Former chair of surgery Ronald Merrell was honored at the Yale Surgical Society Spring Reunion. In his address, Merrell described telemedical techniques that bring medical education around the world.

Tobias Carling, Vikram Reddy and Walter Longo

Reunion 2008

The big news and main attraction of this year’s alumni gathering was the university’s new West Campus, which could transform research at Yale.

This year’s reunion was a jaw-dropping experience for the scores of alumni who toured Yale University’s new West Campus during the weekend. On the three buses shuttling alumni to the 136-acre campus in neighboring West Haven and Orange and in the corridors of one of the site’s research buildings, alumni marveled at the new space, its pristine laboratories and the low price. When Dean Robert J. Alpern, M.D., Ensign Professor of Medicine, led alumni down a hallway past a chemistry lab that seemed to stretch forever, the possibilities for research seemed equally endless.

After a brief tour of the lab and its 12-foot chemistry hoods followed by a lunch in the facility’s cafeteria, Alpern described the process that led to the university’s $109 million purchase of the site and its 1.5 million square feet of office, storage and research space, as well as some of the medical school’s plans for its use. “We don’t see this as a site for classroom teaching,” Alpern said, “but we do see this as a site for research, some of which will include student participation.”

The first research program to be based at West Campus will be the new Center for High-Throughput Cell Biology, headed by the new chair of cell biology, James E. Rothman, Ph.D. ’71, the Fergus F. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Sciences. The center will focus on developing tools and techniques for analyzing the cellular functions of the 25,000 known protein-coding genes in the human genome.

West Campus, Alpern said, may also be a site for clinical use. Yale-New Haven Hospital sees potential for building an emergency room, and Yale Medical Group could open clinical practices at West Campus, which has parking for 3,000 cars. “For people coming up from southern Connecticut, the thing they hate most is the last 10 minutes, driving into New Haven and trying to find parking,” Alpern said.

Bayer HealthCare, which had owned the site for decades, decided to close it down in 2006 after a corporate merger. The company put the property on the market hoping to sell it to another pharmaceutical firm, but the only bids came from developers interested in the land. “When it became clear that no pharmaceutical company was going to come into the bidding process … they told us they would love to get a bid from us,” Alpern said. “The developers were getting land. We were getting research buildings, office buildings and land. The biggest bonus is the time. If I convince [Yale President Richard C. Levin] that we need to start today on a new research building, it is a six-year time frame. … We have gotten something that would have taken six years.”

West Campus was also a central theme in Alpern’s State of the School address earlier that day at the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine’s business meeting. “We want to establish programs of exceptional quality that greatly enrich science at Yale and outside of Yale,” Alpern said, explaining the vision for the new campus. “This needs to transform science at Yale.”

West Campus was not the only topic, however, in Alpern’s discussion of the state of the school. The School of Medicine, he said, remains one of the best in the world. “It has become absolutely impossible to get into the School of Medicine. We get over 4,000 applications for 100 spaces,” he said. “The top 1,000 applicants are indistinguishable, they are so fantastic.”

Among the new educational initiatives is a program for clinical clerkships in global health, which relies on established and ongoing programs with universities and hospitals abroad. “We used to let students pick a place in Africa and go there,” Alpern said. “Now we really try to have organized rotations.”

The medical school is moving away from the traditional “see one, do one, teach one” methodology through the use of such computerized models that mimic the human body as SimMan, a portable manikin that allows students to practice emergency treatment techniques and decision-making skills. “It is completely real,” Alpern said. “You see EKG, you see vital signs, you give medications. You don’t know that the patient isn’t real.” The medical school has also adjusted its financial aid policy (see related story, “New financial aid policy geared toward middle-income families and students”), in order to ease the burden on middle-income families.

The clinical practice, Alpern said, is the fastest-growing area of the medical school. The partnership with Yale-New Haven Hospital, he said, “has never been better.” The new liver transplant program had performed 33 procedures since the summer of 2007; in September 2007 the program completed the first split-liver transplant in the state. “We have overnight become a center for liver transplants,” he said.

At the alumni meeting that morning Christine A. Walsh, M.D. ’73, a professor of clinical pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, received the Distinguished Alumni Service Award in recognition of her service to her profession, patients and family. “It is icing on the cake to receive an award for something you absolutely love to do,” Walsh said.

Improved outcomes for autism
Diagnosing autism these days, said Fred R. Volkmar, M.D., director of the Yale Child Study Center, is something like filling out a form to diagnose deafness. “You’d say ‘I want a hearing test!’ … We’re trying to make the diagnosis [of autism] … more like a hearing test.”

Although researchers have found some genetic markers for autism, diagnosis is still a complex process requiring far more than a simple hearing exam. The current diagnostic gold standard requires the judgment of an experienced clinician who looks for certain behaviors in a child and discusses the child’s developmental history with his or her caregiver. Most cases aren’t diagnosed until the child is between the ages of 3 and 5; however, recent advances have allowed clinicians to diagnose the disorder in children as young as 2. Clinicians and researchers at Yale are now developing ways to spot autism even earlier.

Formal diagnostic criteria became available only in 1980, and research and interventions developed since then have led to improved outcomes. Autistic children now apply for college, Volkmar said—something unthinkable 25 years ago. “In a university setting,” Volkmar joked, the odd social behaviors typical of people with autism “are often more easily tolerated and people can fit right in.”

