring of 1996, she was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins.
Wafik S. El-Deiry
Hershey, Pennsylvania
Wafik El-Deiry is the Rose Dunlap Professor of Medicine and chief of Hematology/Oncology and the associate director for Translational Research at the Cancer Institute, Penn State University. Among his research interests are cancer cell death, resistance to anti-cancer drugs, and cancer drug discovery and development. He is committed to translational cancer research that is focused on bringing new biomarkers and novel therapies into the clinic. In addition to teaching and clinical work, he serves on review panels and editorial boards, including, since 2001, as founding editor-in-chief of Cancer Biology and Therapy. El-Deiry trained at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, completing his internship and residency in internal medicine in 1994, followed by a fellowship in medical oncology.
Geza Feketekuty
Bumpass, Virginia
Geza Feketekuty has had an illustrious policy and academic career focused on trade policy and international trade negotiations. For 21 years, he served with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative in various senior trade policy leadership positions. He played a key role in developing U.S. policy positions on a range of new trade issues, including trade in services, aspects of competition policies, regulatory reform, and environmental/labor standards. From 1979 to 1985, he was responsible for planning and developing domestic and international agreement on the agenda for the Uruguay Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations. From 1980 to 1983, he was also an adjunct professor in the SAIS International Economics program. In 1995, Feketekuty developed an innovative master's degree program in trade and commercial diplomacy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He was the director of the Center for Trade and Commercial Diplomacy at Monterey from 1995 to 1998 and a distinguished professor of commercial diplomacy from 1998 to 2008.
Arthur Michael Feldman
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Arthur Feldman is executive dean of the Temple University School of Medicine and chief academic officer of the Temple University Health System, as well as a professor of medicine and physiology. After completing his PhD at the University of Maryland, he did a postdoctoral fellowship in physiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He then earned his medical degree from Louisiana State University and returned to Johns Hopkins for his internship, residency, and a fellowship in cardiology. In 1985, Feldman was appointed an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and named director of both the Heart Failure Research Program and the Belfer Laboratory for Molecular Biology of Heart Failure. Nine years later, he departed for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Health System. In 2002 he became chairman of the Department of Medicine at Jefferson University School of Medicine. He was founding editor of the journal Clinical and Translational Science and is a past president of the Heart Failure Society of America and of the Association of Professors of Cardiology. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, and the Interurban Clinical Club.
Linda P. Fried
New York, New York
Linda Fried became dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, as well as the DeLamar Professor of Public Health and a professor of epidemiology, in 2008. She is also a professor of medicine in the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia and senior vice president of Columbia University Medical Center. An internationally renowned scientist, she co-designed the Experience Corps, a community-based program that puts senior volunteers to work as tutors and mentors in public schools, benefiting both the students and the volunteers. At Johns Hopkins, Fried was the Mason F. Lord Professor of Geriatric Medicine, with joint appointments in the schools of Public Health and Nursing. She was also the division director of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, as well as director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Aging and Health. Fried has received numerous awards, including the Irving Wright Award from the American Federation for Aging Research and the American Geriatrics Society Henderson Award for career contributions to research on aging. She has also received an NIH Merit Award and was elected to the Institute of Medicine.
Ethylin Wang Jabs
New York, New York
Ethylin Jabs has been a pioneer in the study of birth defects. She has also contributed passionately to the education of medical geneticists in this country and abroad. She is currently at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she is a vice chair and professor of genetics and genomic sciences, a professor of pediatrics, and a professor of developmental and regenerative biology. Almost uniquely the product of Johns Hopkins training, Jabs enrolled in a combined BA/MD program, receiving her BA in 1974—a member of the first class with women undergraduates—and her MD in 1977. After an internship at Cornell, she returned to Hopkins for her pediatric residency and subspecialty training in medical genetics. In 1984, she joined the faculty, becoming a professor of pediatrics in 1996, with joint appointments in Medicine and Surgery. When she left Hopkins in 2007, she was the Dr. Frank V. Sutland Professor of Pediatric Genetics and director of the Center for Craniofacial Development and Disorders.
Timothy R.B. Johnson
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Timothy Johnson is the Bates Professor of the Diseases of Women and Children and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School. At the start of his career, he was a fellow in maternal fetal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. After military service, he returned to Johns Hopkins and established one of the first fetal assessment centers in the United States. During his 10 years at Johns Hopkins, he became director of the gynecology/obstetrics residency training program and of the Division of Maternal Fetal Medicine. He was promoted in 1988 to associate professor with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health, where he focused on global women's health. In 1993, Johnson was recruited to the University of Michigan to chair its Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Most notably, he was a major architect of the Carnegie initiative to fund training in obstetrics and gynecology in Ghana. In recognition of his commitment, in 2013 the Timothy R.B. Johnson Professorship in Global Women's Health was endowed at the University of Michigan.
