Jefferson in Asia
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Hepatitis B Pioneer
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Alumni Weekend 2015
The Bulletin winter 2016
at Thomas Jefferson University
Hidden Scars
Uncovering the Mysteries of Fibrotic Disease
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fe at u re
Japan & Jefferson: Connections Over Three Centuries
on the cover: Joel Rosenbloom, MD, PhD, and Xiaoling Jin, MD, PhD, in Rosenbloom's lab. Photo by Kevin Monko.
Senior Director, Communications: Mark P. Turbiville Editor: Karen L. Brooks Jefferson Alumni Bulletin Winter 2016 Volume 65, Number 1 Executive Vice President: Elizabeth A. Dale, EdD Associate Vice President, Alumni Relations: Cristina A. Geso
Design: SwivelStudios, Inc. Bulletin Committee William V. Harrer, MD ’62 Chair James Harrop, MD ’95 Cynthia Hill, MD ’87 Larry Kim, MD ’91 Phillip J. Marone, MD ’57, MS ’07 Joseph Sokolowski, MD ’62
Address correspondence to: Editor, Alumni Bulletin Office of Institutional Advancement Thomas Jefferson University 125 S. 9th Street, Suite 700 Philadelphia, PA 19107-4216 215-955-6890 alumni@jefferson.edu Fax: 215-503-5084 Advancement.Jefferson.edu Alumni Relations: 215-955-7750
The Jefferson community and supporters are welcome to receive the Alumni Bulletin on a regular basis; please contact the aforementioned address. Postmaster: send address changes to the aforementioned address. ISSN-0021-5821 Copyright© Thomas Jefferson University. All Rights Reserved. Published continuously since 1922.
6 Fibrotic Disease Forward Momentum in Decades-Long Quest to Detect & Disrupt Progression
12 Jefferson & Asia Historic Ties, 21st-Century Collaborations
14 Japan & Jefferson
Connections Over Three Centuries
18 China & Jefferson
Uniting for Research & Training 2
DEAN’S COLUMN
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4 FINDINGS Arteries Are Better Than Veins for Liquid Biopsy
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5 giving matters A Message from Elizabeth Dale
22 ON CAMPUS 26 Hie-Won Hann, MD Breaking the Chain of Hepatitis B Infection
30 alumni weekend 2015 34
Peter V. Scoles, MD ’70 2015 Alumni Achievement Award Winner
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Jessica De Sabato Studying at Jefferson, Feeling at Home
40 CLASS NOTES 44 IN MEMORIAM 49 BY THE NUMBERS
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The dean’s column
Reflections from a Journey to Japan
Having just returned from a remarkable first visit to Japan, I find that this Bulletin, showcasing Jefferson’s deep connections to Asia, could not be more timely. The visual of late autumn leaves in Nara and Kyoto is still fresh in my mind, capturing Albert Camus’ phrase, “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” I return from this fascinating journey with a number of reflections that touch on the essence of Jefferson’s international collaborative ventures. As dean, I host delegations from other countries with some frequency. There are, of course, all the expected pleasantries and formalities, as my team delicately guides me through the well-choreographed and audience-specific process. But the reality is that such visiting delegations are per force just a sea of faces, absent context—no real resonance is possible since there is no overlay of shared history or personal connection. How different after one meets these individuals on their turf, back in their home country. It may have been but one afternoon together, or one hour, or even a 10-minute brush-up in the hallway of a hospital clinic— and suddenly, on their return visit to Jefferson, we embrace as friends, bonded at the hip. To understand the other, one must slow down, carve out time, and, importantly, see the other in his or her own element. As Charles Kuralt put it: “Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.”
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A second reflection touches on the profound impact we at Jefferson have on those we host. Shortly after arriving in Tokyo from Kyoto, a visit to the Noguchi Medical Research Institute was our first order of business. This was the big interview day, with medical students from all over Japan vying for coveted Jefferson training slots. As I entered the seminar hall, I was struck by the image projected at the front of the room—a large “Jefferson” emblazoned on the screen. The speaker, a trainee who had recently returned from Jefferson, was describing what the experience had meant for him. Simply put, there is nothing like witnessing such a testimonial to remind me of why I do what I do. For this visiting trainee, living half a world away, Jefferson was now an integral part of his lexicon, likely to add rich color to the rest of his career. The Q&As were enlightening, too. Students repeatedly commented about the high-level medical knowledge they hoped to glean while in the U.S. Once I reached the podium, however, my message was twofold. First, I suggested that the primary purpose of crossing the Pacific for a Jefferson experience was not necessarily to gain factual knowledge, though some would certainly be forthcoming. Rather, the true value added was to witness a contrasting healthcare culture in play—how physicians relate to patients, how physicians relate to each other, how physicians and patients relate to the systems around them. Not necessarily better, just different. This message dovetailed with a subtheme that had been percolating up from two of the earlier student presentations: how
impressed they had been by what was to them a radical difference between Japanese and American atmospherics in the physicianpatient relationship—in the way rounds are conducted, in the way the American physician seems to touch the patient on an emotional level. I do think I held back from qualifying that this was not necessarily a general feature of American medical care, but rather of Jefferson’s! Second, in providing yet more rationale for an overseas experience, I referenced Stuart Kauffman’s Adjacent Possible. New ideas are spawned where adjacencies are fostered—adjacencies of knowledge domains, pathways for thinking and perspectives. By trekking across the ocean, students start to bank their own personal suite of adjacencies. The creative fruits of such adjacencies then emerge over career lifetimes. So it’s not just going somewhere else to gather some specific content—it’s all about bumping up against the other, gathering novel concepts to marry with your own. The trip was, of course, creating new adjacencies for me, including a Eureka! moment or two. One example—at the glittering, ultra-modern clinics of the Hasumi International Research Foundation, I learned about a novel vaccine for acne— using peptide immunogens corresponding to culprit bacteria. How creative! There were other such flashes of insight, as I learned about the Japanese Association for the Development of Community Medicine’s (JADECOM) innovative approaches for extending advanced primary care into Japan’s underserved areas in far-flung places, or glimpsing how the world-class immunology lab of Dr. Toshinori Nakayama
Dr. Yoshihisa Asano of NMRI with Drs. Charles Pohl and Mark Tykocinski
at Chiba University is looking to create a clinical imprint where allergic pathogenesis meets lung. Japan is but one of the countries on which Jefferson has set its sights over the years. Others include China, Israel, Great Britain, Portugal and Italy. In these countries we think multi-institutional— top-down Jefferson planning to connect multiple Jefferson physicians and scientists to multiple partners, with such critical mass creating its own set of strategic possibilities, up to the governmental level. Good things are likely to follow, sometimes hard to predict. While at first blush, Jefferson’s selected countries seem disconnected from each other, interconnectedness uncannily seems to blossom. Witness the news of growing R&D and commercial ties between Japan and China, China and Israel and so forth. Jefferson, in some instances, can serve as the catalyst. There are three essential elements for success in Jefferson’s multi-institutional alliances. One is having an in-house champion for each respective country. For Japan, it is Dr. Takami Sato; for China, Dr. Xin Ma. These are individuals who have made their mark as elite faculty at Jefferson, all the while leveraging their extensive academic roots and deep personal ties in their home countries. Meaningful roots translate into the implicit trust that key thought leaders in those countries have in them, and by extension, in Jefferson. The second element is having forwardthinking leaders in the partner country. In Japan, these are exceptional people such as Dr. Yoshihisa Asano of NMRI, Dr. Michiyasu Yoshiara of JADECOM, Dr. Fumimaro
Takaku of the Japanese Association of Medical Sciences and Drs. Toshinori Nakayama and Hiroshi Shirasawa of Chiba University, among others. These are individuals who have a core understanding of the dividends and demands of true partnerships. One of my sayings: Successful people are not those who merely know a lot, but more importantly, those who know exactly what they don’t know. These Japanese leaders understand this implicitly, and this is what makes them such effective overseas champions for Jefferson—complemented, of course, by their generosity of both spirit and resources. There is a third important element, and that is having the right leaders at the top of the Jefferson pyramid. No one is more emblematic of this than Dr. Joseph Gonnella, our former dean who championed international alliances and cultivated our deep connections to places like Japan, Italy and Portugal. And there is Dr. Charles Pohl, who has ably picked up the mantle for our Japan alliances as director of our Japan Center. There is an overarching logic behind Jefferson’s push on the international front: programmatic initiatives are key to our future success, whether in the research or education realms. At the heart of “programmatic” is inter-institutional collaboration.
The Jefferson of today is relentless in looking beyond our walls. Partnering will allow us to continue to diversify our revenue sources, but even more importantly, to plant new seeds and coalesce new ideas that simply would not have happened otherwise—autumn leaves morphed into flowers. International is front and center in this approach, as we cultivate adjacencies that bridge continents. For more about Jefferson’s ties to Japan as well as to China, see page 12. Develop interest in life as you see it; in people, things, literature, music— the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself. —Henry Miller
Mark L. Tykocinski, MD Provost, Thomas Jefferson University Anthony F. and Gertrude M. DePalma Dean, Sidney Kimmel Medical College
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FIN D IN G S
Arteries Are Better Than Veins for Liquid Biopsy As the field of liquid biopsies for tracking disease progression and therapeutic response heats up, physicians are seeking ways to apply this approach to patients. Currently, assays for circulating tumor cells (CTCs)—one type of liquid biopsy—have been approved for diagnostic purposes in metastatic breast, colorectal or prostate cancer. In these diseases, the presence of CTCs in the peripheral blood is associated with decreased progression-free and overall survival. The major challenge for this technology is that CTCs are not always found in the blood of patients with aggressive disease, who would be expected to have high numbers. Now, Jefferson researchers investigating uveal melanoma, which originates in the eye, have shown that the low numbers could be explained by where the blood is drawn—from a vein or an artery. In breast cancer, a high number of CTCs (more than five cells in 7.5 ml of blood collected from the veins) indicates aggressive metastatic disease. “If we can validate this approach for uveal melanoma, we hope to be able to catch
cancer before it develops into metastatic disease,” says Takami Sato, MD, PhD, the K. Hasumi Professor of Medical Oncology and lead investigator. “The work by Dr. Mizue Terai and others at Jefferson gives us hope that CTCs might be useful for uveal melanoma patients as well. On the other hand, our research raised a concern that venous blood specimens, which are tested as the standard practice for CTC measurement, might not be the best source for CTC detection.” CTCs are larger than other blood cells and have different characteristics, making them detectable in samples. Most commonly, blood is obtained from a patient’s vein, having already passed through an intricate sieve of narrow capillaries throughout the body. When Terai, PhD, and colleagues compared blood samples taken from uveal melanoma patients’ veins to those collected from arteries, they saw a much higher number of CTCs in the latter. In fact, all of the uveal melanoma patients with multiple liver metastases had CTCs present in their arterial blood, while only 53 percent of blood from the veins of those same patients had CTCs. Although it is more technically difficult to collect blood from an artery than a vein, this and other research suggests that checking arterial blood may be a more accurate way of assessing the number of CTCs—and therefore metastatic disease.
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A m e ss a g e f r o m El i z a b e t h D a l e
Endowed Professorships A Differentiator in Academic Medicine
How Does an Endowment Work? Endowments last forever. They are both a foundation for excellence, ensuring financial stability year after year, and a springboard for the future, providing vital resources to do innovative work that otherwise would have no funding. “Endowment” refers to assets that are invested permanently. Earnings from those investments provide a lasting source of income for Jefferson. When a donor creates an endowed fund, the gift “buys shares” in Jefferson’s pooled endowment, which operates like a mutual fund. Each year the Board of Trustees sets a payout rate, much like a dividend, for shares. Payout is the amount available to be spent annually for each fund’s designated purposes. For more information, email us at giving@jefferson.edu.
In 1824, when London and Paris—two of the world’s great centers of medical learning—each had only one medical school, Dr. George McClellan founded Philadelphia’s second, Jefferson Medical College. His approach to education—having students, under faculty supervision, learn the art and science of medicine by caring for patients—was revolutionary. It would later become the standard of medical education. Jefferson’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College has a distinguished history of pushing boundaries, breaking paradigms and inventing better ways of training doctors. Today, our faculty comprises some of the world’s finest clinicians, most celebrated researchers and most innovative teachers. Above all else, our faculty created and perpetuates the culture that distinguishes our graduates. Professorships are among the most prized resources of any academic institution. They are among the highest honors faculty members receive—an acknowledgement of the esteem with which the institution holds them—and they are a source of funding that enables our physician-scientists to take on research and education projects that make them stand out among their peers, which makes Jefferson stand out, too. And they send a clear signal to potential benefactors that giving to SKMC is a terrific investment with a big payoff. Our first endowed professorship, The Samuel D. Gross Professorship of Surgery, was established in 1910 with a bequest from Maria Gross Horowitz, in memory of her father. Gross, MD 1828, was one of the finest surgeons of his time, an eminent Jefferson educator and a prodigious author of medical texts as well as founder and first president of the Alumni Association of Jefferson Medical College. Among the eight holders of the Gross Professorship is Dr. John Gibbon, Jr., who performed the world’s first successful open heart operation at Jefferson. The current holder is Dr. Charles
Yeo, a world-renowned surgeon, scientist and educator. Jefferson has 70 professorships, but to attract the brightest medical minds, we need more. Jefferson recently received a $2.5 million gift to create the Ellen and Ron Caplan Professorship and Directorship of Integrative Medicine, now held by Dr. Daniel Monti. The gift was doubled with a match from the Kimmel Matching Program for Endowed Professorships, creating the largest endowed professorship in Jefferson’s history. Professorships like this open the door to potential key hires who might create a luminary program or spark another medical revolution. On May 17, Jefferson will host our first Endowed Professorship Dinner, when donors and their professorship holders can sit down together to celebrate the impact of giving and the achievements of faculty. Our first professorship donor, Mary Horowitz, wanted her gift to “be the means of alleviating human suffering and prolonging human life.” If our dinner guests were to speak to alumni, I imagine they might say, “It’s about your alma mater. It’s about new generations of Jefferson physicians. It’s about the future of healthcare. It’s about you. It’s about us all.”
