Fifteen women and men who spent formative parts of their illustrious careers at Johns Hopkins were honored on April 13, when they were inducted into the university's Society of Scholars. The event, held at the Peabody Institute, was hosted by President Ronald J. Daniels and Provost Robert Lieberman.
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 with postdoctoral programs, elects a limited number of scholars from the candidates nominated by the schools. The scholars are presented with a certificate and a medallion on a black and gold ribbon at the annual induction ceremony. Their induction brings to 626 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.
Robert L. Gallucci
Washington, D.C.
Robert Gallucci is a Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he served as dean for 13 years. He left Georgetown in 2009 to become president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, a position he held until 2014. Earlier, he had spent more than two decades in government positions focused on international security. As ambassador-at-large and special envoy for the U.S. State Department, he dealt with the threats posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction, and he was chief U.S. negotiator during the North Korean nuclear crisis of 1994. He also served as assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, and as the deputy executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission overseeing the disarmament of Iraq after the first Gulf War. Gallucci completed a postdoctoral fellowship at what is now the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins' Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and was a professorial lecturer at SAIS from 1973 to 1976.
Douglas A. Jabs
New York, New York
Douglas Jabs is a professor of ophthalmology and medicine, and chairman emeritus of the Department of Ophthalmology, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. With continuous NIH funding for nearly 30 years, he chairs the Multicenter Uveitis Treatment Trial, the Standardization of Uveitis Nomenclature Working Group, and Studies of the Ocular Complications of AIDS Research Group. Jabs is the recipient of numerous honors and a frequent speaker both nationally and internationally, and has produced 290 publications and 46 book chapters. He earned both his MD and MBA degrees at Johns Hopkins. His internship in internal medicine at New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center was followed at Johns Hopkins by residencies in internal medicine and in ophthalmology, as well as a fellowship in rheumatology. In 1984, he joined the Johns Hopkins faculty and in 1993 was promoted to professor of ophthalmology and medicine in the School of Medicine; he also served as a professor of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and as director of the Division of Ocular Immunology at the Wilmer Eye Institute. He moved to Mount Sinai in 2007.
Keith D. Lillemoe
Boston, Massachusetts
Keith Lillemoe has contributed to major advances in the management of pancreatic cancer, bile duct injuries and strictures, and numerous other abdominal conditions. Since 2011, he has been surgeon-in-chief and chief of the Department of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and the W. Gerald Austen Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. Active in numerous surgical societies and a frequent speaker throughout the world, Lillemoe has produced 350 journal articles and 120 book chapters, has been a visiting professor more than 95 times, is editor of one of the leading surgical texts, Surgery: Scientific Principles and Practice, and is editor-in-chief of Annals of Surgery. He earned his MD in 1978 and completed his entire surgical training at Johns Hopkins, joining the faculty in 1985 and rising to the rank of professor of surgery in 1996. He left Johns Hopkins in 2003 to become the Jay L. Grosfeld Professor and chairman of the Department of Surgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Piero Madau
Santa Cruz, California
Piero Madau, Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and director of the Next Generation Telescopes Science Institute, researches challenging and fundamental problems at the intersection of cosmology, galaxy formation, and theoretical and computational astrophysics. His work spans a large range of astronomical scales and epochs, from the present-day properties of the universe going back in time to the dawn of galaxies and the epoch of the first stars and quasars. Among the prestigious awards Madau has received for his significant and breakthrough results are the Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment DOE Award, and the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in Physical Sciences. He regularly serves on NASA mission and science advisory committees, as well as in other leadership roles in his field. Born and educated in Italy, he came to the United States in 1987 for postdoctoral work, which included a Davis Fellowship at Johns Hopkins and a position as assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He then joined the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, and moved in 2000 to UCSC.
Santa J. Ono
Cincinnati, Ohio
A highly accomplished researcher in eye disease, Santa Ono is president of the University of Cincinnati, where he also serves as a professor of pediatrics in the College of Medicine and as a professor of biology in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. Named the university's president in 2012, Ono has become a frequent opinion leader on higher education issues and a trailblazer in the use of social media. He chairs Ohio Gov. John Kasich's task force focusing on the biopharmaceutical industry, and he heads the health committee of the Urban Serving Universities. Ono has received many honors and awards for his research and scholarship, is a member of several national and international honorific societies, and is a sought-after public speaker. Earlier in his career, from 1992 to 1996, he was an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins.