Shiriki Kumanyika
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Shiriki Kumanyika is a professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is associate dean for health promotion and disease prevention and founding director of the Master of Public Health Program. President-elect of the American Public Health Association, she is recognized as one of the world's leading scholars and practitioners addressing obesity as a public health crisis, particularly in underserved populations. She is the founder of the African American Collaborative Obesity Research Network, a national organization that seeks to improve the quantity, quality, and effective translation of research on weight issues in African-American communities. She was born and raised in Baltimore at a time when children, herself included, attended racially segregated schools. When she left Maryland to attend Syracuse University, she was attracted to sociology and psychology, as they related to racial disparities in health, especially in nutrition. After a job as a social worker, she returned to school, completing her doctoral degree in human nutrition at Cornell. She then came to Johns Hopkins as a Master of Public Health student, earning her degree in 1984 and joining the faculty of the Department of Epidemiology.
William C. Mobley
La Jolla, California
William Mobley holds the Florence Riford Chair for Alzheimer's Disease Research and is a Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Neurosciences at University of California, San Diego. He also serves as executive director of UCSD's Down Syndrome Center for Research and Treatment. Mobley earned his doctorate from Stanford University in neuroscience and behavioral science in 1974, and his MD from that institution in 1976. He completed a residency and fellowship in neurology and pediatric neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1982. His research focuses on the neurobiology of neurotrophic factor actions and signaling, and on the hypothesis that dysfunction of such signaling mechanisms contributes to neuronal dysfunction in developmental and age-related disorders of the nervous system. His emphasis on the neurobiology of Down syndrome has brought new insights into the disease, including possible treatments. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences. He collaborated with the Dalai Lama to create the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. He also serves as the expert adviser to the Congressional Down Syndrome Caucus, for which he received the Christian Pueschel Memorial Research Award in 2007.
Kenneth R. Sembach
Baltimore, Maryland
Kenneth Sembach is head of the Hubble Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute, where he is deeply involved in the scientific, operational, and managerial aspects of the Hubble Space Telescope. He served as the instrument scientist and team leader for Hubble instruments, and he led two NASA mission concept studies and supported two others. In 2006, he became the Hubble Project scientist at STScI. Given his strong interest in the design and operation of observatories in space, Sembach played a critical role during the extended planning and execution of the Hubble servicing mission in May 2009, for which he received a NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal in 2010. His scientific interests focus on the physical properties of the intergalactic medium, the origin and evolution of structure in the universe, and the interactions of galaxies with their surroundings. He is known for his studies of diffuse gas clouds found between galaxies.
Julie Ann Sosa
Durham, North Carolina
Julie Ann Sosa is a professor of surgery and oncology at Duke University, where she serves as chief of Endocrine Surgery and director of Health Services Research in the Department of Surgery; she is also the leader of the Endocrine Neoplasia Diseases Group at the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Clinical Research Institute. She is vice president of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons and serves on practice guidelines committees for the American Thyroid Association and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network. Sosa is associate editor of the Journal of Surgical Research and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism and the Journal of Thyroid Research. She received her undergraduate degree from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and her MD from Johns Hopkins, where she also completed the Halsted residency program and a fellowship, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar. She received a master's degree from the University of Oxford.
Hugh Ringland Taylor
Carlton, Australia
Hugh Taylor is the Ringland Anderson Professor of Ophthalmology and chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the University of Melbourne. He also holds the Harold Mitchell Chair of Indigenous Eye Health in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the university. He is an accomplished academician, department chair, international leader, and scholar. At Johns Hopkins, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Wilmer Eye Institute and then joined the faculty of ophthalmology in the School of Medicine and the departments of International Health and Epidemiology in the School of Public Health. Taylor helped design and carry out trials that demonstrated the efficacy of behavioral modifications and antibiotic prophylaxis, which now compose the core of the global strategy for the eradication of trachoma, a disease that has blinded 8 million people worldwide. He played a major role in demonstrating that annual dosing with Mectizan is effective in preventing the disease known as river blindness, resulting in dramatic reduction or elimination in many countries.
Ora Weisz
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Ora Weisz is an international leader in the field of epithelial biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where she has been on the faculty since 1995. She is a professor of medicine, cell biology, and physiology, and the associate director of the Pittsburgh Center for Kidney Research. Weisz's research program focuses on the pathways of protein and lipid sorting in polarized epithelial cells. Her work has led to new understanding of the complex signals that direct membrane components to the apical surface, a process critical to the barrier function of epithelia. The work is innovative in the approaches used, including cutting-edge microscopic analyses. Weisz has also made a significant contribution to faculty mentoring and currently serves as assistant dean for faculty development at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She received her PhD from the Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology Graduate Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1990 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cell Biology and Anatomy.
Lijun Wu
Lexington, Massachusetts
Lijun Wu is the vice president of biology and preclinical research and development at Concert Pharmaceuticals. Prior to Concert, she held senior executive positions at Resolvyx Pharmaceuticals, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, and Millennium Pharmaceuticals. She received her PhD from Northwestern University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Wu is a leader and pioneer in research and development in the bio-pharmaceutical industry in inflammation, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and oncology. She is an author of more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in such prestigious journals as Nature and Cell, and an inventor who holds numerous patents. She received an Outstanding Contributor Award from Millennium, and Small Business Innovation Research grants from NIH. She was the recipient of Mass High Tech's Women to Watch award as recognition of a leader, innovator, and mentor in science and technology.
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