Elizabeth Dale, EdD Executive Vice President for Institutional Advancement
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Story Summary
Fibrotic diseases can affect virtually every organ in the body and account for 45 percent of deaths in the United States.
The Joan & Joel Rosenbloom Research Center for Fibrotic Diseases, founded in 2013, serves as a hub for more than a dozen Jefferson clinicians and scientists seeking to prevent suffering and premature death due to fibrotic disease.
Forward Momentum in Decades-Long Quest to
Detect & Disrupt Progression of Fibrotic Disease By J e ss i c a S t e i n D i a m o n d
oel Rosenbloom’s life at age 80 encompasses work, love, autonomy and pursuit of his ongoing quest to prevent suffering and premature death due to fibrotic disease.
PhotoGRAPHY by KEVIN MONKO
He exercises for an hour early most weekdays while scanning a favorite
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TV show, Squawk Box, for stock tips. Five days a week, Rosenbloom, MD, PhD, drives to work. As director of the eponymous Joan & Joel Rosenbloom Research Center for Fibrotic Diseases at Jefferson, Rosenbloom leads a highly productive hub for collaborative research, papers and grants aimed at reducing suffering and premature death due to fibrotic disease.
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The Center is a productive fount of research, publications and grants aimed at defining the precise pathomechanisms of fibrotic disease—dysregulated tissue growth and scarring that disrupt function in organs such as the heart, lung, kidney, liver and skin. Long-term goals include developing early diagnostic tools and better ways to measure and halt fibrotic disease progression.
Faculty members across many departments at Jefferson are collaborating to accelerate research involving fibrosis in different organ systems.
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From left: Uitto, Rosenbloom and Jimenez have been friends and peers for more than four decades.
Rosenbloom regularly confers with colleagues Jouni Uitto, MD, and Sergio Jimenez, MD, whom he first met in the early 1970s as fellow postdoctoral students. Today, as chair of dermatology and associate director of the Jefferson Institute of Molecular Medicine, respectively, they’re among a diverse group of more than a dozen preeminent clinicians and scientists on campus who are active in fibrotic disease research. Together, they strive to understand and unlock the deadly mechanisms of fibrotic disease; to find early diagnostic tools and ways to measure its progression; and to identify existing approved drugs that might halt, slow and (in a more perfect world) reverse its ravages. “A lot of people ask me, ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t you retired?’” Rosenbloom says. “I think of (my late wife) Joan and what she would want me to do. I’m doing work that I think she would be really pleased about. This is a group of diseases for which there is no specific or effective treatment. These affect a sizeable number of people and are collectively a source of major healthcare costs with significant morbidity and mortality.” Forty-five percent of U.S. deaths can be attributed to forms of fibroproliferative disease that occur when dysregulated tissue growth and scarring destroy healthy tissue. Deadly mechanisms of fibrotic disease
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“This is a group of diseases for which there is no specific disrupt function in virtually every organ in the body, including the heart, lungs, kidney, liver and skin. “These are cruel, terrible diseases,” says Rosenbloom. “For instance, with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, people’s lungs fill with collagen and then they die; by the time slowly developing symptoms are noticeable enough to visit a doctor, the timeline to death is three to five years. Nobody knows what to do for these patients because nobody understands the etiology and precise pathomechanisms. Defining cause is part of the spectrum of discovery we’re leading as we search for common pathways that would allow us to treat fibrotic disease.” Rosenbloom founded the Center in 2013 with $500,000 that he and Joan pledged soon after she was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in 2012. He credits several of his research breakthroughs to Joan, who worked as his lab manager—a long-deferred career change decades after her 1961 acceptance to a physics PhD program at Penn was derailed by parenthood. Quite possibly the world’s only research entity dedicated to the group of fibrotic diseases that affect organs throughout the human body, the Rosenbloom Center also received start-up funds from Jefferson; future funding will come from grants and philanthropy. “Joel is clearly a guy who loves research, who enjoys his role as a teacher and the satisfaction of passing knowledge on to the next generation of scientists. He gives sage advice at our weekly joint laboratory meetings,” says Uitto, chair of the Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Biology and a connective tissue molecular biologist who
or effective treatment. These affect a sizeable number of people and are collectively a source of major healthcare costs with significant morbidity and mortality.”
has more than 800 publications, recently had his longest-running NIH grant renewed for years 33 through 38 and has trained 16 departmental chairs. Creating a short list of the Rosenbloom Center’s many research collaborations is challenging because fibrosis—when tissues lose elasticity and become so stiff and overgrown as to stifle organ function—occurs in nearly every tissue and organ in the body. A few productivity metrics: In August 2015, the Rosenbloom Center had numerous papers in the pipeline for publication, was on track for submitting several interdepartmental grants by the close of 2015 and had contributed findings to close to a dozen papers published in the Center’s first two years. Post-surgical adhesions are a huge, understudied problem and a key focus for collaborative work with Jefferson’s Department of Surgery. “Billions of dollars of healthcare costs go to fix the consequences of those adhesions,” says Uitto. His lab focuses primarily on fibrotic skin diseases, such as keloids, and wound healing with a focus on fibrosis and heterotopic ossification in severe burns. Uitto has identified promising leads for a new treatment for severe burn patients and anticipates clinical trials within a few years for specialized diets with potential to reduce ectopic mineralization. Developed via collaborations on and off campus, the
treatment builds on Uitto’s efforts to help patients who suffer from ectopic mineralization disorders, a group of genetic conditions that tragically lead to calcifications of arterial blood vessels that prove fatal as early as six months after birth. Jimenez’s laboratory is working to define and disrupt the role of fibrosis in scleroderma, a disease in which close to 50 percent of patients die within five years from the time of diagnosis due to excessive amounts of connective tissue and scarring. Related work on campus includes research with Jefferson cardiologists on cardiac fibrosis and myocardial infarction, with pulmonologists on pulmonary fibrosis and with nephrologists on mechanisms through which diabetes triggers kidney fibrosis and chronic renal disease. Grappling with mortality and reinvention of the self are enduring themes in Rosenbloom’s life. His parents ran a pawn shop near a military base in Washington, D.C., during World War II; their customers’ injuries and ailments inspired Rosenbloom to become a doctor. He also recalls, as “a singularity,” a particular day in 1947 when he was 12: Rosenbloom grew up with Yiddish as a second language (“mostly to argue with my grandmother”) and spent a day showing a Yiddish-speaking relative around Washington. A recently arrived Holocaust survivor, the man had lost his wife and children to Nazi genocide. Reflecting on that day and a childhood in wartime, he says, “This may sound
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Rosenbloom in his lab with researchers Shumei Ren, MD, PhD, and Deepika Koganti, MD.
corny—but I believe you have an obligation to do your best when so many people died so that you can live.” Fast-forward through undergraduate years at Harvard and an MD-PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where Rosenbloom taught for 40 years and most recently directed the Center for Oral Health Research. He recalls his first attempt at retirement in the 1990s with wry wit: “That was a fairly evil experience that drove my wife crazy and me, too, so I decided to come here to Jefferson as a professor of unwanted advice.” In 2004 his life became a scientific version of a buddy movie: Rosenbloom jumped at Uitto’s invitation to run a lab within the dermatology department and to work closely with Uitto and Jimenez on fibrotic disease topics each has grappled with scientifically ever since the early 1970s when they met as postdoctoral students. Rosenbloom worked at Jefferson gratis for nine years—simply for the joy of meaningful work and the chance to add to his 350-plus peer-reviewed scientific publications. Then, when he established the Rosenbloom Center, he was required to begrudgingly accept Jefferson’s minimum salary so the Center would qualify for grant support. Powered by abundant curiosity, intelligence, energy and collaboration-inspiring charisma, the Rosenbloom Center today is a fount of publications and grant submissions to obtain funding required to identify and target the biochemical pathways common to
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Hurdles to Overcome: Complexity of the disease’s molecular events More than one drug required for treatment Slow progression makes detection difficult Clinical trials’ financial and logistical snags
all forms of fibrotic disease. These efforts focus on overcoming hurdles that include the complexity and closely intertwined nature of molecular events that drive fibrotic disease; how that complexity makes it likely that more than one drug will be needed at a time for its successful treatment; the slow and subtle progression of fibrotic disease, which makes it difficult to detect symptoms of onset, disease progression and treatment efficacy; and the considerable financial and logistical hurdles associated with getting prospective new fibrotic disease treatments into the clinical trials pipeline. “This is a badly underfunded area,” says Rosenbloom, estimating that fibrotic diseases in aggregate account for twice as many deaths per year as all forms of cancer combined, yet receive significantly less research funding. “Greater investment in fibrotic disease research would have a very high impact not just on the health of individuals but on the cost of healthcare in the U.S. These chronic diseases are a serious economic burden to society and a terrible
fate for the individuals affected. Once a person gets them, they cannot be cured because there is currently no effective treatment.” As for the love in Rosenbloom’s life, he has two adult children and five grandchildren plus the new light of his life: Sondra Johnson, who was likewise widowed after 50-plus years of marriage. A dear friend of his sister’s, Sondra also happens to be the first girl he ever dated (he was 16 and she was 14 at the time). Together, they enjoy dancing and travel, and occasionally visit Philadelphia’s aptly named “Time” whiskey bar. She even joined him on a science-focused journey to China in October. There, Rosenbloom met with Chinese pulmonologists with whom he is working to identify better treatments for the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Chinese coal miners diagnosed annually with pneumoconiosis (black lung disease)—a chronic, incurable disease that leads to devastating pulmonary fibrosis and respiratory failure.
For more information about fibrotic diseases research at Jefferson or to support the Joan & Joel Rosenbloom Research Center, contact Jonathan Agree, Assistant Vice President for Clinical Programs, at 215-503-6058 or jonathan.agree@jefferson.edu.
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Jefferson
Historic Ties,
Jefferson’s extraordinary relationship with colleagues, medical schools, research centers and hospitals in Asia spans dozens of departments and disciplines. It stretches across 13 time zones, more than 8,000 miles and nearly 200 years—and has grown despite harrowing early sea voyages, 17-hour airline flights and the challenges of jet lag. Ties with Japan and China are especially strong, involving physicians and researchers as well as allied health professionals in many fields.
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& Asia
By S a r i H a r r a r
21st-Century Collaborations
Here’s the latest on how these connections and collaborations are advancing medical education, clinical care and research. >
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Japan & Jefferson:
Connections Over Three Centuries
On a June day in 1860, three Japanese physicians—Ritsugan Miyazaki, Hakugen Murayama and Domin Kawasaki—watched as renowned Jefferson surgeon Samuel D. Gross, MD 1828, removed a troublesome stone from the bladder of a well-heeled Philadelphian.
Top: Yumi Radi and Charles Pohl, MD '87, with JADECOM visitors in summer 2015. Bottom: Kenichiro Hasumi, MD; Joseph Gonnella, MD; and Takami Sato, MD, PhD.
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The surgery took place in the man’s home—an old-fashioned setting that well-to-do 19th-century families preferred to avoid hospital-acquired infections. Yet the procedure had a high-impact factor. Thanks to inhaled sulfuric ether, a recent breakthrough in anesthesia, the patient felt no pain. It was “a revelation” that astonished Gross’s Japanese visitors, one historian noted. But this long-ago medical exchange had a significance no one could have predicted. It marked the start of an international partnership between Jefferson and colleagues in Japan that’s going strong in the 21st century. Today, dozens of medical students, doctors and a wide range of health professionals from Japan’s leading hospitals and medical schools travel to Jefferson’s campus every year to observe, learn and connect with faculty at SKMC as well as the College of Health Professions. The Japan Center for Health Professions Education and Research arranges every detail—from shadowing opportunities to lectures and meetings between colleagues with shared specialties to time for observing on hospital rounds, in the emergency room and at SKMC-affiliated clinics. There’s even a little sightseeing (the Liberty Bell and a Phillies home game are popular). “Medicine is all about relationships,” notes Charles Pohl, MD ’87, senior associate dean, student affairs and career counseling; associate provost for student affairs; and director of the Japan Center at Jefferson. “We greatly gain from our relationships with our patients, colleagues and mentors. That’s true of our relationship with Japan. It’s long, rich and holds many benefits for all of us.”