Volkmar and his colleague Ami Klin, Ph.D., director of the Yale Autism Program, described new diagnostic techniques at this year’s reunion symposium. The new approaches allow clinicians to deduce what a child is thinking by tracking what she looks at. Klin’s team recently found that toddlers who were later diagnosed with autism, when shown a video of a woman speaking tenderly into the camera, pay attention mostly to her mouth or to background objects. Other children typically watch the woman’s eyes.

The eye-tracking technology that led to this discovery has been central to research at the Child Study Center since 2000, when Warren Jones, now a graduate student in neuroscience, proposed its use to Klin. Using this technique, researchers found that autistic adults watch actors’ mouths or background objects during emotional movie scenes rather than the actors’ faces. Brain imaging studies confirmed that people with autism see human faces the way normal people see objects.

The youngest subjects of eye-tracking technology, though, are infants. The team created a video of a human figure rendered as a series of moving dots along with a spoken soundtrack; they then showed the video to babies. Infants later diagnosed with autism tended to look at both upright and upside-down figures, while normal babies preferred the upright figures. The autistic group, though, were more interested in figures that move in time with the soundtrack. This preference for audiovisual synchrony may be part of the reason that autistic people watch lips so intently—they’re drawn to the synchronous occurrence of lip movements and speech sounds. The team showed that mouth-looking exceeds eye-looking as early as 5 months of age in at-risk infants.

Volkmar and Klin hope that in the near future babies held on a parent’s lap can watch a video while eye-tracking technology monitors their gaze and offers an early diagnosis of autism. But little research on effective treatments has been done in children under the age of 3. Klin told the audience that a task force for extending therapies to babies has been formed. “We need a rapid-response system for the very young children who can’t wait.”

Telemedicine’s global reach
At $10,000 per hour for analog satellite time, said Ronald C. Merrell, M.D., the world’s first telemedical surgery “was a little bit, well, unwieldy.”

The former chair of surgery at Yale referred to a pioneering open-heart operation in Houston in 1965, when a satellite linkup connected legendary surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, M.D., to viewers in Geneva. More recently, a surgeon in New York performed the first fully remote surgery on a patient in France. The momentous event was underreported, said Merrell, because the press conference was scheduled for September 11, 2001.

Merrell, who left Yale in 1999 to become chair of surgery at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), discussed the past, present and future of telemedicine at the Yale Surgical Society Spring Reunion, which was held this year in his honor. He now leads the Medical Informatics and Technology Applications Consortium at VCU. Telemedicine, he said, is “the application of telecommunications and information science to support the delivery of health care at a distance.”

Telemedicine is already with us in many ways, he said. Picture archiving and communication systems, now common, allow radiologists to diagnose patients from thousands of miles away. Preoperative clearance can also be done remotely, as Merrell and a team of surgeons demonstrated when they cleared the way for patients in the Dominican Republic to undergo surgery before the surgeons had arrived. A satellite dish installed on the roof of an outbuilding provided the link for low-bandwidth video.

In medical education, Merrell said, telemedicine can be as simple as Internet access in Kenya from solar-powered laptops, or as sophisticated as the class he once taught from the operating room for a group of medical students in Russia. “Education can be distributed in virtual reality in ways that really do work,” Merrell said, adding that he hoped such techniques would reduce our “separation and alienation from the developing world.” Telemedical techniques might one day beam top-quality medical education into medical classrooms around the world.

“I would make this integral to the training of medical students internationally,” he said. “As long as it’s interactive, I think we can do as well as we could in a classroom.”

A focus on ethics in public health
As Lawrence O. Gostin, J.D., associate dean and the O’Neill Professor of Global Health Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, surveys the health landscape around the world, he comes to an obvious yet troubling conclusion. “Rich countries just don’t care enough,” he said, calling the response of the United States and other affluent countries to health inequalities “limited and quite pathetic.”

Gostin, the keynote speaker at the School of Public Health’s Alumni Day symposium, said that government leaders need to pay closer attention to health threats in other parts of the world. “Infectious diseases don’t respect national borders,” he said, noting that health issues pose serious ramifications for international commerce, trade, tourism and government stability. “States with unhealthy populations provide a great opportunity to harbor terrorists.” Even the CIA, he said, uses infant mortality as a marker of political stability.

While such headline-grabbing events as the recent China earthquake and the East Asian tsunami of December 2004 are typically followed by a “powerful humanitarian response,” Gostin said that help to meet such basic necessities as sanitation, clean air and water, pest abatement and vaccines is more urgently needed in developing countries. “It’s disarmingly simple and inexpensive,” he said. “They don’t need state-of-the-art facilities or foreign aid workers parachuting in to rescue them; they just need basic stuff they can run themselves.”

Noting that governments currently exist in a state of “global health anarchy,” Gostin proposed the creation of an international framework convention on global health modeled on the Kyoto Protocol, which raised the visibility of climate change as a global threat. The framework convention, an idea that is already being discussed by the World Health Organization and other international agencies, would convene key stakeholders for the purpose of addressing health disparities and developing global health solutions.

When it comes to health, “the poor suffer much more than the rich,” Gostin said. “Health disparities are no less important than global warming and other issues of the times.”

The panel that followed Gostin’s talk also pursued the subject of ethics and public health. On the panel was Stewart D. Smith, M.A., M.P.H. ’96, a former Navy officer, who served in the first Gulf War and was in the Pentagon on September 11. Since leaving the military, Smith has made a career as a consultant who helps organizations prepare for disaster. However, he has yet to see a company disaster plan that includes an ethics analysis. “Everybody assumes that ethics is common sense, that they intuitively know the right thing to do, and—guess what—they really don’t. They need to be taught; and the time to do it is before disaster strikes,” he said. For example, a recent government survey found that 73 percent of its employees would not come to work during a flu outbreak. Would it be ethical to require them to? “Get real,” said Smith. “Ethics is real.”