Carole A. Parent
Bethesda, Maryland
Carole Parent is deputy chief of the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biology at the National Cancer Institute's Center for Cancer Research. She is a world-leading expert in the field of directed cell migration, having identified novel mechanisms used by cells to communicate with each other as they move in a concerted fashion toward a chemical attractant, a process that underlies fundamentally important processes occurring during embryonic development, response to infection, and cancer metastasis. After receiving her PhD at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1992, she completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, under the direction of Peter Devreotes, the director of the department. She was promoted to instructor in 1996. In 2000, Parent moved to NCI, where she received tenure in 2006 and was appointed deputy chief in 2010. In 2011, she was appointed adjunct professor at the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and in 2013 was named co-director of the NCI-UMD Partnership for Cancer Technology.
Ramon E. Parsons
New York, New York
At the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai since 2013, Ramon Parsons is the Ward-Coleman Professor in Cancer Research, chair of the Department of Oncological Sciences, and co-leader of the Cancer Mechanisms Program of the Tisch Cancer Institute, where he studies cancer signaling and biology with an emphasis on breast cancer. After earning his MD and PhD degrees at SUNY at Stony Brook, Parsons completed a fellowship at Johns Hopkins under the direction of Bert Vogelstein; there, Parsons and his colleagues discovered that inactivation of DNA mismatch repair genes causes hereditary colorectal cancer. At Columbia University Medical Center, where he was the Avon Professor of Pathology and Medicine and leader of the Breast Cancer Program, Parsons' laboratory identified the PTEN tumor suppressor gene, which is inactivated in a wide variety of cancers and cancer predisposition syndromes. He has been a leader in establishing the importance of PTEN and the PI3K pathway for cancer using a combination of genetic, biochemical, human tissue, and systems biology approaches. He is a Komen Scholar and has received numerous honors and awards.
Godfrey D. Pearlson
New Haven, Connecticut
Godfrey Pearlson is a leader in using neuroimaging as a tool to address a broad array of questions regarding the neurobiology of major mental disorders, primarily psychosis and drug and alcohol abuse. He is a professor of psychiatry and neurobiology at Yale University Medical School and founding director of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center at the Institute of Living/Hartford Hospital. The recipient of many awards, Pearlson is on the editorial board of several psychiatry and neuroimaging journals, and has published more than 500 peer-reviewed research articles. He is also co-founder of the annual BrainDance Competition, which aims to encourage high school and college students across New England to learn about psychiatric diseases and to develop a more tolerant and realistic perspective toward people with severe psychiatric problems. After completing medical training in England and receiving a graduate degree in philosophy at Columbia University, he came to Johns Hopkins as a resident and postdoctoral fellow in psychiatry under Paul McHugh. He later joined the faculty, becoming a professor of psychiatry and founding director of the Division of Psychiatric Neuroimaging.
Robert Reid-Pharr
New York, New York
A Distinguished and Presidential Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he also directs the Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, Robert Reid-Pharr is a highly regarded specialist in African-American culture and a prominent scholar in the field of race and sexuality studies. Reid-Pharr has published three books: Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American; Black, Gay, Man: Essays; and Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual. His essays have appeared in a range of publications, and his research and writing have been supported by leading private foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Before joining the Graduate Center, he was an assistant and associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins. He also has been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, American University of Beirut, University of Oxford, University of Oregon, and University of Chicago.
Elise F. Stanley
Toronto, Canada
Elise Stanley heads the Cellular and Molecular Division of the Toronto Western Research Institute and has established a laboratory in synaptic transmission research. She holds the Tanenbaum Chair in Molecular Brain Science and the Canada Research Chair, and supervises the TWRI Wright Cellular Imaging Facility. Stanley has worked primarily within the field of information transfer in the nervous system, beginning with spinal cord synaptic pathways that serve the small muscles of the human hand. Among her significant research contributions is the finding that a single calcium channel could trigger the fusion of a single synaptic vesicle, which led to her prediction that the calcium channel must be physically linked to the synaptic vesicle. Initially disputed, this is now the generally accepted mechanism. After her education in England, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship and was an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins. She moved to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in 1984, initially as a visiting fellow and head of the Synaptic Mechanisms Section. She has been at TWRI since 1999.
