D’Onofrio named head of emergency medicine

Gail D’Onofrio, M.S., M.D., associate professor of surgery (emergency medicine), has been named section chief of emergency medicine at the medical school and chief of adult emergency services at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She had led both services in an interim position since 2004.

D’Onofrio practiced nursing for many years before getting her medical degree in 1987. She chose emergency medicine, she said, for the excitement of making a radical difference in patients’ lives, literally in seconds. She calls her practice one of “controlled chaos” and acknowledges that it takes a particular personality to cope. In addition to her clinical work, she has done research on using the emergency department to move alcohol and drug abusers into treatment. She recently received a $3.6 million grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to test a counseling intervention with harmful and hazardous drinkers. Half of all major traumas are alcohol- or drug-related, so addressing substance abuse can prevent visits to the emergency department.

In her dual roles she manages emergency departments on-site and at a satellite clinic in Guilford, Conn., and conducts research, teaches medical students and is responsible for emergency physicians in residency. She is also medical director of Women’s Heart Advantage, a New Haven-based program aimed at educating patients and clinicians about the risks of cardiovascular disease in women. And she heads Project ASSERT, a program in which health promotion advocates screen emergency department patients for drug and alcohol abuse.

Fund honors a mentor, boosts young scientists

When Applera Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., asked members of its board of directors last spring to suggest recipients for gifts from the company, Carolyn W. Slayman, Ph.D., the medical school’s deputy dean for academic and scientific affairs and a member of Applera’s board, suggested a grant that would also promote her ideals in biomedical education.

Slayman earmarked $300,000 to endow a fund that will support Yale’s Combined Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS) and honor the memory of her mentor and thesis advisor, Edward L. Tatum, Ph.D. She met Tatum at Rockefeller University in New York City, where she earned her doctorate under his supervision in 1963, a few years after he won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for pioneering work on genetic regulation of metabolism in the cell. “For a very famous man—he was at the height of his career—he nonetheless took extraordinary measures to work closely with every student and every postdoc in his lab group,” recalled Slayman, Sterling Professor of Genetics and professor of cellular and molecular physiology.

Tatum, who died in 1975, did part of the research that led to the Nobel while he was on the Yale faculty. Tatum and his graduate student Joshua Lederberg, Ph.D. ’47, who shared the prize, along with Harvard geneticist George Wells Beadle, Ph.D., discerned how bacteria exchange and recombine genetic material, findings that paved the way for gene sequencing and genetic engineering.

Ever the scientist, Slayman said she hopes the Applera gift will be “autocatalytic”—a term from chemistry for the mechanism by which the products of a reaction provide fuel for further reactions—and will inspire others to support the BBS program. Applera’s contribution already shows signs of self-replication: it stands to benefit from a university policy that matches endowment gifts to the School of Medicine, which will double its impact.

Applera is the parent company of Applied Biosystems, which develops and markets scientific equipment, and Celera, which played a major role in sequencing the human genome.

Center renamed in honor of “father” of Head Start

At a celebration in July, the Yale Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy was renamed in honor of Edward F. Zigler, Ph.D., Sterling Professor Emeritus of Psychology, considered the “father” of the Head Start program. Zigler was also the founder of the center, now called the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy.

The center is one of the nation’s oldest centers for child and family policy research. It has been part of the Department of Psychology and the Child Study Center, where it serves a critical role in training and scholarly research.

Walter S. Gilliam, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Yale Child Study Center, who has been affiliated with the Zigler Center since 1995 and is known for his studies of state-funded prekindergarten systems, has been named director of the center. Matia Finn-Stevenson, Ph.D., will remain as associate director, and Sandra J. Bishop-Josef, Ph.D., will continue as assistant director. Zigler will serve as director emeritus.

Zigler is regarded as the nation’s leading researcher of programs and policies for children and families, having planned or implemented such national programs as Head Start, Early Head Start and the innovative School of the 21st Century. Founded by Zigler in 1978 with funding from the Bush Foundation of Minnesota, the center works to improve the lives of America’s children and families by bringing the results of empirical research on child development into the policy arena.