Smith was one of four panelists to discuss the importance of ethics in emergency planning and public health. Speaking from their own experiences—which range from military action to anthrax attacks—the panelists made a strong case for ethics training in public health education and decision making.

James L. Hadler, M.D., FW ’80, M.P.H. ’82, who recently retired as chief of the infectious diseases section at the Connecticut Department of Public Health, often juggles benefits to the community and individual rights. (See related story, “School of Medicine goes green as it aims for lower carbon emissions by 2020.”) He usually favors the welfare of the community “when the individual can’t predictably be harmed.” But determining the chances of harm isn’t always easy. During a meningitis outbreak on college campuses just a few days before the end of a semester, for example, Hadler had to decide whether to vaccinate more than 12,000 students with jet-injector guns that carried a small risk of cross-contamination with blood-borne pathogens or with injections that would take much longer to administer, thereby putting students at risk of meningitis infections. After consulting with an ethicist and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and researching different brands, Hadler authorized the use of jet-injector guns.

On a smaller scale, there are the problems of running an inner-city clinic. “Do we rob Peter to pay Paul?” asked Thomas J. Krause, M.P.H. ’81. For Krause, that question isn’t just hypothetical. Krause is chief operations officer at Southwest Community Health Center in Bridgeport, where most of his patients are self-pay or have Medicaid, and every year he faces budget cuts. He is responsible for delivering health care to poor people, many of them immigrants who have never encountered Western medicine. And he must maintain the morale of a staff that is hamstrung by scarcity and the difficulty of caring for this patient population. In the face of such pressures, it would be easy to think of ways to trim and skimp, Krause said. “But we never go there.”

Bruce Jennings, M.A., a lecturer in ethics at the School of Public Health, explored the philosophical underpinnings of the others’ real-world stories. The idea that society serves the individual and not the other way around, he said, sometimes “butts heads” with public health when officials must weigh an individual’s liberty against the greater public good. Debates from the early days of AIDS provide an example. As the epidemic silently spread, public health officials pushed for greater tracking and surveillance of cases, while others argued that to do so would infringe on privacy rights. Since the AIDS era began, he said, “it has been impossible to take a purely libertarian [standpoint] and it has been impossible to be purely utilitarian.” But, he added, “We have to figure out how to get respect for persons and liberty—and outcomes and health—together.”

Awards and the state of the school
Dean Paul D. Cleary, Ph.D., delivered good news to those gathered at Alumni Day 2008 at the New Haven Lawn Club—the School of Public Health has gone through a successful reaccreditation process. And, Cleary said, changes are in the works for the school, including a revamping of the global health program.

“We stopped admitting students to global health last year,” Cleary said. “We dissolved the division of global health and created a schoolwide global health program.”

In addition, he said, Elizabeth H. Bradley, Ph.D., professor of public health (health policy), is developing a global health leadership initiative that will bring practitioners from around the world to Yale. The school has also created an office of community health, led by Elaine O’Keefe, former head of the New Haven Health Department’s AIDS division and former health director for the town of Stratford. The new office will oversee student internships, Cleary said. “We will move from a less-than-optimal approach to a better-focused, more-managed program,” he said.

The Association of Yale Alumni in Public Health (AYAPH) presented several awards this year.

Robert E. Steele, M.P.H. ’71, Ph.D. ’75, M.Div., received the Distinguished Alumni Award for his contributions to the school and the profession. Steele has been on the AYAPH board since 2001 and served as president from 2004 to 2007. He is a founder and benefactor of the Creed/Patton/Steele Endowed Scholarship Fund, which supports future public health professionals. “It is important to support the institutions that have supported us,” Steele said as he accepted the award.

The Eric W. Mood New Professionals Award went to Keshia M. Pollack, M.P.H. ’02, Ph.D., who teaches at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also works for a member of the Maryland General Assembly and advises a Baltimore community coalition seeking to alleviate childhood obesity.

The Award for Excellence in Public Health Practice was given posthumously to Virginia Alexander, M.D., M.P.H. ’41. Alexander received her medical degree from Woman’s College of Pennsylvania in 1925, but no Philadelphia hospital would accept Alexander, who was African-American, for training. Instead she completed her internship at Kansas City General Hospital, in Missouri, the designated hospital for people of color in that city. After receiving her public health degree from Yale, she became physician-in-charge of women students at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Her niece, Rae Alexander-Minter, Ed.D., and great-niece, Virginia Brown, accepted the award on her behalf.

Reunion Reports

Click here for reunion photos.

1948
60th Reunion

The 60th reunion of the Class of 1948 was a great success. As of June this year 31 of the 55 of us who graduated in 1948 were still around, and 15 attended the reunion along with nine of the wives. They were a pretty vigorous bunch of 80-somethings.

Three of our five living women members were there. The prize for vigor has to go to Elizabeth Fuller Elsner, who spends the winter in Alaska where she is addicted to cross-country skiing. She had to take time off this past year to get a new hip but she is now back to her old sport. She spends the summer in Massachusetts and came down on Saturday morning with Nan Godley. Nan still does some volunteer work at Harvard. Sylvia Preston Griffiths also does volunteer work at Columbia.