An Experience You Can’t Get from a Book More than 300 visitors from this Pacific Rim nation have come to the university on medical exchange programs since the 1980s. Joseph S. Gonnella, MD, dean emeritus, has long nurtured the exchanges. Gonnella first visited Japan while working as a U.S. Army doctor at a military base in Korea in the early 1960s. “I fell in love with the country and Japanese culture,” he says. “Kyoto is one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” At Jefferson, he promoted international exchanges focused on research, education and clinical care with Japan and other nations as a consultant for
International Benefits
the World Health Organization and in his role as founder and director of the university’s Center for Research in Medical Education and Health Care. “I met individuals who played key roles in medical education and international exchanges in Japan—including chemist and philanthropist Yoshihisa Asano, PhD, founder of the Noguchi Medical Research Institute (NMRI) and president and CEO of Noguchi Medical Research Corp. in Tokyo. That relationship continues to this day.” NMRI began sending physicians and medical students to Jefferson in the 1980s; other Japanese institutions followed suit. The Japan Association for Development of Community Medicine (JADECOM)—a major health system that manages hospitals and clinics across Japan—sends physicians as well as nurses, dietitians, occupational and physical therapists and hospital administrators. Chiba University, Osaka City University, Kariya Toyota General Hospital and others also send doctors, nurses and other health professionals. In 2012, JADECOM—with the help of NMRI—provided financial support to establish the Japan Center, which coordinates the medical exchanges. It provides a centralized system for organizing trainings and fostering research. Pohl says the center will become the springboard for even more research collaborations in the future: “We have been exploring shared interests with Japanese institutions, with the goal of linking departments there and at Jefferson for rich scientific investigation.”
Among the early NMRI research fellows to arrive on Jefferson’s campus was Takami Sato, MD, PhD, now the K. Hasumi Professor of Medical Oncology at SKMC and director of the Metastatic Uveal Melanoma Program in the Department of Medical Oncology. An internationally recognized clinician and researcher specializing in cancer of the eye, Sato used his 1991 fellowship to focus on immunotherapy—harnessing the immune system against cancer. “My fellowship in Japan was in pediatric oncology,” he says. “I spent nine years in general practice in rural Japan and wanted to return to oncology and to research. I had seen the limits of existing cancer treatments and wanted to find something more effective.” His NMRI fellowship led to a professorship at Jefferson and a research collaboration with Kenichiro Hasumi, MD, a cancer immunotherapy specialist in Japan. Sato developed a new immunotherapy treatment (immunoembolization) that targets uveal melanoma’s spread to the liver. In clinical trials, immunoembolization has extended survival time, typically two months for advanced cases of this cancer, to 12 months or more. In 2013, Hasumi endowed a professorship in medical oncology at SKMC—the first in the U.S. endowed by a Japanese citizen. Sato is its first recipient. “Meeting face to face and seeing firsthand how medicine is practiced here is an experience you can’t get from a book or the Internet, or from a visiting lecturer at home,” he says. “You see the differences in clinical care and education styles. You make meaningful personal connections. Doctors and students interested in future residency programs in the U.S. can assess their language skills and become familiar with the American medical system, too. Training abroad is becoming an essential part of medical education.”
‘It Moved My Heart’ Each year in March, the Noguchi Medical Research Institute sponsors 10 high-achieving students from Japanese medical schools for a one-week immersion in the American healthcare and medical education systems. “This is a national selection of best candidates from various prestigious medical schools in Japan and we just choose 10,”
Sato notes. "We hold a workshop in Japan each winter that’s open to all applicants, to help them understand what they’ll need for the program.” The students face a busy week, coupled with the jet lag from the 13-hour time difference. They attend internal medicine rounds, observe in the emergency room and learn clinical skills with Joseph Majdan, MD, director of professional development at SKMC. In the evenings, small groups spend several hours at one of the free JeffHOPE clinics for homeless and underserved Philadelphians at shelters and rescue missions across the city. The clinics are staffed by SKMC students with oversight from supervising physicians. “Visiting JeffHOPE always has a big impact,” notes Yumiko (Yumi) Radi, operations manager for the Japan Center. “It’s eye-opening. In Japan, medical students begin shadowing physicians in their fifth year. At SKMC, it starts in the first year. And in JeffHOPE, first-year and second-year students are paired with fourth-years to see patients. Our visitors see their American counterparts taking such an active role that it’s very inspiring.” Others may visit a free clinic at Holy Redeemer Church and School in Chinatown with Wayne Bond Lau, MD ’04, an emergency medicine physician and assistant director of the Japan Center who has been a volunteer at the clinic since 2007. It’s an emotional moment. “Dr. Lau’s lecture moved my heart a lot,” one visiting student wrote afterward. “I could see how patients rely on and trust the clinic. It’s small…but I feel it’s like the origin of medicine there.” Noted another: “I’ll never forget this... Everyone had great passion for helping people. It reminded me why I decided to become a doctor.”
American Experience NMRI also sends several physicians to SKMC each year for three-week fellowships; each visitor shadows a resident who shares his or her specialty. “Students and doctors who come here from Japan often comment on how patient-centered the care is,” Sato notes. “After a case is presented during rounds, everyone goes to the patient’s bedside. The family may be present or may
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What Japanese Medical Students Have to Say About Visiting SKMC Medical students chosen by the Noguchi Medical Research Institute visit SKMC each March for a 10-day training program. At the end, they write about their experiences. Here’s what three had to say after a recent stay: I was impressed with doctors’ attitudes toward their patients. They always do their job with responsibility and respect…and made good relationships with patients. I was also impressed with the relationships between doctors and students. Doctors are likely to teach students and the students do a great job. It encourages me to try harder in clinical practice at my university.”
The training affected my view of my future as a physician, especially after shadowing family doctors. Their view is holistic as they try to pull out what would be best for the patient beyond their chief complaint.”
Early Links between Japan and Jefferson: A Timeline
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1860
Three Japanese physicians view a surgery performed by Samuel Gross, MD. They subsequently tour the medical college and give gifts, including medical instruments and books on surgery. The doctors are part of a historic Japanese delegation that sailed to the U.S. to ratify a commercial treaty.
[At the free Chinatown Clinic] we could see Dr. Wayne Bond Lau interview patients. I was impressed by his passionate attitude toward helping patients who couldn’t go to the hospital and also educating medical students, however busy he was. I am interested in working as a doctor in a developing country, so their way of seeing patients [offers] a lot for me to learn from.”
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Jefferson alumnus John C. Berry, MD, leaves his home in Bath, Maine, to become a physician with the Japanese Mission of the American Board of Boston. Berry worked at the International Hospital in Kobe, helped fight an outbreak of beriberi in the city’s prison and helped establish a nurses’ training school at Doshisha University.
Dr. Berry
Joseph Majdan, MD, instructs visiting students from Chiba University and Osaka City University.
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Admiral Baron Takagi, Surgeon General of the Imperial Japanese Navy, gives a talk to Jefferson students—noting that Gross’s book The System of Surgery was widely studied in Japan.
Admiral Takagi
1934
Jefferson graduate Jo Ono, MD ’28, returns to Japan and becomes one of the first bronchoscopists at St. Luke’s International Hospital in Tokyo. In 1949, Ono helps organize the Japan Bronchoesophagological Society.
The envoys
call in with audio and visuals on an iPad. It’s one of the many ways having an international and cross-cultural experience helps people grow.” Many physicians hope to return to the U.S. for residency programs. The Japan Center is happy to help. “Some of our medical exchange fellows use the program to test how ready they are to make the leap and to see if it’s really right for them,” Pohl says. “One of my jobs is to help them better understand the residency application process in the U.S. and explain what the experience will be like.” Fellows who return home rely on their new SKMC relationships for guidance afterward, too. “Often, I find myself offering advice about the right fellowship, the best place for that particular physician,” Sato says. “It’s a big-brother relationship.” The NMRI connection leads to other beneficial outcomes. “After the earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of Japan in 2011, more than 30 former NMRI fellows volunteered to work for a week each at Onagawa Hospital in Miyagi prefecture,” says Sato. “The tsunami had destroyed much of the town and flooded the first floor of this hospital. “We slept on the floor. At first, there was no electricity. We treated many patients with respiratory and GI infections. Others had
1982
The first visiting medical students and physicians from Japan come to Jefferson through the Scholar Exchange Program of the Center for Research in Medical Education and Health Care. “We had the wonderful experience of seeing basic science and clinical medicine for two weeks,” noted Kimitaka Kaga, MD, who led the group.
1991
chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart failure who needed medical care and medications. Their medical records were gone, so healthcare practitioners had to figure out their diagnosis, sometimes starting with the color of the pills they had been taking.”
Beyond Medicine Exchange programs with Japan aren’t just for physicians. “We pair health professionals from JADECOM and other institutions with counterparts throughout the university and hospital community,” Pohl says. When four nurses from JADECOM hospitals and clinics came in June 2015, they toured the Jefferson College of Nursing, the emergency department, the Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience, the neonatal intensive care unit and the Patient Flow Management Center. With help from a Japanese-speaking nurse, they discussed shared concerns with Jefferson nurses, including risk management, patient safety and peer communication. Two of the guests presented at a roundtable discussion on outcomes related to nurse staffing levels and job satisfaction. “One of my objectives in participating in the training is to reduce the job separation rate in our hospital,” one nurse noted afterward. “I realized we need to create a
The Noguchi Medical Research Institute establishes the GonnellaAmano Fund to promote medical exchanges with Japan.
2012
working environment where individual nurses can work with a sense of meaning and purpose, and to support their professional development.” The Japan Center has also paired Japanese dietitians with university counterparts, and has done the same for physical and occupational therapists, pharmacists and recently, administrators who work in payroll and human resources.
Leading Role SKMC and the Japan Center are leaders in medical exchange between the U.S. and Japan, notes James B. Erdmann, PhD, director of the Japan Center from 2012 through mid-2014 and retired dean of the College of Health Professions. “Other universities have relationships, but no one else hosts professionals from so many health fields and from so many institutions,” he says. “When JADECOM and NMRI joined us in forming the Japan Center, other institutions in Japan wanted to get involved, too. The focus isn’t technology. It’s really how people learn and work together. Our team approach and patient-centered care get a lot of attention. People tell us they go home with ideas they’re going to use.”
The Japan Center is established through the financial support of JADECOM, supplemented by NMRI.
2014
Yoshihisa Asano, founder of NMRI and a visiting scholar and faculty member at SKMC, endows $1 million to Japan Center director Charles Pohl, MD ’87, to establish The Asano Program for Collaborative and Compassionate Health Care. “The focus is on delivering compassionate care by interdisciplinary healthcare teams,” Pohl says. “This year’s theme is Social Injustice and Empathy. Through cultural events, panel discussions and lectures we will encourage the growth of empathy.”
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China & Jefferson: Uniting for Research & Training
What can obstructive sleep apnea teach us about preventing heart disease? Can traditional Chinese medicine yield the drugs of the future? How can busy physicians get help with ultrasound scans? And could a skin disease that affects just one in 50,000 people hold the key to solving the riddles of hundreds of rare diseases? Through innovative collaborations, physicians, educators and researchers from SKMC are teaming up with medical experts in the People’s Republic of China to answer these and other health questions that transcend borders and time zones. Here are just a few of the many connections SKMC is making halfway around the globe.
Dermatology: The Genetic Roots of Rare Diseases
Top: Adam Dicker, MD, PhD, chair of radiation oncology, has forged close relationships with peers in China. Bottom: SKMC dean Mark Tykocinski, MD, and emergency medicine chair Ted Christopher, MD, visit a simulation center at the West China School of Medicine.
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For one in 50,000 people, the inherited skin disease pseudoxanthoma elasticum (PXE) leads to a buildup of minerals in the skin, eyes and cardiovascular system that can dim vision, boost risk for heart attacks and stroke and scatter yellow bumps at skin folds. There’s no cure, but early research suggests identifying the genetics behind the condition could open the way for cell- and gene-based therapies. The hitch: Mutations vary by ethnic group. Now, a collaboration between Jouni Uitto, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Biology at SKMC, and Gang Wang, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Dermatology at Xijing Hospital at China’s Fourth Military Medical University, has identified 16 mutations among Chinese women and men with PXE. The work, published in 2015 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, can help with genetic counseling, pregnancy planning in families with PXE and development of future treatments, the researchers say. “Here in the U.S., we’re testing different allele-specific treatments on a pre-clinical level, looking at gene replacement and cellular therapies to stop PXE,” Uitto says. “It’s important to understand the mutations in different populations, so that one day therapy can be personalized.” In 2013, the first Center of Excellence on PXE Research and Clinical Care in China opened at Fourth Military Medical University through the efforts of Uitto and Wang, with funding from the patient advocacy group PXE International and the Milstein Medical Asian American Partnership Foundation. There, joint research using high-throughput sequencing to rapidly identify mutations “has significance beyond PXE,” Uitto says. “It’s a model for collaboration in studying the genetics of a wide variety of rare diseases
that affect 26 million Americans and up to 150 million Chinese.” Meanwhile, Uitto and colleagues are also working with partners at Beijing Children’s Hospital to uncover the genes driving another group of devastating inherited diseases, called epidermolysis bullosa, that leave skin fragile and blistered.