Kathleen J. Stebe
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Kathleen Stebe is the Richer and Elizabeth M. Goodwin Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also serves as deputy dean for research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. A respected researcher, Stebe focuses on capillary phenomena, assembly at interfaces and within complex fluids, and interfacial flows, with particular emphasis on how surfactants can be used to direct stresses at interfaces and to alter drop breakup modes. Following completion of her PhD in chemical engineering at the Levich Institute and a postdoctoral year at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne, Stebe joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, where she rose through the ranks to become a professor and department chair. She moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. Stebe has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, was named a fellow of the American Physical Society, and received the Frenkiel Award from the APS' Division of Fluid Dynamics.
Rolf-Detlef Treede
Mannheim, Germany
Rolf-Detlef Treede is a professor of neurophysiology at the Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg and also managing director of the Center for Biomedicine and Medical Technology Mannheim. His wide-ranging interests in the field of pain include the mechanisms and treatment of neuropathic pain, the cortical representation of pain, peripheral nociceptive transduction mechanisms, pain memory, pain assessment by quantitative sensory testing, and clinical neurophysiology. Treede is president of the International Association for the Study of Pain, past chair of its Special Interest Group on Neuropathic Pain, and past president of its German chapter. He sits on numerous national and international committees, is on the editorial board of the journal Der Schmerz, and has authored or co-authored about 330 publications in journals and books. After completing his medical degree in 1981, he joined the Department of Physiology at the University Hospital Eppendorf in Hamburg, spending two years (1988 to 1990) as a visiting scientist with the Department of Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. From 1992 to 2007 he was a professor of neurophysiology at the Institute of Physiology and Pathophysiology of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.
David Vlahov
San Francisco, California
David Vlahov is a professor and dean of the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. He initiated the International Society for Urban Health and is an expert consultant to the World Health Organization's Urban Health Center in Kobe, Japan. Vlahov's work focuses on epidemiology, infectious diseases, substance abuse, and mental health, and his experience includes interprofessional and interdisciplinary education and research. He studied urban populations in Baltimore for more than 20 years and led epidemiological studies in Harlem and the Bronx, New York, experiences that provided a wealth of information on how to deal with racial and ethnic health disparities. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, and he has edited three books on urban health and published more than 640 scholarly papers. After earning BSN and MS degrees at the University of Maryland, Vlahov completed his PhD in epidemiology in 1988 at what is now the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he joined the faculty and became a professor and deputy chair of the Department of Epidemiology.
Judith N. Wasserheit
Seattle, Washington
Judith Wasserheit's development of the concept of epidemiological synergy between HIV infection and other STDs has had a major influence on HIV prevention policy and programs around the world. At the University of Washington, Wasserheit is the William H. Foege Chair of the Department of Global Health, a professor of global health and of medicine, and an adjunct professor of epidemiology. Her research has included one of the first laparoscopic studies of pelvic inflammatory disease etiology conducted in the United States, the first population-based study of the prevalence and etiologic spectrum of STDs among rural women in the Indian subcontinent, and a study on the interrelationships between STDs and contraceptive practices in other parts of the developing world. The recipient of many prestigious awards and honors, Wasserheit was the founding chief of the National Institutes of Health's STD Research Branch, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's STD Prevention Program, and director of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network, the largest global clinical trials platform evaluating preventive HIV vaccines. She became an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1986 and earned her MPH at the university's School of Public Health in 1989.
Maria T. Zuber
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Maria Zuber is vice president for research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has served on the Presidential Commission on the Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy and was recently appointed to the National Science Board. Zuber's research bridges planetary geophysics and the technology of space-based laser and radio systems. She has published more than 230 papers, and since 1990 has held leadership roles associated with scientific experiments or instrumentation on nine NASA missions. She remains involved with six of these missions and is principal investigator for NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission, an effort to map the moon's gravitational field. Zuber has received numerous professional honors, and has been singled out in the popular press as one of the 50 most important women in science and as one of America's best leaders. Earlier in her career, Zuber was a faculty member at Johns Hopkins in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