The prize for the longest trip goes to Al and Ruth Fisk who came from California. They live in the Sonoma valley and until recently had a small vineyard. They also won a gold medal in 2003 at the Cal State Fair for their pinot noir. They have now given up the vineyard and keep busy with duplicate bridge, gardening and leading environmental walks. Next longest was Jock Bishop, who is retired from an academic career at Minnesota in internal medicine and research in the physiology and biochemistry of diabetes. He now pursues a hobby in creating rustic furniture from buckhorn wood. In listing our longer travelers I overlooked Dick Buker who is the last member of our class still seeing patients. He is the county health officer of Chester, Mont., and is in charge of disaster planning for his area. He attended with Candace Chang.

Bob and Mary Lempke joined the group on Friday from Indiana. The OR at the Richard L. Roudebush Indianapolis VA Medical Center was named in Bob’s honor. He was chief of surgery there for many years. He has taken up oil painting—landscapes and some portraits and has had a showing of his works in Indianapolis. Dave and Kayoke Morton came from Pueblo, Colo. They have been doing a lot of traveling, including trips to Japan to see Kayoke’s relatives.

Bud and Esther Rowland, Jack and Ann Strominger and Paul Talalay came from Columbia, Harvard and Johns Hopkins respectively. I mention them together because they probably represent the most successful of our academicians. Paul is the John Jacob Abel Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at Hopkins. He is widely known for his studies of vegetables like broccoli that induce protective enzymes in the body and help prevent cancer. In 2005 he was awarded the prestigious Linus Pauling Award in recognition of his work. Jack is a professor at the Dana Farber institute at Harvard. He has studied histo-compatibility in man and other vertebrates leading to the understanding of mechanisms of immune recognition. In 1999 he received the Japan Prize, the largest monetary reward for scientific investigation. Bud was chief of the department of neurology at Columbia’s Neurological Institute and was widely known for his work on stroke.

Paul and Betty Goldstein, Paul and Margaret Koehler, and Dick Richardson represent our clinicians who remained in the Northeast. Paul is the only member of the class who remained in New Haven and has been an anchor for returning alumni. He now spends winters in Florida. When he is in New Haven he spends one day a week in his clinic. Dick Peterson is now retired. He drove down from Southbury, Conn., with his daughter Melanie Barry. Paul and Margaret drove down from Newbury, N.H. Paul served us for 50 years as class secretary. He’s still pretty active despite acquiring four artificial joints.

During the spring I contacted almost everyone in our class. I’d like to mention three of our achievers who couldn’t come. They are Herold Griffith, Tom Frei and Betty McCleary Hamburg. Herold spent eight years as chief of plastic surgery at the University of Illinois medical school. He was made an honorary member of British Association of Plastic Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons, of which there are only eight in the United States. Tom is the Richard and Susan Smith Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard and a member of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. In 1972 he was given the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award for demonstrating that a combination of chemotherapeutic agents could result in long-term survival and even cures in some leukemias and lymphomas. This award is often a prelude to the Nobel Prize. Betty reports having two careers, first as a professor at Harvard and then as the first director of child psychiatry at The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. After retiring from Mount Sinai, she began a second career as president of the William T. Grant Foundation. Herold couldn’t come because his wife is so frail. Tom couldn’t make it for health reasons. Betty thought she could come in on Saturday but something must have interfered.

Looking forward to seeing all of you on our 65th.

Ben Rush

1953
55th Reunion

Our 55th class reunion welcomed 10 of our members, who had lively discussions in many venues. Two of our married sets, Ed and Rhoda Powsner and Ora and Howie Smith, added greatly to the pleasure of the weekend. Attending some of the reunion activities were Claude Bloch, Fred Lane and José Ramírez-Rivera. Tom Gentsch was accompanied by wife Betty. Hyla and Bob Melnick had to leave early Sunday to welcome a new grandchild who had arrived on Saturday. Maureen was with Hal Bornstein. Many of our regular attendees had excused absences for a variety of reasons from knee replacement to family conflicts. Excellent weather enhanced the reunion program, especially the tour of Yale’s new West Campus.

Harold D. Bornstein

1958
50th Reunion

Thirty-two members of our class of 72 graduates were in attendance. Many with their wives or significant others were there to partake of the festivities. George and Anne Aghajanian, Joe and Ann Angelo, John and Trudy Arnot, Gerry and Ann Burrow, Dave and Helen Carlson, Joe Cillo and Tina Callahan, John and Sheila Creatura, Bob and Ellen Donohue, Larry and Reggie Dubin, Don and Helen Duncan, Michael and Liz Fishman, Marcia Kraft Goin, Bill and Sue Gould, Stan and Debbie Harris, Ernie Hartmann, Dick Hinckley, Mike and Jean Kashgarian, Jay and Barbara Kislak, Ted and Dora Lieberman, Tom and Karen Mauro, Bill McClanahan and Anne Bourne, Andy and Lois McGowan, Richard and Eva Miller, Al and Judie Muggia, Bob Neuwirth, Carol Phillips, Bill and Dorothy Radcliffe, Paul and Sandra Rudnick, Bruce Sklarew and Margaret Meyer, Ray and Maria Turner, Jack and Pauli Wood. We missed Bill Schlaepfer who could not attend and were sorry to hear that Chuck Kashima was not doing well. Our Friday night class dinner was held at the old Fulton Mansion on Deepwood Drive. We were fortunate to enlist the Union League Café as our caterers since they produce the best French cuisine in Connecticut. Dean Robert Alpern joined us and assured us that the Yale system, although somewhat modified by external influences, is still alive and well and is attracting the very best students. We started dinner with a toast to honor the 10 members of our graduating class who have passed on over the years. John Carlston, Jake Gallagher, Dick Gershon, Jim Greenwald, Ken Jimenez, Mike Lotz, Pat McKegney, Al Phillips, Dave Pugh, Tom Shea, and Bob Wroblewski. Alumni Day began with a symposium on autism that fascinated and enthralled all who attended. The afternoon was occupied by some with a visit to the new West Campus, where new programs in biotechnology, chemistry, physics, environmental sciences and art preservation will take place, while others had some moments of nostalgia by having pizza at Pepe’s on Wooster Street. The weekend ended with dinner with the Friends of the 50th at the Graduate Club, where old friendships were renewed. Mike McCabe did not attend and is still surfing in Hawaii and sends this message “I miss all of you guys. But I love surfing my Hawaiian waves. So, come visit me in Hawaii!”