Cardiovascular Disease Research: The Translational Approach In China, one in five adults has cardiovascular disease. Heart attack, stroke and related conditions are responsible for 20 percent of deaths—a number expected to rise to 30 percent in the next 15 years, according to the World Health Organization. As attention focuses on primary prevention, Xinliang (Xin) Ma, MD, PhD, professor and director of the Cardiovascular Research Program in SKMC’s Department of Emergency Medicine, has expanded his work looking at heart failure and ischemic damage to cardiac muscle tissue across many time zones. Ma, who received his PhD from Fourth Military Medical University in 1988 and came to Jefferson in 1989, began collaborating with colleagues in China in 1998. “A group from the university came to the U.S. to talk with Chinese researchers. They flew from San Francisco to New York, then took a Greyhound bus to Philadelphia to meet me,” Ma recalls. “I’m an emotional guy and that really moved me.” More than 20 researchers have trained in his lab and returned to Fourth Military Medical University in China. “They’ve contributed immensely to my research,”
he says. “Most are clinicians and have been able to do exciting translational research at home—taking findings from their work with patients and tracing them back to make new discoveries about cardiovascular disease. This is the new direction in translational medicine, rather than working all the time from the test tube up to humans.” Since 2010, Ma has worked with heart researchers at Capital Medical University in Beijing, including Changsheng Ma, MD, chair of the university’s cardiology department. The relationship went in an unexpected direction. “The head of the university’s hospital is an ear, nose and throat specialist who also wanted to collaborate,” Ma says. “We decided to focus on obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), which greatly increases risk for heart disease. We have seven investigators, 30 PhD students and a whole team looking at the connection in many ways. I’m looking for clinical problems that I can use to generate useful scientific questions, then take them back and do basic science.” One example: Ma and the team are on the lookout for people with extreme OSA who do not have cardiovascular disease. “We can then look for genetic mutations that are protective,” he explains. “That could lead to new treatments down the road.”
Ultrasound Every day, the ultrasound department at West China Hospital of Sichuan University is remarkably productive: 25 doctors scan more than 1,000 patients. Despite this throughput, there is a backlog. Yan Luo, MD, director of the ultrasound department, is working with Jefferson to create new systems to care for her patients. “In China, physicians perform almost all ultrasounds. They’re highly trained to do the scanning of every patient, and then read and dictate reports by themselves…But that’s beginning to change,” says Ji-Bin Liu, MD, professor of radiology at SKMC and director of the China-America Ultrasound Scholar Training Program. The Jefferson Ultrasound and Radiology Education Institute (JUREI), its China-America Ultrasound Scholar Training Program and the Department of Radiologic Sciences are collaborating with Sichuan University to hone a new health profession: sonography.
The universities are also working together to create a unique curriculum for Chinese students, with the ultimate goal to certify and credential the new sonographer profession through the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonography. The Chinese sonographer program will also send some of its top students to Jefferson for advanced study. Education has begun in both countries. In 2014 and 2015, Liu and colleagues Laurence Needleman, MD; Flemming Forsberg, PhD; John Eisenbrey, PhD; and Levon Nazarian, MD, taught at Sichuan University symposia and other sites in China. In summer 2015, Jefferson’s Traci Fox, EdD, attended the international exchange teacher program at West China Medical School to teach immersion courses in the principles and instrumentation of medical ultrasound and hemodynamics. Sonographers and physicians from West China Medical School and Hospital have also come to Jefferson for study. The relationship between Jefferson Ultrasound and China began in the 1980s. More than 300 Chinese ultrasound physicians have visited Jefferson in the past 20 years. In 2013, supported by Vijay Rao, MD, the David C. Levin Professor and Chair of the Department of Radiology, the ChinaAmerica Ultrasound Scholar Training Program was established between the Beijing Medical Ultrasound Association and JUREI to promote medical ultrasound career development for clinicians and researchers throughout China. Through JUREI, Jefferson has established ultrasound education centers at Zhongshan Hospital at Fudan University in Shanghai; Peking Union Hospital at Peking Union Medical College in Beijing; Xijing Hospital at Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an; and Erdos Central Hospital at Erdos, Inner Mongolia. In 2015, SKMC partnered with Third Hospital of Peking University in Beijing to create a Musculoskeletal Ultrasound Collaboration Training Center. “Many physicians from these centers come to Jefferson for symposia and fellowships and take back what they’ve learned to improve clinical care and research,” notes Liu, a graduate of Bethune Medical College at Jilin University in
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Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), practiced for thousands of years, includes complex herbal formulas deployed against a wide variety of ailments. Now, researchers from SKMC are teaming up with colleagues at Zhejiang Traditional Chinese Medical Hospital (ZTCMH), affiliated with Zhejiang Chinese Medical University in Hangzhou, China, to take a deep look at TCM’s most potent active ingredients. “First, ZTCMH will send research fellows, residents and dermatologists to SKMC for training in dermatology research laboratories and/or clinics,” says Qiaoli Li, PhD, research associate professor in SKMC’s Department of Dermatology and Cutaneous Biology. She is leading the project with Jouni Uitto, MD, PhD, chair of the department. “Second, with many compounds/molecules extracted from complex TCM remedies at ZTCMH, a potential program may be established to test these compounds at Jefferson in skin and vascular derived cells in vitro. Active compounds, once identified, will be tested at Jefferson in pre-clinical animal models for skin diseases in vivo.” ZTCMH researchers are particularly interested in compounds from formulas used to treat oxidative stress and inflammation in various pathologies. Ultimately, the project could yield new medicines drawn from an ancient tradition.
Top: Crystal Waters, simulation program coordinator at Jefferson, leads a demonstration for visitors. Bottom: Li Weimin, MD, dean of Sichuan University's West China School of Medicine, and Tykocinski sign an agreement for an eight-year program for medical students. Graduates will be granted medical degrees from both institutions.
Rehabilitation Medicine Advances Important goals of rehabilitation medicine include treating pain, healing or minimizing musculoskeletal injuries and addressing loss of function due to a wide variety of neurologic and musculoskeletal conditions such as stroke, arthritis and osteoporosis. An international program in SKMC’s Department of Rehabilitation Medicine that hosts visitors from the People’s Republic of China and encourages faculty to travel there to teach and train is doing both—and more. “Rehabilitation medicine has grown rapidly in China since I first visited in 1981,” says John Melvin, MD, department chair and the
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Jessie B. Michie Professor of Rehabilitation Medicine. “We always have one or two visitors in our department. And professionals we have hosted have gone home to take important leadership roles.” These include Jianan Li, MD, professor and chair of rehabilitation medicine at Nanjing Medical University and current president of the International Society of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine. Li spent six months at Jefferson in 2001, noting at the time, “I have visited rehabilitation facilities in more than a dozen countries. There is no doubt that the strength of rehabilitation
Changchun, China, who came to Jefferson as a research fellow in 1987. He also collaborates with Chinese ultrasound researchers. “Jefferson also provides training materials to the centers and many faculty members have visited to give lectures. I don’t think there’s another ultrasound education program like JUREI anywhere in the world. The group has more than 75 affiliates from Afghanistan to Honduras to Nigeria and beyond and is recognized by the World Health Organization as a Collaborating Center for Continuing and General Education in Diagnostic Ultrasound.” “Improving ultrasound through worldwide collaborations is an important part of JUREI’s mission. Face-to-face education here and in China between faculty and students encourages deeper ties and better education. We are also thrilled to lend our experience to start a new model of clinical ultrasound which incorporates sonographers,” says Nazarian, professor of radiology and JUREI director.
Radiation Oncology: Research Horizons Chinese research fellows are exploring important questions in radiation oncology for the treatment of cancer with SKMC investigators. “At any time, we have three to six physicians and researchers from China here through our department’s International Fellowship Program in Radiation Oncology, Molecular Radiation Biology and Medical Physics,” says Adam Dicker, MD, PhD, chair and professor of radiation oncology, pharmacology and experimental therapeutics. “We’ve forged close relationships with institutions across China.”
Recent collaborations include: • An evaluation of robotic surgery guided by magnetic resonance imaging and of an image-guided brachytherapy system, which implants radioactive “seeds” directly in affected tissues. These are collaborations between Yan Yu, PhD, MBA, vice chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology and director of the Division of Medical Physics at SKMC, and investigators from Tianjin University’s Center for Advanced Robotics. • An investigation of novel genetic mutations driving radiation-resistant cancers. Work is underway by a researcher from the Shanghai Cancer Center at Fudan University in the lab of Bo Lu, MD, PhD, director of the Division of Molecular Radiation Biology in Jefferson’s Department of Radiation Oncology. • A comparison of surgery and stereotactic radiotherapy for early non-small cell lung cancer—one of the most common forms of cancer in the world. This multi-center study involves a collaboration between Ying Xiao, PhD, professor of radiation oncology and director of SKMC’s International Fellowship Program, and researchers from five Chinese universities. • Immunotherapy combinations of checkpoint inhibitors and DNAdamaging agents using preclinical models of lung cancer. The goal is to have data for the development of the next generation of lung cancer clinical
medicine in the Jefferson Health System is one of the very best in the world.” Li said he was especially impressed by outcomes thanks to early intervention after injuries and with multidisciplinary teams delivering care. In 2008, Li lead a team of rehabilitation medicine professionals who responded after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan. They set up facilities to treat those injured, including many with spinal cord injuries. Researchers followed survivors’ progress, and the group’s experiences have shaped the way rehab medicine providers
trials. This collaboration involves Dicker, Bo Lu and You Lu of West China School of Medicine, Sichuan University. “Our relationships began as personal contacts as Chinese-born faculty and researchers from SKMC gave lectures and did trainings in China through the years. This has grown into very strong collaborations,” Dicker says. Recently, Jefferson’s Department of Radiation Oncology sponsored the Shanghai Cancer Center at Fudan University—one of China’s largest cancer centers—as an affiliate member of the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG), a key clinical research component of the American College of Radiology. The RTOG (now known as NRG Oncology) is part of the National Clinical Trials Network, an international research cooperative funded by the National Cancer Institute that aims to increase survival and improve the quality of life for cancer patients. In one notable Philadelphia-Shanghai collaboration, physicists from SKMC and Fudan University demonstrated that a semi-automatic review process for personalized radiation treatment plans shortened patient wait times and reduced the risk of human error. “The tools developed from the study will benefit Chinese radiation oncology departments where a large number of patients are being cared for,” said Zhen Zhang, MD, PhD, chairman of radiation oncology at Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, when the work was published in the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology in 2013.
respond to disasters around the world. “The Chinese government is now in the process of setting up about 30 rehabilitation centers around the country, and experts in the field are doing something groundbreaking,” Melvin adds. “They’re developing a national system for measuring outcomes. The reason we all go into rehab medicine is to help people. Good measuring tools will let us see how well our efforts are working and what needs to be changed.”
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ON CA M P U S
SKMC Receives LCME Accreditation Following a visit to campus in March 2015, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) granted Sidney Kimmel Medical College accreditation for an eight-year term. This means the LCME has confirmed that SKMC’s educational programs fully prepare graduates for their next stage of training and for entry into the field of medicine. This achievement is the culmination of many months of hard work on behalf of SKMC’s academic leadership, faculty, staff and students. Numerous individuals and offices institution-wide contributed to the LCME self-study materials and on-site visit; the Jefferson community wishes to thank everyone who contributed to this effort. The next full survey visit will take place in academic year 2022-2023.
AMA Taps SKMC to Help Transform Medical Education SKMC has been chosen to join the American Medical Association “Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium”—an elite group of schools collaborating to reshape medical education nationwide. The AMA established the consortium with 11 founding institutions that conceptualized programs and curriculum models on which the newly added schools will build. More than 100 schools applied to join the consortium in 2015; SKMC is one of just 20 selected and will receive $75,000 over three years to advance the AMA’s innovative work to transform undergraduate medical education so it better aligns with the healthcare system of the 21st century. Steven K. Herrine, MD, vice dean of academic affairs, and Tony Frisby, PhD, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, spearheaded SKMC’s proposal.
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Brent Honored by IOM Robert L. Brent, MD, PhD, a distinguished professor of pediatric radiology and pathology at Jefferson and at A.I. duPont Hospital for Children, received the Gustav O. Lienhard Award from the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in October 2015. Established in 1986, this award is presented annually by the IOM in honor of Gustav O. Lienhard, chairman of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Board of Trustees from 1971 to 1986. The award—a medal and $40,000—recognizes individuals for outstanding achievement in improving healthcare services in the United States. A renowned teratologist, Brent has counseled thousands of pregnant women and their families over the past 55 years.
Cohen is ABPM President-Elect Mitchell Cohen, MD, has been named president-elect of the American Board of Pain Medicine (ABPM), the oldest credentialing body for subspecialty certification in pain medicine. The ABPM is associated with the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the largest physician entity in organized pain medicine. Cohen is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior who specializes in chronic pain.
Emergency, Family Medicine Faculty Receive $1M Award
The National Committee for Quality Assurance has recognized Jefferson’s Geriatrics Division as a Level 3 Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH)—the highest level of recognition offered. A patient-centered medical home is a model that replaces episodic care with personalized, coordinated care; each patient has an ongoing relationship with a single physician who leads a team at a single location that provides for the patient’s healthcare needs. Brooke Salzman, MD ’01, geriatric fellowship program director and medical director of Jefferson Geriatrics, led the team that pursued recertification. The practice was first certified as a Level 3 PCMH three years ago.