Notes

Sandra L. Alfano, Pharm.D., an associate research scientist in the department of medicine, has been appointed chair of one of the medical school’s two institutional review boards for research involving human subjects. As chair of Human Investigation Committee I, Alfano is responsible for overseeing several hundred research protocol applications a year.

Roland E. Baron, D.D.S., Ph.D., professor of orthopaedics and rehabilitation and of cell biology, received the D. Harold Copp Award from the International Bone and Mineral Society in June, for “outstanding achievements in basic research in the fields of bone and mineral metabolism that have led to significant changes in understanding of physiology or disease.”

Henry Binder

Henry J. Binder, M.D., professor of medicine (gastroenterology) and of cellular and molecular physiology, received the 2005 Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Gastroenterological Association in May. The award honors his research into the pathophysiology and treatment of diarrheal diseases.

Joyce A. Cramer, B.S., associate research scientist in psychiatry, was elected in May to the board of directors of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research, an organization dedicated to translating research into practices that lead to efficient and equitable allocation of scarce health care resources.

Stanley J. Dudrick, M.D., professor of surgery (gastroenterology), received the 2005 Jacobson Innovation Award from the American College of Surgeons in June. He was honored for his contributions to science, medicine and education through his research and achievements in nutritional support for surgical patients. In 1967 Dudrick demonstrated that infants could receive nutrition intravenously and still grow and develop.

Alison Galvani

Alison P. Galvani, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases), received a Young Investigators’ Prize in June from the American Society of Naturalists for her work in evolutionary ecology.

Theodore Holford

Theodore R. Holford, Ph.D. ’72, the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health and head of the division of biostatistics, was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Akiko Iwasaki

Akiko Iwasaki, Ph.D., assistant professor of immunobiology, is one of 11 recipients of the 2005 Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in Pathogenesis of Infectious Disease Award, which will allow her to study the role of mucosal lining cells in the initiation of immune responses against viral infections.

Becca R. Levy, Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology (chronic disease), has been named a fellow in the Behavioral and Social Sciences section of the Gerontological Society of America. Fellows are recognized by their peers for outstanding contributions to the field of gerontology.

Judith H. Lichtman, Ph.D., M.P.H. ’88, assistant professor of epidemiology (chronic disease), received the Women with Heart Research Award in June from the American Heart Association for her work on her research grant “Prospective Registry for the Predisposing Factors, Care and Outcomes of Myocardial Infarction in Young Women.”

Glenn Micalizio

Glenn C. Micalizio, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry, has been named a 2005 Beckman Young Investigator. The Young Investigator Awards are given annually by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation to support promising young faculty members in the early stages of their careers in the chemical and life sciences.

Linda M. Niccolai, Ph.D., assistant professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases), received a three-year, $240,000 grant from the Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation to examine sources of repeat chlamydia infections in young women. Niccolai’s multidisciplinary study, which will continue through 2007, will provide a more complete understanding of the factors that influence the trajectory from initial diagnosis to repeat infection.

Lynne Regan

Lynne J. Regan, Ph.D., professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry and of chemistry, has won a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for her studies of novel anticancer reagents.

Sandra Resnick

Sandra G. Resnick, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry, received the 2005 U.S. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association Carol T. Mowbray Early Career Research Award, one of five presented by the association for outstanding contributions to the field of psychosocial rehabilitation. Resnick is the associate director of the Northeast Program Evaluation Center of the Veterans Health Administration.

Steven M. Strittmatter, M.D., Ph.D., the Vincent Coates Professor of Neurology and professor of neurobiology, is one of six scientists to receive the Senator Jacob Javits Award in the Neurosciences from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Strittmatter’s award will allow him to further study signaling pathways and loss of function studies in animal models of disease.

Edward M. Uchio, M.D., assistant professor of surgery (urology), received the 2005 Dennis W. Jahnigen Career Development Scholars Award. The two-year career development awards allow junior faculty to begin a career in the geriatric aspects of their discipline.

Raymond Yesner

Raymond Yesner, M.D., professor emeritus and senior research scientist in pathology, received the Gold Medal from the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology in May, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of pathology.


			Originally published in Yale Medicine, Autumn 2005. Copyright © 2005 Yale University School of Medicine. All rights reserved.