Mike Kashgarian and Gerry Burrow

1963
45th Reunion

Eleven members of the Class of 1963, many accompanied by their spouses, made their way back to the mother ship for the 45th Reunion. Sending regrets but unable to attend because of illnesses, prior commitments, unavoidable conflicts or intractable lethargy were Wayne Brenckman, Bill Friedewald, Bill Lehmann, Bob Mueller, Bob Grummon, Seth Weingarten, Steve Joseph, Lee Talner, Peter Gregory, Judy Davis, John Mahoney, Rick Back, Dudley Danoff, Allen Flaxman, Ben Harris, Pete Tishler, Larry Tremonti, Jim Dalsimer, Gordon Cohen, John Conte, Bill Porter and Gene Profant. Many commitments were offered for attendance at our 50th in 2013.

Our small but very congenial and talkative group lingered through extensive conversation and reminiscing at Friday’s clambake and a marvelous Saturday dinner at the Q-Club. Art Ackerman, who has been bringing Western medicine to the backwaters of developing countries over many decades, continues to do so, most recently in Africa (Tanzania and Rwanda) and the Caribbean (Antigua). Colonel Craig Llewellyn, fully retired from his longtime Army career, splits his time between Florida and Vermont, while teaching and assisting in the establishment of emergency preparedness teams and procedures at universities. Sheldon Pinnell, a Duke faculty guy since 1973 and self-confessed workaholic, sold his SkinCeuticals Company (for which he developed research-based sunscreen and antioxidant skin protection and restoration products) to L’Oréal, and continues to spend full days in his lab at Durham, having a good time. Dave Fulmer, on the other hand, has his good times at the front end of a fishing rod. Back at the turn of the millennium, Dave decided that he had had enough of managed care and other regulatory baloney and would retire from his internal medicine practice in Princeton, N.J., and start enjoying his seven grandkids. Alex Gaudio continues his full-time retinal disease practice in Hartford, Conn., now with his son, Paul, and spends one day every week maintaining his academic connection at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston. Hal Kaplan finally retired from his gastroenterology practice in July 2007, but continues in his “part-time” medical affairs consulting slot at his old hospital in Meriden, Conn., while finding more time to enjoy his 10 (and still counting?) grandchildren. Mike Fessel, also still hanging out in the New Haven area, practices internal medicine, and, along with Hal, enjoys a clinical appointment to the med school faculty, trying to teach the art of effective communication with patients and family. Andy Edin continues his active internal medicine practice in Minnesota. Part of a large multi-specialty group, he now arranges his patient schedule on his own terms, allowing him time to enjoy his longtime hobby of hunting in Minnesota (these days, without shooting), as well as in any number of remote locations. Alan Shapiro remains happy in an active urology practice in Tinseltown. Helen Walsh, long since moved on from a career in anesthesia to one in psychiatry, is quite active and happy with a part-time Massachusetts practice limited to geriatric psychiatry. Also still engaged in a part-time psychiatric practice is Jay Pomeranz, who in his free time wields a very competitive tennis racquet in Springfield, Mass.

Twenty-nine classmates contributed to the 45th Reunion Booklet, providing a variety of long and short glimpses of their personal lives, with fascinating details beyond the limited scope of this article. Copies will be distributed by mail to all members of the Class of 1963. This mailing will be the first phase of an intensive campaign to encourage maximum attendance at our 50th reunion, scheduled for June 7–8, 2013. SAVE THE DATES!

Harold Kaplan

1968
40th Reunion

Seventeen members of the Class of 1968 came to New Haven for our 40th reunion. Elizabeth Short provided the star attraction with the 2008 edition of the Class Roster, a 139-page summary of the class that will be mailed to all who did not attend. Grace Jordison Boxer came with husband Larry from Michigan. Bob Dillard, who came with wife Laura, reminded us of his passions for treating sick babies and for fly fishing. Alan Finesilver, who came with wife Cindy, is also an avid fly fisherman (Wisconsin and Montana) and works as a volunteer to help find housing for homeless people. Bill Flynn Jr. is still working as a general surgeon with no intention of retiring any time soon. Gil Grand revels in his “perpetual immaturity.” Len Grauer, who came with wife Betsy, was “delighted to see everyone.” Ralph Greco came with wife Irene Wapnir. Peter Jokl was excused from the fête due to aortic valve surgery a few weeks earlier. Marc Lippman was happy “just to be here.” Frank Lucente, who came with partner Stephen Saikin, tells us he is now enjoying “minimal work.” Allen McCutchan and wife Emily are anticipating semiretirement soon. Richard Morehead invites us all to Santa Fe, N.M., for next year’s West Coast reunion—a necessary location due to global warming (i.e., no more West Coast). Jim Ogilvie is happy to “see a happy and productive Class of ’68. We’re not done yet!” Jerry Rauch and wife Nancy have been traveling internationally, rebuilding their house and volunteering at an animal shelter. Peter Kirkpatrick says this event brings back good memories. And Chuck Post has been semiretired for 8 years, sailing along the East Coast and the Caribbean, doing surgery in the Third World and bicycling in various countries.