Jefferson faculty seeking to increase patients’ input on their personal priorities when receiving medical care have received a three-year, $1 million funding award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to study the value of “concept mapping.” Frequently, interviews and focus groups are used to engage patients, but these methods are time consuming and leave data analysis up to professional researchers. Commonly used in non-healthcare settings, concept mapping is a group process through which participants brainstorm, organize and analyze their ideas to take a more active role in sharing their healthcare preferences and desires. Led by principal investigator Kristin Rising, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine, and co-principal investigator Marianna Lanoue, PhD, assistant professor of family and community medicine, the newly funded Jefferson study will focus on patients with diabetes mellitus.
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Jefferson Geriatrics Recognized
Karen Knudsen, PhD Adam Dicker, MD, PhD William Kevin Kelly, DO
SKCC Faculty Receive PCF Challenge Awards
Several faculty members at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson were named 2015 Prostate Cancer Foundation Challenge Award recipients. PCF Challenge Awards are given annually to an elite few teams of crossdisciplinary prostate cancer investigators and cover the direct costs of their research. These grants support “first in field” studies using novel techniques for which no prior funding exists. Leaders of $1 million funded projects include Karen Knudsen, PhD, director of the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center and chair of the Department of Cancer Biology; Adam Dicker, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology; and William Kevin Kelly, DO, director of the Division of Solid Tumor Oncology and leader of the Biology of Prostate Cancer Program.
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ON CA M P U S
Pipeline Program Reaches Minority Students A network of institutions that includes SKMC has received a five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Social Services Office of Minority Health to develop a healthcare professions pipeline program that focuses on minority students in the State of Delaware. A collaboration between the Delaware Technical Institute, Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children and SKMC, STEM-UP Delaware! will infuse STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and healthcare learning into schools with high numbers of minority and other underrepresented students. The program will create a workforce pipeline of minority job candidates for healthcare positions throughout the Delaware Valley. Bernard Lopez, MD, SKMC’s associate dean for diversity and community engagement, represents Jefferson on the program’s advisory board.
Thakur Named Distinguished Investigator Madhukar (Mathew) Thakur, PhD, professor of radiology, was honored as a Distinguished Investigator of the Academy of Radiology Research at the 101st Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in November 2015. Distinguished Investigator Awards acknowledge achievement in academic imaging research. Thakur is director of Jefferson’s radiopharmaceutical research and molecular imaging laboratories and focuses on developing radiopharmaceuticals to be used as diagnosis and therapeutic agents.
SAMHSA Grant to Fund Substance Abuse Training
▲ Jefferson Hosts 89th Annual Halsted Society Meeting From Sept. 16-19, 2015, the Department of Surgery hosted the 89th Annual Meeting of the Halsted Society—named after William Stewart Halsted, MD, the first professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins. Jefferson surgeons Nicholas Cavarocchi, MD; Stephen Dunn, MD; Ernest (Gary) Rosato, MD ’99; Jordan Winter, MD; and Charles J. Yeo, MD, the Samuel D. Gross Professor and Chair of Surgery, are members of the society. With 160 people, the 2015 meeting boasted the highest attendance to date. The four-day event kicked off with a welcome from SKMC Dean Mark Tykocinski, MD, and Yeo, followed by a more than a dozen faculty presentations. Highlights included a reception at the College of Physicians and Mütter Museum featuring New York Times bestselling author Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, who gave a captivating talk about Thomas Dent Mütter, MD, Jefferson’s third chair of surgery. A black-tie reception was held at the Hyatt at the Bellevue Hotel, where Kathleen Squires, MD, the W. Paul and Ida H. Havens Professor of Infectious Diseases at Jefferson, gave a talk about Legionnaires' disease, which acquired its name in 1976 when an outbreak of pneumonia occurred among attendees of the American Legion convention at the hotel.
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The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has awarded Jefferson a three-year, $325,000 grant to initiate a program called Jeff Curricular Enhancement-Substance Abuse Training (CE-SAT). CE-SAT will provide training to all medical, physician assistant and pharmacy students at Jefferson during the 2015-2018 academic years so they are better prepared to serve and communicate with patients who have or are at risk for substance abuse issues. Skills related to screening, intervention, referral and treatment will enhance existing course content. James Plumb, MD ’74, vice chair of community medicine and director of the Center for Urban Health, is leading the development and implementation of the new curriculum.
Rivlin Honored by Hand Surgery Foundation Michael Rivlin, MD, a hand and wrist surgeon at the Rothman Institute at Jefferson, received the American Foundation for Surgery of the Hand’s 2015 J. Leonard Goldner Pioneer Award for earning its most meritorious grant of the year. The grant will support Rivlin’s study of fibrosis in injured peripheral nerves.
ON CA M P U S
Pediatric emergency medicine fellow Kim Fugok, DO, and neonatal medicine fellow Elizabeth O’Donnell, MD, train Rwandan physicians and anesthetists in pediatric intubation.
Pictured with Ellen Plumb, MD ’10, and James Plumb, MD ’74, are the Rwandan students who came to Jefferson in 2015: Providence Akingeneye, Peace Kakibibi and Benedicte Ndayishimiye.
SKMC Builds Relationships in Rwanda In 2005, medical students and faculty from Jefferson’s Department of Family and Community Medicine started the Rwanda Health and Healing Project, a community-oriented health project in two rural Rwandan villages. The program includes a partnership with the Rwanda Village Concept Project (RVCP), a Rwandan medical student-driven public health and community development organization. Two years later, Jefferson faculty and members of JeffHEALTH— a student-run organization aiming to help Africa link to improved health resources—developed an exchange program to bring RVCP medical students to Jefferson. Every year, Jefferson selects two to three Rwandan students for two-month rotations focused on primary care, community health and public health. Since 2007, 24 Rwandan students have completed this exchange program. This past September, Christopher Raab, MD, medical director of international medicine for Nemours—Jefferson’s pediatrics partner—took residents and fellows to the Remera-Rakoma District Hospital near Kigali, Rwanda, where Jefferson has cultivated clinical exchange and capacity-building programs. Raab and his group led hospital staff through Helping Babies Breathe, a clinical education program that outlines how to respond if a newborn isn’t breathing. Raab hopes to return to Rwanda next year and will send residents to conduct additional trainings in the meantime.
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Hie-Won Hann, MD Breaking the Chain of Hepatitis B Infection
PhotoGRAPHY by karen kirchHoff
By k aren l . brooks
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fter a healthy childhood in Korea, a young man moved to the United States, built a career, got married and raised two children. Suddenly, at age 52, he developed excruciating back pain. An ultrasound revealed a large tumor. Although he’d had no prior symptoms, liver cancer had been progressing in his body for years. Hie-Won Hann, MD, begins many of her presentations with stories like this. A revered leader in liver disease management, Hann champions awareness surrounding hepatitis B, the virus that causes approximately 80 percent of all liver cancers. For unknown reasons, three-quarters of the 400 million people infected worldwide are from Asian nations—so Hann has focused her work on these populations. “The virus ruminates for decades without symptoms, because the liver has no nerves. If a patient has symptoms, the cancer has spread,” says Hann, director of the Liver Disease Prevention Center at Jefferson. “People listen better to stories than statistics, so I tell them about my cases … then they agree to get screened.” Most people with hepatitis B were infected during childbirth; an infant born to a carrier has more than a 90 percent chance of acquiring the virus. A simple blood test can detect surface antigens (a marker for infection) long before liver cirrhosis or cancer develops, and early intervention saves lives. But early intervention is only possible if people at risk know why and how to get tested. That’s where Hann comes in. By pioneering extensive educational, screening and treatment programs, Hann has helped change the course of hepatitis B around the world. She has played a key role in identifying carriers, testing antiviral agents aimed at curing them and promoting vaccination for uninfected individuals. The two ambitious goals that have consumed her for nearly 40 years—preventing death from liver cancer through early detection of the hepatitis B virus and preventing infection from occurring in the first place—have resulted in unprecedented success in overcoming a stealth menace to public health.
Setting Research Roots Hann is best known for her work on hepatitis B, but her initial interest was cancer biology. One of only two women in her class at the elite Seoul National University Medical School, she fulfilled a dream to train at Harvard, where she completed a residency and fellowship at Dana Farber Cancer Institute. She moved to Philadelphia when her husband, Richard Suhung Hann, MD—an immunologist and classmate from medical school—got a fellowship at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. Unable to find an oncology position in the area, Hann explored research opportunities and in 1971 joined the lab of Baruch Blumberg, MD, PhD, at the Institute for Cancer Research, one of two institutions that ultimately merged to create Fox Chase Cancer Center. Blumberg was renowned for discovering the hepatitis B virus and subsequently devising the first vaccine (he would go on to win a Nobel Prize). Hann’s early studies involved the correlation between iron and cancer. One of her most significant discoveries involved the childhood cancer neuroblastoma; she showed that serum ferritin levels (which correlate to the amount of iron stored in someone’s body) were increased in these patients and were also their prognostic indicator. She also produced the first clear animal documentation of the relationship between excessive iron and cancer growth. Published in Cancer Research, this work was featured in the National Institutes of Health Research Resources Reporter as one of the most significant papers of 1989. When the hepatitis B vaccine Blumberg developed was introduced to the market in the early 1980s, the manufacturer donated an abundance to Fox Chase. Hann and her colleague W. Thomas London, MD, devised a campaign to visit local Asian immigrants to identify carriers and uninfected people who would benefit from vaccination.
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“Since I am from Korea, it was easy to approach Koreans, so I started with my church,” Hann says. “There was resistance—hepatitis has a stigma—and it took time to persuade them.” But their program proved a success. Word spread, and invitations to other churches—Korean as well as Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese—poured in. Supported by a National Institutes of Health grant, Hann and London screened and vaccinated thousands of immigrants across the Philadelphia region. Hann’s husband, whom she calls her “most important coworker,” drove her from church to church and helped to educate participants and obtain blood specimens. “Many Koreans were clustered in other areas: New Jersey, New York, Washington, Virginia, Maryland,” Hann says. “But our grant limited us to the Delaware Valley, so w e couldn’t go any farther.” Until she got a call from Jefferson.
No More Boundaries In 1988, Dean Joseph Gonnella, MD, and Department of Medicine Chairman Willis Maddrey, MD, recruited Hann as founding leader of Jefferson’s Liver Disease Prevention Center. With geographic restrictions lifted—and her husband at the wheel—she expanded her reach along the East Coast and traveled as far as California to speak to church congregations. Over two decades, they screened more than 30,000 Asian Americans for hepatitis B. Many of those identified as carriers became Hann’s patients, whom she continually monitored for tumors. “People come to see me from far away, because I treat patients like family,” she says. “Unfortunately, for many years, if someone had even the smallest tumor resected, cancer would come back since the virus lived on in the remaining liver.” Until the early 1990s, aside from surgery, Hann had little to offer patients in terms of treatment. Her team tried to suppress the virus with injectable interferons, but they brought severe side effects and inconsistent results. “I was desperate to stop disease progression and became an ambassador for antiviral therapy,” she says.
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I was desperate to stop disease progression and became an ambassador for antiviral therapy.
The first antiviral drug for hepatitis B, lamivudine, was launched in 1998—starting what Hann calls “a new era.” She worked on the initial lamivudine trial, the results of which were published in a landmark study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Since then, she has conducted more than two dozen clinical trials evaluating all five currently available antiviral agents. “Oral antiviral therapies have few adverse effects, and with them we can suppress replication of the virus in the liver, normalize liver function and even reverse cirrhosis or prevent or delay the development of cancer,” she says. By showing that antiviral drugs can deter tumors, Hann and her peers have offered an essential alternative to liver transplantation for patients who develop liver cancer. A shortage of available donor livers often means a waiting list of three years or longer for a transplant; many patients die in the meantime. The next step for researchers, Hann says, is to find ways to tackle the latent virus that remains in the livers of all chronic hepatitis B patients. “We have learned to get rid of the replicating virus, but the non-replicating virus is still in the body. It’s like a template, a grandmother or grandfather virus, sitting inside the liver cell nucleus. That one we haven’t been able to touch yet, but there is a lot of work going on in this area,” she says.
Hann has received many awards, including the Distinguished Leadership Award from the Hepatitis B Foundation; the Women in Leadership Award from Women’s Way; the Korean American Pioneer Award; and one that perhaps brings her the most pride, the 2003 Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania Award, with which she joined the likes of notable women including Pearl Buck, Grace Kelly, Marian Anderson, Mamie Eisenhower, Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Dorrance Hamilton. Hann’s impact on controlling the global spread of hepatitis B is undeniable; as a key opinion leader, she has spoken across the United States and in Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Australia, Panama and more. Since she began campaigning to raise awareness, distribute vaccines and introduce antiviral therapies, the infection rate in Asian and Asian-American populations has decreased significantly. Many nations now have formal vaccination programs in place and have seen carrier rates in children drop below 2 percent. “I am so glad to have seen these results during my lifetime. They give me hope that hepatitis B could be eradicated,” Hann says. “I tell all my patients to keep going, keep taking their medicine—because in five or 10 years, there will likely be a cure.” To learn more about Dr. Hann or to support her work at Jefferson, contact Margaret Fala, Assistant Vice President, Department of Medicine, at 215-955-7556 or margaret.fala@jefferson.edu.
Pride and Hope As fulfilled as she is by her professional accomplishments, Hann is equally proud of her family, which includes two daughters, Christine and Carolyn. Christine, MD, PhD ’00, is a medical oncologist specializing in small-cell lung cancer at Johns Hopkins (her husband, neurosurgeon Gary Gallia, MD, PhD ’00, was a Jefferson classmate and also works at Johns Hopkins). Carolyn, a University of Chicago Law graduate, is a consumer protection attorney at the Federal Trade Commission.
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alumni weekend
In his invitation to Alumni Weekend 2015, Alumni Association President Joe Majdan, MD, CV ’81, said, “While some of the buildings and faces have changed, what has not changed are those ideals, those principles, that esprit de corps that for the past 191 years have uniquely defined and sustained us, not only as a medical college but also as the Jefferson family.” Many members of this Jefferson family returned to campus Oct. 16–17 to relive their medical-school memories and reconnect with old peers and friends.
The weekend included a guided trolley tour of Philadelphia and 50-Year Society induction for the Class of 1965 in celebration of their 50th reunion; the annual luncheon with Dean Mark Tykocinski, MD, during which the 2015 Alumni Achievement Award was presented to Peter Scoles, MD ’70; lectures by Simon Gratz Prize winners Vincenzo Berghella, MD '90, Richard Spaide, MD '81, and Richard Wenzel, MD '65; campus tours; a reunion dinner gala at the Westin Philadelphia for class years ending in 0s and 5s; and much more. Thank you to all who joined us for Alumni Weekend 2015. We hope to see you next time on Oct. 14–15, 2016!
Alumni Wee Photos by David Lunt
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1 Gerald Marks, MD '49, and William Renzulli, MD '65. In honor of his 50th reunion, Renzulli gifted his beautiful painting of the College Building exterior to Jefferson. Prints were available for sale during Alumni Weekend and can also be purchased by contacting Renzulli through his website, renzulliart.com. A portion of proceeds will be donated to Jefferson.
2 Harry John, MD '65. 3 Jeff Reichel, MD '70, with his wife, Linda. 4 Attendees from the Class of 1965. 5 Attendees from the Class of 1970. 6 Attendees from the Class of 1975. 7 Attendees from the Class of 1980. S idne y K immel M edical C ollege at T homas J efferson U niversit y
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8 Nancy Czarnecki, MD '65.
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9 Barbara Frieman, Donna Carr and Marianne Ritchie, Class of 1980.
10 Members of the Class of 1965 were inducted into the 50-Year Society on Saturday morning.
11 Robert Pilewski and Jon Adler, Class of 1965, with their wives, Angie and Miriam.
12 Class of 1985.
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13 Alumni Association President Joe Majdan, MD, CV '81, with Clara Callahan, MD, PEDS '80, the Lillian H. Brent Dean of Students and Admissions.
17 Richard Spaide, MD '81, with SKMC Dean Mark Tykocinski, MD. Spaide was one of three winners of the 2015 Simon Gratz Prize. The others were Vincenzo Berghella, MD '90, and Richard Wenzel, MD '65.
14 Joseph Breslin, MD '70, with his wife, Gertrude.
18 John Hildreth, MD '65, and his wife, Joyce.
15 Dean Kinsey, MD '69, presents the Alumni Achievement Award
19 Vincenzo Berghella, Christine Arenson and Galicano Inguito,
to Peter Scoles, MD '70.
Class of 1990.
16 Steve Glinka, MD '75, and his wife, Janet Moore, a 1975 graduate of Jefferson's diploma nursing program.
20 Patty and Gregory Lewis, MD '75, with student Declan Bell. 21 Elizabeth Dale, Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer in the Jefferson Office of Institutional Advancement, with Loretta and Tom Schneider, MD '65.
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Doing the Right Thing
As a young orthopaedic resident, Pete Scoles was bicycling across Ohio State’s campus one morning when he saw something terrible: horses rolling around on the ground in a field filled with gas. He immediately called the veterinary medicine school to tell them there was a break in their refrigeration system and their horses were dying from the escaping ammonia. When the call reached the dean, who knew a good Philadelphia accent when he heard one, he grasped quickly that Scoles had never before strayed far from his East Coast roots. “In the Midwest we sometimes have a morning phenomenon called fog,” he explained to the startled resident. “Furthermore, horses roll around while they are resting to keep their weight from crushing their internal organs.” Finally, he said, he had arranged for Scoles to expand his horizons by spending one year of his residency in veterinary surgery. Peter V. Scoles, MD ’70, SKMC’s senior associate dean for curriculum development and research and recipient of the 2015 Alumni Achievement Award, relishes telling this story on himself. A consummately skilled surgeon who has repaired thousands of spines, a change agent who has affected the shape of medicine nationally, he remains aware that he shares the human condition, that he can be wrong, even ridiculous, and inadequate by his own exacting standards. These standards, combined with his realistic and compassionate view of medicine, have won him admiration from peers and patients alike. Scoles takes exception, for instance, to the brand of surgery that promises a golden future to patients in all states of health. “Nonsense,” says Scoles. “Most operations won’t get rid of pain entirely, but they can give you a way to live your life, to keep your job and your family.” His advice to patients speaks to his own goal: “Just strive to be human.”
A Family Affair The oldest of five brothers, Scoles says his career in medicine was predestined. His mother idealized her older brother, Anthony F. DePalma, MD ’29, a storied chairman of Jefferson’s orthopaedic surgery department from 1954 to 1970, and would not have accepted any other outcome for her eldest. In 1965, Scoles entered a program offered by Penn State University and Jefferson, which led to a combined BS/MD degree in five years. While the program requires seven years to complete today, its earlier incarnation allowed Scoles to proceed at a pace that suited his intensity. Strongly influenced by legendary Jefferson surgeons Thomas Nealon, Jr., MD ’44; Herb Cohn, MD ’55; and Ed McLaughlin, MD ’56, Scoles initially intended a career in
Peter V. Scoles, MD ’70, senior associate dean for curriculum development and research and recipient of the 2015 Alumni Achievement Award, at home. 34
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Photos by Jim Graham.
Strive to Be Human
Scoles’ standards have consistently meant doing what he sees as the right thing, whatever the cost. You can see it in his early decision to enlist in the U.S. Navy at the height of the Vietnam War. “I had a deferment,” he says with typical Scoles reasoning. “My friends from high school did not. That didn’t seem right.” You can see it in his determination to pursue a medical career that would allow him to teach, a path he had chosen in high school. That meant training in the wilds of the Midwest, then the location of the best residency programs oriented toward academic medicine. He could not have predicted that his time at Ohio State would include a year he loved operating in the veterinary hospital. And you can see it in his decision years later to leave his dean’s position at Case Western University to join the staff of the National Board of Medical Examiners to lead major changes to national assessment programs. He left behind what he loved most, teaching and working with students, because, he says, “When you operate, you affect one life greatly. When you teach, you affect a group of people. But when you improve regulatory systems, you contribute to society. Sometimes personal gratification must take a back seat.”
Peter V. Scoles, MD ’70 2015 Achievement Award Winner
When you operate, you affect one life greatly. When you teach, you affect a group of people. But when you improve regulatory systems, you contribute to society. Sometimes personal gratification must take a back seat.
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Scoles and his cat, Red, sit with the microscope that his uncle, Anthony DePalma, MD ’29, gave him. Below: He will turn the heirloom tomatoes he grows into a classic red sauce, made to the same standards of excellence he applies to any enterprise.
general surgery. The Navy directed Scoles into orthopaedics because, he says, “Vietnam was in full swing, and they needed orthopaedists.” The specialty became a family affair; his brother Paul also became an orthopaedist and he married orthopaedist Angela Smith, MD. To round out the picture, Scoles’ god-daughter, Lindsay, also chose orthopaedics. “Any resident who treats one of us is to be pitied,” Scoles says, in recognition of the formidable gauntlet his family represents.
Moving SKMC Forward Scoles’ career came full circle when he returned to SKMC in 2013. He had given back to his alma mater as a trustee and remains on the board of the Alumni Association today. As a dean, he could work from the inside to set curriculum reform in motion. “Nearly everyone agrees that our current education of healthcare professionals is inefficient, expensive, duplicative and sometimes mind-numbing,” says Scoles. “Many places are working to change pieces of the puzzle, but we are looking at the whole process. We are starting with truly patient-centered care as the goal and then working backwards, and that is unique and different.” Working closely with Steven Herrine, MD ’90, vice dean of academic affairs/undergraduate medical education, Scoles put in place the foundations for JeffMD, a new curriculum named by SKMC students and slated to begin with the Class of 2021. He has now stepped back from JeffMD so he can devote more time to working on a still-larger canvas with
Mark Tykocinski, MD, who holds the chair named for Scoles’ uncle and his wife, the Anthony F. and Gertrude M. DePalma Dean of the Sidney Kimmel Medical College. The two men will bring together medical schools nationwide to talk about a more rational approach to the education of a doctor for tomorrow’s world. Scoles takes heart from what he sees at SKMC today. “I see a proud tradition,” he says. “I also see proud graduates who accept the need for change and who want to see Jefferson move forward into the next 100 years. Only a fool would think it is going to be easy. But I see action, –Carol Thomson and that is gratifying.” To learn more about JeffMD, see By the Numbers on page 49.
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A ‘Fifth Daughter’ Student’s Bone Marrow Donation Saves Stranger’s Life
Allanoff and Ruderman in Philadelphia with Allanoff's mother.
Around the world, there are 26 million people listed on bone marrow donor registries. In fall 2014, Avi Ruderman, of Tel Aviv, Israel—whose non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma had not responded to conventional chemotherapy—needed just one of them to be a match. And one was all there was: Molly Allanoff, then a student in Jefferson’s post-baccalaureate program working to complete prerequisites for medical school. Allanoff, now in her first year at SKMC, had signed up to be a bone marrow donor as soon as she turned 18. Her father’s long-term experience with lymphoma inspired her; he eventually received a transplant when she was in college but passed away within a year. Ruderman was lucky to find a match for all 10 of the necessary blood markers, which only happens for 40 percent of patients in need of a transplant. He wanted to thank his donor immediately after his procedure in October 2014, but the registry mandates a one-year survival before sharing contact information. All he knew was that his donor was a 23-year-old woman. The father of four daughters, Ruderman considered his donor a fifth. Allanoff’s donation took eight hours as blood was drawn from one arm, filtered through a machine and returned to her body through the other arm. Bone marrow donation used to involve extraction from the pelvic bone, but today, physicians often can filter hematopoietic stem cells from the donor’s blood. Allanoff was back in class the next day and spent nearly a year wondering who had received her stem cells. Then, in September 2015, shortly after Allanoff began medical school, the registry forwarded her a letter from Ruderman—although it was not signed. She replied through the agency, writing that her birthday wish that year had been that her recipient was healthy. A few weeks later, on the anniversary of his transplant, Ruderman called. Three weeks after that, he and his family flew to Philadelphia. Allanoff, accompanied by her mother and boyfriend, met them in the lobby of the Rittenhouse Hotel; she and Ruderman embraced, and family members exchanged tearfilled stories. The families have since kept in touch, with Ruderman inviting Allanoff and her family to his daughter’s wedding in Israel this June. “It is my treat, my gift,” he said. “You are family now.”
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Jessica De Sabato Studying at Jefferson, Feeling at Home
De Sabato wearing a t-shirt designed by a JeffHOPE patient for a local pizza shop. Photo by Karen Kirchhoff
“To me, medicine has always meant ‘Jefferson,’” she says— with an emphasis on “always,” as she was born at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and shares Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13. “Being here feels like home.”
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Every Thursday evening, second-year SKMC student Jessica De Sabato and six fellow JeffHOPE volunteers operate a clinic at Our Brothers Place, a long-term men’s shelter in North Philadelphia. De Sabato, who oversees triage, views visitors to the clinic as more than patients. They are her friends. “I am the first person the guys see—I talk to all of them and love being able to provide continuous care,” says De Sabato, who particularly looks forward to her chats with a resident known for his artwork. She and her peers follow weekly progress on his comic strip, and when he was invited to design a T-shirt for a local pizza shop that supports homeless Philadelphians, “several of us bought the shirts the day they became available and wore them to clinic. He was so excited.” The opportunity to touch members of the community in this way drew De Sabato to Jefferson: “Of the local schools, Jefferson does the most outreach, and that’s one of my priorities.” Growing up a few blocks from Methodist Hospital in South Philly also provided a pull; her family doctors were all Jefferson doctors. “To me, medicine has always meant ‘Jefferson,’” she says—with an emphasis on “always,” as she was born at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and shares Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13. “Being here feels like home.” The only aspiring physician in her family, De Sabato earned a full ride to the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied biology and subsequently worked as a clinical research coordinator for the Division of Orthopaedic Surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, managing more than two dozen research projects at any given time. “I enrolled patients, took their measurements, interviewed them, things like that,” says De Sabato, who had
wanted to be a physician since childhood and had developed an early interest in orthopaedic surgery since her mom had undergone a series of spinal procedures. “Being in the clinic made me happy.” Because resources were tight in her low-income household, she applied to medical school under “disadvantaged status” and attends Jefferson with aid via three university scholarships; the rest of her expenses are covered by loans. “I’ve never had a lot and have always appreciated help from anyone in any way,” she says, noting that her limited means inspired her passion for volunteerism at a young age. As an undergraduate student, she was part of a group that visited public schools in West Philadelphia to teach kids about fitness and cardiovascular health. Between her science course load and community service, she found time to learn Russian so she could communicate with relatives of her husband, a Latvian immigrant she married during her junior year. De Sabato can’t really explain how she knew medicine was the right path, but halfway through her second year at SKMC, she remains certain that both the financial sacrifices and time commitment she has made are worthwhile. The classes, the lifestyle, her activities with JeffHOPE— she enjoys them all. “But my favorite thing about Jefferson is my classmates,” she says. “There are 260 of us, which might sound big, but I know almost everyone. Medical school is a bonding experience. We all help each other, and we all work together. I already know these are lifelong friends.” –Karen L. Brooks
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undergraduate ’45 Raymond C. Grandon stopped seeing patients at the end of 2015 at age 96, but he continues to come into the Harrisburg office in which he’s worked since 1950 to review cases and write them up for medical education purposes and possibly a book. Grandon and his wife, Doris, initiated Jefferson's annual Dr. Raymond C. Grandon Lecture in Health Policy in 1992 and later established the Dr. Raymond C. and Doris N. Grandon Professorship in Health Policy, held by David Nash, MD, MBA, dean of the College of Population Health. The Grandons live in New Cumberland, Pa.