Donald Lyman

1973
35th Reunion

Among those who made the pilgrimage were Marv Chassin and wife Barbara, now in Phoenix, where Marv practices oncology. Marvin Miller is the class geneticist; he came from Dayton, Ohio, with wife and children. Sesh Cole and wife Pat came from St. Louis, where Sesh is in pediatrics at Washington University. They left the next day for Dartmouth’s graduation. John Brown has retired from his surgical practice in Vancouver, Washington, and spends time in Mexico and Florida; he noted that John Jr. has presented him with grandchildren. Chris (Kull) Walsh arrived from New York with husband Sean. Chris is a pediatric cardiologist at Einstein and has a daughter in her own training program. Harry Romanowitz and wife Sheila drove up from Stamford, Conn., where Harry practices pediatrics. Doug Maddox and wife Kathryn flew in from Atlanta, where Doug is ENT chair at Emory.

On Saturday, Joe Eichenbaum, who practices ophthalmology at Mt. Sinai, and wife Ingrid joined us. Randy Zusman came from Boston; he has been at Mass. General since graduation. Tom Sweeney and Jim Sullivan were both in attendance, representing surgery and medicine in the New Haven community. Rick Young attended, fresh from his third tour of duty in Iraq. Rick is a pediatric neurologist and chair of pediatrics at the Hospital of Saint Raphael in New Haven. Neil Handel attended by phone, unable to make it from Los Angeles where he is a plastic surgeon and the proud father of three young children. I am a gastroenterologist in Dallas, run a colon cancer research laboratory, and still work on my medical school thesis.

We swapped tales about family and professional activities, tried to exchange information about those who weren’t there, and made up what we didn’t know for certain. We have produced two deans (Lee Goldman at Columbia and Dave Bailey at UC Irvine); several department chairs (George Lister in pediatrics at Southwestern Medical Center, Bob Buchholz, who just stepped down from orthopaedics at Southwestern, Jerry Rosenbaum in psychiatry at Mass. General, and probably more); and many division chiefs and other academic leaders. We look forward to seeing more of you at future reunions.

Richard Boland

1978
30th Reunion

The Class of 1978 reconvened in New Haven this June for their 30th reunion. Sightings included Rich Baron, Duke and Claudia Cameron, Howard Chase and Claudia McNamara, Stuart and Amy Forman, Bob Gelfand and Susan Boulware, Ken Lee and Ruth Daniel, Yvette Piovanetti and Jose Martinez, Barb and Jordan Pober, Seth Powsner and Elizabeth Yen, Mike Rogawski, Bern Shen, Tom Smith and Joann Bodurtha, Marcia Wade and David Officer, John Wagner and Julie Budd, Jonathan Weinberg, and Susan Wong. Dean Alpern joined our class for dinner at the Graduate Club, either because of our illustrious record of charitable giving to Yale or our legacy of mischief … you decide. It was a heart warming and spirited evening. Those not in attendance were missed but also well represented in embarrassing vignettes. Remember this when you consider your plans to attend the 35th! Seth and I will get to work on a class survey to provide a little more detail on everyone’s lives. Have a great summer.

Duke Cameron and Seth Powsner

1983
25th Reunion

“Spectacular” describes our reunion. As we gathered on Harkness lawn, at the 333 Cedar St. rotunda, and in the Historical Library, it seemed as though just yesterday we were students.

Attendees included: Mark Boytim and Anne Boytim, Nancy Crocker, Dianne Edgar, Gerri Goodman, Linda Grais and John Freund, Tammy Harris, Rob Homer, Ana Lamas, Judy Melin, Elizabeth Nolan, David Norton, Dan Oren and Jeanette Kuvin Oren, Alan Reznik and Elizabeth Reznik, David Schwartz, Susan Seward and David Seward, Steven Sockin and Susan Sockin, Michael Silverberg, Michael Tom.

Among us are expert clinicians, educators, chiefs, chairs, partners, directors, trustees, researchers and administrators throughout the country. We discussed our residencies, fellowship training, current or prior practice experiences in allergy (Ana, Steve), ENT (Mike T.), ER Med (Elizabeth), ophthalmology (Gerri), orthopaedics (Alan, Mark), primary care specialties (Tammy-FP; Judy, Sue-IM; Dave N., Nancy-pedi). We talked of teaching, research and practice at Yale and in New Haven (Alan, Dan, Rob). We talked of clinical leadership roles in anesthesia (Dave S., Mike S.), of management/VC work in life sciences (Linda), in pharmaceutical research (Dan), of health care administration and policy work (Dave N., Judy, Nancy et al.). Most talked of educating medical students and residents (Ana, Dan, Dave S., Gerri, Judy, Rob, Sue et al.).

Our dinner on a sunny summer day at Sage’s, formerly Chart House, was the ideal setting for our class photo on the ocean deck. We reviewed Alan’s copy of our Class Yearbook, Judy’s copy of our first-year Facesheet, and were proud to learn that it’s our class that revived the Yearbook tradition at the School of Medicine.