’49 Gerald Marks writes that he is “happy to report an important reduction in my bucket list: I competed in August in the National Grass-Court Tennis Championships, 90s and Above category, for which my partner and I earned a bronze ball third-place award. It should have been silver and could have been gold!” Marks lives in Penn Valley, Pa., and continues to practice with his son John (’89) at Marks Colorectal Surgical Associates at Lankenau Medical Center. Erwin R. Smarr writes that he spent most of winter 2013-2014 relying on the University of North Carolina’s cardiology division because of aortic stenosis. His physician implanted a long stent and he also had surgery to remove a cataract, “so, at 89 I’ve survived all that and can look ahead to the next 100 years.” Smarr lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., and stopped practicing 25 years ago but enjoyed a long career in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Philadelphia; Savannah, Ga.; and Chapel Hill.
’57 Marvin Sackner reports with sadness that his wife of 59 years, Ruth, died unexpectedly in October 2015. Together, they had recently collaborated on a book, The Art of Typewriting, which was published by Thames & Hudson. The couple co-founded the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, the world’s largest private collection of “word art” from 20th-century movements including Italian futurism, Russian and Eastern European avant garde, Dada, surrealism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Ultra, Tabu-Dada, Lettrisme and Ultra-Lettrisme. They amassed more than 75,000 pieces. In 2013, hundreds of items from their collection were put on display
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at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in an exhibition called A Human Document: Selections from the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. Before his retirement, Sackner practiced at Mount Sinai Medical Center of Greater Miami, first as chief of pulmonary medicine and then as director of medical services.
’63 Elliott Heiman is a retired psychiatrist who spent his career at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and now focuses most of his attention on art. During medical school, Heiman participated in free art lessons at the Fleisher Art Memorial, and his love of painting has endured. He has exhibited in various shows, with many of his works depicting life, love and families. Heiman lives in Tucson, Ariz.
’67 Scott C. Stein is head of anesthesia at the Rand Eye Institute in Deerfield Beach, Fla. He writes that he is healthy, happy and enjoying life with his wife, Rhonda. They have three sons, one daughter and four grandchildren, two of whom have begun college.
’71 Donald A. Bergman has been elected president of the Mount Sinai Alumni Association for a two-year term. Bergman specializes in endocrinology and has been a clinical professor of medicine at Mount Sinai since 2004. He lives in Tenafly, N.J. Augustin J. Schwartz, III, is in his 41st year of medical oncology/hematology practice in West Palm Beach, Fla., and is a partner with the Florida Cancer Specialists and Research Institute. Schwartz also serves as a member of the medical executive committee and director of the Community Cancer Center of Good Samaritan Medical Center in West Palm Beach.
’72 James E. Fticsar writes that he has been happily retired for seven years after 31 years of practicing surgery with the U.S. Navy. He lives in Chesapeake, Va.
’74 Stanley J. Geyer was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College of American Pathologists (CAP) in October 2015. Geyer was honored for his “service and leadership on the Diagnostic
Immunology Resource Committee as a member, vice chair and chair” and for having a “broad, positive impact on the profession of pathology through contributions to the CAP organization over an extended period of time.” He is a pathologist on staff at Indiana Regional Medical Center in Indiana, Pa., and at Punxsutawney Area Hospital in Punxsutawney, Pa. He is also laboratory director at Select Laboratory Partners at Advanced Pain Medicine in Wexford, Pa., and principal of Geyer Pathology Services, LLC. William J. Gibbons is still in private practice of internal medicine at Holy Redeemer Hospital in Meadowbrook, Pa. He lives in Southampton, Pa. John Lubicky writes that he is happy to be working alongside three fellow Jefferson graduates in the orthopaedic surgery department at the West Virginia University School of Medicine in Morgantown, W.Va.: Adam Klein (’92), Scott Daffner (’01) and Ryan Murphy (’09). Lubicky, professor and chief of pediatric orthopaedic surgery, is “the oldest of the bunch and also the oldest member of the department.” Klein is an assistant professor and member of the Division of Adult Reconstruction; his father, Jack (’61), is also an alumnus. Daffner, an associate professor in the Division of Spine Surgery, is a graduate of Jefferson’s orthopaedic surgery residency program, and Murphy is an assistant professor in the Division of Adult Reconstruction who completed WVU’s orthopaedic surgery residency program. Lubicky reports that “West Virginia is a long way from Philadelphia, but the loyalty and affection for our Jefferson education created an immediate bond … I endure frequent ‘elder abuse’ done in good fun by the other three. They insist I was a classmate of Dr. Samuel Gross!”
’75 Gregory L. Lewis writes that he is enjoying retirement after practicing gastroenterology in Carlisle, Pa., for 34 years. He and his wife, Patty, a dental hygienist, spend their time traveling and doing volunteer work in their community.
’76 Ira Brenner continues in the private practice of psychiatry in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. Brenner co-sponsored the 10th annual Akhtar-Brenner Lecture in Psychoanalysis at Jefferson. His fifth book, Dark Matters: Exploring the Realm of Psychic Devastation, has received favorable reviews in professional literature. Brenner lives in Philadelphia.
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When Patient is Professor
Remembering John R. Prehatny, MD ‘57
Alumnus and longtime faculty member John R. Prehatny, MD ’57, died Feb. 1, 2014. Prehatny served as a mentor to many residents and students, but his teaching efforts did not end when he retired. On the day he died, he taught a group of medical students gathered around his hospital bed. Here, current faculty member Gregory Kane, MD ’87, remembers the experience.
By Gregory C. Kane, MD '87 Chair, Department of Medicine The Jane and Leonard Korman Professor of Pulmonary Medicine
The reasons for my sub-interns’ uneasiness were apparent. First, our patient for bedside rounds was a longtime (but retired) faculty member at our medical school—a revered former surgeon, now in his 80s. Second, his medical care was quite complex, with previously treated metastatic bladder cancer, progressive mantle cell lymphoma and acute-on-chronic renal failure. Finally, the patient and his family were contemplating hospice. This was not a case that makes the typical medical student comfortable. Even less so was this a case for teaching rounds with 10 sub-interns gathering in the room to be “quizzed” by their department chair. So when I announced that we should go to the bedside after our preliminary classroom presentation, my students’ countenances revealed their anxiety. I was able to partially mitigate their concerns by reassuring them that we would seek our patient’s consent (as is always part of such encoun-
ters) prior to bringing all 10 of them into the doctor’s room. We arrived outside of Dr. Prehatny’s room on the oncology unit. William (the presenting student; not his real name) went ahead and assessed whether our patient would accept the 10 students—and me, as professor—for teaching rounds. We had already embraced the differential diagnosis at a high level. The students had postulated potential explanations for the current problem of acute renal failure complicating chemotherapy for mantle cell lymphoma. They had included tumor lysis, abdominal compartment syndrome, acute tubular necrosis, cholesterol emboli, renal vein thrombosis and sepsis. They had analyzed the urinalysis, urine electrolytes, labs and imaging in wonderful detail. We waited outside and prepared by washing our hands. William disappeared into Dr. Prehatny’s room and closed the door. I reminded the remaining sub-I’s that we would individually introduce ourselves to break the ice and put our patient at ease. When five minutes went by without William emerging, anxiety crept back onto the faces of my students. They could not imagine what was going on in the room. Nor could I contemplate what was happening. Remaining patient, I realized that we would either gain permission or not—and that either was fine. I used the time to rehearse in my mind those questions we would ask, the exam findings I wished to highlight and how I could turn the session into a teachable moment. Finally, William emerged with a nervous smile. We could certainly see Dr. Prehatny for rounds, but his wife and daughters wished to stay. The room would be crowded, but I was totally pleased by this request. In we went; William first, then me and then the rest of the nine students. Dr. Prehatny's gracious wife and grown daughters were on the far side of the bed. I went to the near side and took our patient’s hand in mine as I made my introduction. The students snaked around the foot of the bed as far as they could advance. The last just made it in the door, and I softly encouraged her to close the door to provide some privacy. The team introduced themselves slowly and deliberately so
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that Dr. Prehatny could acknowledge each in turn. He nodded as they shared their names and hometowns. I was now poised to make an impact as bedside teacher. We began by reviewing the patient's past history, but I very quickly realized that I was losing control of the rounds. My initial impulse was to continue the trail of the history, but I now understood that this was not going to be successful. “Try to listen more than you speak,” Dr. Prehatny implored the students, as he began to lead the session, focusing intently on the sub-interns. “You were given two ears, but only one mouth.” He paused for impact. “You’ll learn more that way.” He looked at each student affectionately. I took a step backward away from the bedside, no longer in charge of this teaching session. I surrendered to the professor in the center of the room. “Remember that challenges are not problems. They are opportunities.” “Don’t let them get you down,” he continued as I retreated further to the orbit of the students. Dr. Prehatny was just getting started as he continued
“Put your hands here and feel my spleen.” to weave tales of medicine, life and philosophy. The students were spellbound. I was in awe. His wife and daughters were thrilled to see him for one final session in the role of medical teacher. This was his element. When a break finally occurred in the discussion, I asked Dr. Prehatny if we could examine him. He immediately obliged. His anasarca made our abdominal palpation challenging. Despite this, he guided each of the students firmly but gently, bringing each up to the bedside. “Put your hands here and feel my spleen.” One by one, the students came up to the bedside—some with confidence, some with trepidation, some with certain hands and others less so. All, however, appreciated the splenomegaly with the gentle guidance of an experienced professor and surgeon leading his final bedside lesson. I hoped the session might never end. But when the doctor seemed to tire, we bade him well and thanked both him and his family for the incredible privilege. That night I emailed the students to reinforce Dr. Prehatny’s lessons. At the end of the next day, William informed the group that Dr. Prehatny had passed away quietly after electing to forgo further therapy. William added that his loving family was at his side.
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’77 Ronald M. Fairman was chosen as presidentelect of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) at the organization’s 2015 annual meeting in June. Long active with the SVS, Fairman has served on the executive committee, the board of directors and various councils and committees. He is chief of vascular surgery and endovascular therapy at Penn Medicine, where he also has a dual faculty appointment as the Clyde F. Barker-William Maul Measey Professor in Surgery and a professor of radiology. Fairman lives in Ardmore, Pa.
’79 Julian L. Ambrus, Jr., has been promoted to full professor of internal medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo and is director of the Systemic Autoimmune Disease Research Center of Western New York. His father, Julian Sr. (MD, PhD ’54), also is a professor of internal medicine at SUNY Buffalo. His mother, Clara (MD, PhD ’55), a professor of pediatrics, died in a house fire in 2011 at age 86. Marc B. Goldberg received the GQ Magazine Gentlemen's Fund 2015 Leader Award on Oct. 22, 2015, in recognition of 25 years of work with Healing the Children New Jersey, which carries out surgical missions for children in Third World countries. Goldberg has participated in 20 missions as a pediatric anesthesiologist and is currently vice president of the organization, which also brings children with medical issues too complicated for in-country correction back to the United States. His most recent medical mission trip was to Guayaquil, Ecuador, in January 2016 for advanced treatment of urologic disorders. Goldberg lives in Cinnaminson, N.J., and his U.S. practice is with Rancocas Anesthesiology, serving the Kennedy Health System in New Jersey and Main Line Surgical Center in Bala Cynwyd, Pa.
’83 Jack Sariego has been appointed head breast surgeon and medical director of both the breast health program and perioperative services for Aria Health in Northeast Philadelphia. Sariego previously served as professor of surgery and associate program director for the surgery residency at Temple University. An active member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve, he holds a number of military titles including general surgeon, flight surgeon and trauma/critical care specialist.
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Andrew Bradbury is medical director at Brigham Young University-Idaho. Bradbury and his wife are Cedar Badge advisers for the Boy Scouts of America, and he also serves as scoutmaster for his ward in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The couple lives in Rexburg, Idaho, and has seven children and 10 grandchildren. Their son Nicholas (’08) is an interventional radiologist working in Bismarck, N.D.