Other classmates heard from recently include Alan Bloom (ophthalmology), April Hang-Miller (rheumatology), David Helfgott (ID), and Eric Winer (oncology). Tina Young Pouissant and Valerie Stone led the establishment of the memorial fund honoring Yvedt Matory, M.D. ’81. We thank Michael Tom, for his leadership role in the Yale Tomorrow School of Medicine alumni fund campaign, our reunion gift volunteers David Schwartz and Eric Winer, and reunion co-chair David Helfgott. We also extend our thanks to Joan Peck of the Association of Yale Alumni in Medicine for organizing our reunion, and to Mary Meehan, director of alumni affairs, and Claire Bessinger of Yale Medicine.

For classmates not here for the reunion, know we talked of your research advances, publications, teaching, leadership, and outstanding care you provide. When we next convene, we’ll again prove accurate the refrain from our fourth-year show theme song, that we’re “one singular sensation, Yale Med Class of ’83.” We’ll be holding a place for each classmate at our next reunion. Do join us.

Judy Melin

1988
20th Reunion

It is hard to believe that it has been 20 years since we left New Haven, especially since everyone who attended looked unchanged from our medical school days. Five of us took a break from chauffeuring our children to their various activities and returned for this year’s reunion.

Dave Chelmow arrived for the Saturday night dinner. He is the director of the ob/gyn residency program and the IRB chair at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. He and wife Fay, a hospice nurse, live in Newton, Mass. They have two children, Ben, 15, and Jenny, 11.

Nicole Davis and Alex Vukasin also attended the Saturday night dinner after driving up from Princeton, N.J. Nicole is a gynecologist in solo private practice and Alex is a urologist in a group practice. They have two children, Gabrielle, 16, and Alex, 13.

Irene Freeman attended most of the reunion festivities. She is a pediatrician in a group practice in Chicago. She lives with husband Bob McDonald, an economist at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill. They have three children, Claire, 15, David, 13, and Henry, 11.

Rhonda Karol attended the Saturday night dinner with husband Gordon Berger, a managing director of the Bank of New York Mellon (and a very good sport as he was the only non-alum and non-physician present). She continues working as a dermatologist in Forest Hills, N.Y., in the solo private practice she started 13 years ago. They live in Roslyn, N.Y., with their two children, Elizabeth, 13, and William, 10.

We reminisced about absent classmates and exchanged stories about our last sightings of various class members. We also very much missed Martha Brochin, who passed away since our last reunion. We hope that more of you will return to New Haven for our next reunion.

Rhonda Karol

1998
10th Reunion

The Class of 1998 set another reunion attendance record, this time for our 10th. Friday night brought the traditional clambake and overtired children. Saturday was filled with official Yale lectures and touring, capped off by a dinner at the New Haven Lawn Club with dancing to the DJ’ed music of Richard Lyn-Cook and his perennial roadie/sidekick, Steven Williams. Along the way we got updates from many of our classmates who were there.

Senai Asefaw lives in New Haven, where he works as a hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Hospital and does part-time consulting work. Kristen Aversa lives with her husband and children in Woodbridge, Conn., and continues to practice ob-gyn locally. Tamar Braverman and husband Michael brought their daughters Yael and Talya on Friday night. Tamar is an internist in Branford, Conn. Sydney Butts lives in Syracuse, N.Y., where she works as an ENT surgeon and volunteers her time reconstructing the faces of domestic violence victims. Kent and Shelley Chou flew in from Phoenix, where Kent is an orthopaedic surgeon.

Pediatricians Dan Coghlin and Barb McGee brought children Molly and Henry, who look like clones of their parents. Dan and Barb work in the same practice in Rhode Island. Psychiatrist Caroline Dumont lives with psychiatrist husband Brian Tobin and their three mentally healthy children in the New Haven area. Lawrence (Lori) Etter is a dermatologist in Durham, N.C. Husband Jeff Welty and daughter Caroline were barely recognizable beneath layers of sunscreen, hats, and long-sleeved shirts. ENT Mark Homicz and Pam Loman came in from California wine country, where they live with their two children. Russ Huang is married, lives in New York and is a spine surgeon. Unfortunately, he has not had much time to play guitar, perhaps explaining the absence of class band Haploid Floyd at our reunion. Or Scott Floyd, for that matter, who wasn’t at the reunion but who is a radiation oncologist in Boston.

One of our longest-in-training classmates, neurosurgeon Hahnah Kasowski and husband Robert Seminara live in New York with their son Nathaniel. Lisa Lipschitz practices obstetrics and gynecology in San Diego, where she lives with husband Steve Montal and their two children. Rich Lyn-Cook treats adults and kids, he spins tunes as a DJ, and he can impersonate any human born in the 19th or 20th centuries! The versatile Rich lives in Houston with his wife Monica, who is a surgeon but was too busy operating to join us.

After several years on faculty as a hospitalist at the University of Vermont, Ursula McVeigh recently moved to Boston to start a palliative care fellowship. Matt Mealiffe works as the director of clinical research at Perlegen Sciences in the South Bay. Ali Portnoy lives in Villanova, Penn., with husband Raphael Crawford; Ali works for GlaxoSmithKline as medical director of early phase clinical drug development in infectious disease. Ruth Potee lives in western Massachusetts with her husband Steve Martin and three kids; Ruth commutes once weekly to Boston, where she is on the family practice faculty at Boston Medical Center. Ruth is probably our only classmate who still sleeps in a call room once a week. Paul Pottinger lives in Seattle with wife Julie and children Zoe and Matthew. Paul is an infectious disease specialist, especially now that he has two children. Nikki Rabidou and her husband have a new baby boy; Nikki practices rheumatology in Torrington, Conn.

Greg Raskin lives in New York City and works at Alliance-Bernstein. Greg occasionally practices medicine on his wife Jackie Weiss and on his children Daphne and Morris.

Lisa Gale Suter, husband Lindsay and children Fenn and Halvor live near Yale, where Lisa is on faculty in rheumatology. They still have a sluice gate. Kimara Targoff and Josh live in New York with their three children. Kim is an instructor at Columbia in pediatric cardiology, and is also doing research on the regulation of cardiac development. Meena Thayu and husband Eric Keuffel have a year-old daughter Anna and live in Philadelphia, where Meena is a pediatric gastroenterologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Ricky Torres isn’t even in our class, but he gamely showed up on Saturday night and danced some salsa. He’s on faculty at Yale. Sus Waikar is a nephrologist at the Brigham in Boston and lives with his wife and kids in Brookline, Mass.

Steven Williams is a plastic surgeon in San Ramon, Calif., where he lives with his wife. Steve occasionally goes to Honduras on medical missions. Ashley Wivel lives with son Jackson in Philadelphia, where she works for GlaxoSmithKline as a pharmacovigilance specialist. Say that 10 times fast!

Lori Etter

2003
5th Reunion

If there had been one thing the 20 of us in attendance agreed upon, it was that everyone looked the same and no one seemed to have changed a bit. On the other hand, words cannot adequately capture all we have been through since graduating, so I will not attempt the impossible. Instead here are brief updates on those who made it to the reunion:

Severine Chavel Greenspan is finishing her dermatology residency at Yale and will begin private practice in Stamford, Conn., while remaining a volunteer attending at Yale. Severine and husband Mike have a 10-month-old girl—Sophie! Mike Greenspan, one of several “Yale lifers” in attendance, is finishing his psych residency after winning the “world’s strongest man competition.” He will pursue a forensics fellowship at Yale, of all places.

Sean Christensen is beginning a four-year derm residency at Yale and proudly acknowledges his and Elin’s official status as “lifers.” Elin Lisska Christensen is now a partner in an internal medicine private practice in Madison, Conn. Elin and Sean just bought a house in Guilford. They are also celebrating their second wedding anniversary.

Doug Davis has “finally” graduated from the M.D./Ph.D. program and is beginning his intern year in Yale’s primary care internal medicine program.

Nataliya Uboha is beginning her second year of an internal medicine residency at Yale. She and husband Doug have bought a home in New Haven.

Danny Kanada had “two more weeks” of Yale radiology residency on reunion day. He’s headed to UCSF for a cross-sectional fellowship.

Pramita Kuruvilla is in the San Francisco Bay Area working as a hospitalist and teaching family medicine residents at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center.

Matt Goldenberg is an emergency psych attending and consultant/liaison at Dartmouth. He is contemplating focusing on refugee mental health and forecasts “liberation” in the near future.

Namita Seth Mohta lives in Cambridge, Mass., with husband Vinay and 10-month-old daughter Aanika. She is a clinical strategy consultant at Partners Health Care and a hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Kyeen Mesesan Andersson met husband Richard during her three years in South Africa completing her M.D./Ph.D. She is now starting a postdoc at Yale.

Ada Emuwa, a family medicine physician, is moving with husband Chi to Nashville, Tenn., and will practice in United Neighborhoods-Health Service Core Clinics for the underserved.

Satish Nagula finished an IM residency at Penn and is now living in NYC with wife Shreya, where he is completing his final year of a GI fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

Marta Rivera is a hospitalist at Yale-New Haven Hospital after enjoying a highly recommended seven-month primary care stint in Hawaii post-residency. She has accepted a position in primary care in Virginia Beach, Va.

Dave Ross is finishing his third year in the Yale adult psych-neuroscience research training program, where he continues researching his passion—music and the brain.

Rebecca Seekamp is excitedly moving from Boston, where she is a practicing family doc, to San Francisco, where she will become a clinician-educator in Stanford’s family medicine department.

Joahd Toure was found moonlighting in the Yale-New Haven MICU. He is finishing up a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars fellowship, moving to “the city” for a health care consulting position and still marveling at the recent purchase of a washer and dryer with wife Viviana.

Sunny Ramchandani is now a primary care internist with the U.S. Navy in Bethesda, Md. He is looking forward to seeing his fellow classmates at the next reunion!

Susan Rushing worked as an attorney before returning to medicine. She has two years left in psychiatry training at U Penn, where she assists with health law lectures at the med and law schools. She and husband Karl Richter have two children, Elizabeth, age 2, and Kaitlyn, age 2 months.

As for me, I am working on childhood obesity prevention as a special assistant to the president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and as an obesity medicine consultant to Harvard Health Publications. I dream of resuming clinical work in obesity treatment and lifestyle medicine in the Promised Land (San Francisco).

Our goal is to have the entire class show up for the 10-year reunion. In the meantime, join our soon-to-be-created Facebook group to keep in touch and share news of the many bundles of joy brought into the world thus far as well as other life transitions.

Mark Berman

Send alumni news items to Claire M. Bessinger, Yale Medicine Publications, 300 George Street, Suite 773, New Haven, CT 06511, or via e-mail to claire.bessinger@yale.edu.