Christopher M. Mikson recently joined the legal services organization Mayer Brown in Washington, D.C., as a partner in the litigation and dispute resolution practice. Mikson focuses on regulatory, intellectual property, litigation and legislative matters involving healthcare and the life sciences, and primarily works within the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device and healthcare industries. He earned his law degree at Rutgers School of Law-Camden.
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Anthony Scarpaci recently joined Abington Cancer Care Specialists in Abington, Pa., and specializes in diagnosing and treating all cancers, with a special interest in breast cancer management. Scarpaci completed a fellowship at Jefferson and is board certified in internal medicine and medical oncology/ hematology.
Kate Sugarman practices family medicine in Washington, D.C. She has extensive experience treating torture survivors and works in cooperation with Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International; Advocates for Survivors of Torture and Trauma; and the Program for Survivors of Torture & Severe Trauma at Northern Virginia Family Services. Her expertise in diagnosing and treating post-traumatic stress disorder has focused on minority and immigrant patients, many of whom suffer from physical and mental disorders. She has worked with many Ethiopian refugees who are sprinters and distance runners and accompanied a group of elite runners to the Philadelphia Marathon in November 2015.
’98 Paul M. Morrissey has been promoted to Colonel in the U.S. Army. He serves as chief of psychiatry at Fort Drum, N.Y., home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division.
’99 Heather Nesti has been practicing ophthalmology for 11 years and specializes in glaucoma and cataract surgery. Her husband, Leon (’02), has a new position as director of the hand fellowship at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. The couple lives near Annapolis, Md., and has three children.
’01 Pallav Mehta is an attending physician in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center at Cooper. He has special expertise in breast cancer and integrative oncology and joined the board of Living Beyond Breast Cancer in January 2016. Mehta recently co-authored a book, After Cancer Care, on the topics of exercise, nutrition and stress modification in people with cancer; it was published in August 2015. He lives in Philadelphia.
’06 Peter M. Fleischut, a graduate of the combined MD/MBA program, is an associate professor of anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical College and an editorial board member for Academic Medicine. He is also the founding director of the Center for Perioperative Outcomes (CPO) at Weill Cornell Medical College. The CPO encompasses methodological, statistical and information technology resources within a single center to encompass operational efficiencies, quality, compliance and outcomes research. Fleischut lives in New York City.
’07 Marisa Gefen has been appointed practice team leader for CityLife Neighborhood Clinics in Philadelphia. Gefen sets clinical standards and protocols for CityLife’s three clinics in addition to seeing patients and leading a primary care team. CityLife is a subsidiary of Ampersand Health, which develops clinics and primary care teams to care for Medicare Advantage, Managed Medicaid and dualeligible members in large urban communities. Gefen also was recently named to the Board of Directors for Living Beyond Breast Cancer. She and her husband, Jonathan (’97), a general surgeon, live in Wynnewood, Pa.
’08 Larysa Hud is a specialist in body and women’s imaging and interventional radiology and recently joined the Department of Radiology at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital in Darby, Pa., and Mercy Philadelphia Hospital in West Philadelphia. Hud completed fellowship training in abdominal imaging at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
’09 Adam E. Hyatt recently joined Orthopedic Associates of Lancaster as a sports medicine physician. Hyatt has worked with collegiate and pro sports teams including the Philadelphia Flyers, Eagles and Phillies. He also works with student athletes at Saint Joseph’s University and Villanova University. He completed his fellowship training at the Rothman Institute at Jefferson after serving a residency at RutgersRobert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Post-Graduate ’61 Carl M. Mansfield (radiology), a pioneer in early-stage breast cancer treatment and former professor and chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology and Nuclear Medicine at Jefferson, was selected as a 2015 American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Gold Medalist. The ASTRO Gold Medal is the highest honor bestowed upon members who have achieved outstanding lifetime contributions in the field of radiation oncology. When he retired in 2002, Mansfield was associate director of the Greenebaum Cancer Center and chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Maryland. He previously held the positions of chairman of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Kansas Medical Center and associate director of the Division of Cancer Treatment, Diagnosis and Treatment Centers Radiation Research Program at the National Cancer Institute.
’73 Arnold Bayer (internal medicine), of Palos Verdes, Calif., has been promoted to distinguished professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a senior investigator at the L.A. Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA in Torrance, Calif., studying the pathogenesis of bacterial endovascular infections in the 20th year of a National Institutes of Health-funded program.
’90 Sonny Joseph (psychiatry), a psychiatrist and clinical psychologist, published an article titled “A Dynamic and Psychosocial Analysis of Soccer: Problems and Solutions” in the American Journal of Applied Psychology in May 2015. The article analyzes issues such as fan conflicts, referee errors, low scores, excessive fouls and player drama. Joseph lives in Orlando, Fla.
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In Memoriam
In Memoriam ’43 Edward Michael (Mike) Greaney, Jr., 96, of Pasadena, Calif., died July 14, 2015. Greaney was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps and began his internship at Brooklyn Naval Hospital. After combat training at Camp Lejeune, he was a surgeon for the Third Battalion of the 12th Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division. He participated in the Battle of Iwo Jima. After concluding his military service in 1947, he completed a residency in general surgery at Long Beach Veterans’ Hospital, then started private practice in general and pediatric surgery. He spent the majority of his career at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif., where he became chief of staff in 1962. He was an adjunct clinical professor of surgery at Los Angeles County University of Southern California Medical Center until his retirement in 1989, attaining emeritus status and an honorary lifetime membership in the Society of Graduate Surgeons. He was a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons as well as a Governor of the College and served as president of the Southern Californian Chapter of the American College of Surgeons and the USC Professional Staff Association. Greaney is survived by nine children, Mary Ellen, Kathleen, Michael, Patricia, Gregory, Margaret, Elizabeth, Deirdre and Teresa; 26 grandchildren; and 16 great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife, Mary, and a daughter, Deborah.
’44S Robert C. Dix, Jr., 96, of Milton, Pa., died Dec. 13, 2015. Dix served in the U.S. Army from 1942-1946 and was honorably discharged from the Army Medical Corps as a Captain. During his time in the military, he was a flight surgeon stationed in Florida, Colorado and Utah; at the Carlyle War College; and in the Pacific arena on Guam. From 1947-1987, he was on staff at the Evangelical Community Hospital. He was a member of the American Medical Association, the Pennsylvania Medical Society, the Lycoming Medical Society and the Union County Medical Society and continued to practice part time until he retired in August of 1988. When general practice (now known as family practice) became an acknowledged medical specialty, Dix sat through two days of rigorous examinations at age 50 and became not only a specialist but also a Diplomate. In 1972, he was made a Charter Fellow of the American Association of Family Practitioners.
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His hobbies included tennis, swimming, Penn State football, reading, photography, bird watching, wine-making and stamp collecting. Dix is survived by his wife of 70 years, Sara; a daughter, Jill; five step-grandchildren, Noelle, Jason, Joshua, Jordan and Jackson; six stepgreat-grandchildren, Collin, Patrick, Alyssa, Riley, Lily and Hannah; and a nephew, Larry.
’45 Martin David Reiter, 95, of Rock Hill, S.C., died Sept. 30, 2015. Reiter served during World War II and the Korean War. He was board certified in internal medicine and allergy/ immunology and practiced in Wheeling, W.Va., for 45 years in both governmental and private practice roles. He was a clinical instructor for the University of Pittsburgh and West Virginia University Medical School and was on the staff at Ohio Valley Medical Center, where he served as chief of staff, and Wheeling Hospital. He authored a popular medical advice column in the Wheeling Intelligencer. He loved golf, crossword puzzles and travel and visited every continent. Reiter was married three times and had three children by his first wife, Dolores. His second wife, Myrna, was from Wheeling, and his third wife, Marie Claire, was from Bellaire, Ohio. He is survived by his youngest brother, Kenneth; three children, Jeff, Martia and Debbie; two grandchildren, Chris and Lauren; and three great-granddaughters, Juliana, Alexandra and Mackensie.
’47 Frederick W. Bode, Jr., of Vero Beach, Fla., formerly of Churchill, Pa., died May 12, 2015. Bode was a Captain in the U.S. Army and a veteran of the Korean War and while in Pittsburgh served as a member of the Churchill Volunteer Fire Department. He is survived by five children, Joanne, Ann, Frederick III, Thomas and C. Baxter; 12 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife, Helen; his second wife, Lori; and his sister, Marjorie. Harris G. Fister, 92, of Hampden, Maine, died Aug. 5, 2015. Fister, formerly of Maple Shade, N.J., interned at Cooper Hospital. He served as a U.S. Army physician from 1948–1950 and was reactivated during the Korean War. He opened his private practice in Maple Shade in 1950 and also served as physician for the Maple Schools and taught at Cooper Hospital. He is survived by two sons, Jeffrey and Lee; a daughter, Nancy; three grandchildren, Carey, Nicolai and Andrei; and four great-grandchildren, Tyler, Parker, Aaron and Cooper. He was predeceased by his wife, Jane.
’48 Earl Stanton Moyer, 91, of Camp Hill, Pa., died Aug. 4, 2015. Moyer received training at Lankenau Hospital, the Guthrie Clinic, Duke University Hospital and Harrisburg Hospital. He was in the U.S. Army Reserve Corps during World War II and served during the Korean War as a U.S. Navy physician at Quantico, Va., and with the destroyer fleet. He practiced internal medicine in Harrisburg, Pa., for 51 years and was affiliated with Harrisburg Hospital, Holy Spirit Hospital and Health South. For many years he was the medical consultant for the Dauphin County Department of Welfare. He worked with residents and staff for many years at the Dauphin County Home, now Spring Creek Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. Moyer was a member of the American Medical Association, American Society of Internal Medicine, Dauphin County Medical Society, Harrisburg Academy of Medicine, Pennsylvania Medical Society and Pennsylvania Society of Internal Medicine. He enjoyed natural history, flower gardening, golf, tennis, skiing, traveling and ballroom dancing with his wife and liked classical music, opera and old-fashioned jazz. Moyer is survived by his wife, Pauline (“Pat”); two cousins, Joe and Eugene; and several nieces and nephews. William Benner Shope, 92, of Greensburg, Pa., died Sept. 8, 2015. Shope served in the Korean War in 1950-1951. As a naval officer on loan to the 8th Army, he was a triage physician on the front lines. He worked as pediatrician for more than three decades in the Greensburg area, making house calls at all hours. His family of five boys and two girls lived on a 56-acre farm where they often played sports and did other activities. Shope was the Greensburg Salem School physician from 1955-1988 and was a member of the Greensburg VFW. In his later years, he attended weekly breakfasts with the RODEO, or Retired Old Doctors Eating Out. Shope is survived by five sons, Edward, James, William, Robert and Timothy; a daughter, Rebecca; 11 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by a daughter, Amy.
In Memoriam
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John G. Finley, 89, of Warminster, Pa., died July 25, 2015. Finley interned at Nazareth Hospital in Philadelphia and completed a radiology residency there as well as at Cooper Hospital in Camden, N.J. He served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps as a First Lieutenant and chief of radiology on bases in Trieste, Italy, and Bad Kreuznach, Germany. He then worked as an assistant radiologist at Cooper Hospital, followed by positions in the radiology departments of St. Mary Hospital in Philadelphia; Mercer Hospital in Trenton, N.J.; Garden State Community Hospital in Marlton, N.J.; South Amboy Memorial Hospital in South Amboy, N.J.; and Saint Mary Hospital in Langhorne, Pa. Throughout his 48-year career, he developed expertise in all aspects of radiology, including diagnostic ultrasound and nuclear medicine. He remained an emeritus staff member at St. Mary Medical Center after his retirement in 1997. Finley is survived by his wife of 64 years, Erna; six children, Maureen, Joseph, Janeen, John, Michael and Colleen; seven grandchildren, Daniel, Stephen, Theresa, Kimberly, Laura, Amanda and John Michael; and four great-grandchildren.
Charles Harris Powell, 85, of Mars Hill, N.C., died Aug. 2, 2015. Powell served in the U.S. Navy as a medical officer at the Naval Hospital, Quantico, Va. He was a family practitioner for more than 40 years, serving western North Carolina and Daytona Beach, Fla. He was a faculty member at Mars Hill College and director of the Madison County Health Department and served on numerous boards and community programs in North Carolina and Florida. Powell is survived by his wife of 60 years, Johanne; a daughter, Suzanne; a son, Jeffrey; a brother, William; and five grandchildren, Jaclyn, Hannah, Justin, Reid and Layton.
Patrick S. Pasquariello, Jr., of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., died Aug. 29, 2015. He served his internship at St. Joseph’s Hospital and his residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he was chief resident under C. Everett Koop, MD, who later became the U.S. Surgeon General. He remained at CHOP for the rest of his 54-year career and rose to the rank of professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1990. He held numerous leadership roles at CHOP, including director of the Office of Continuing Medical Education and interim chief of the Division of General Pediatrics. Pasquariello created the Diagnostic and Complex Care Center to aid children with difficult-to-diagnose problems and served as director of the spina bifida program and as general pediatric consultant for the “22q and You” Center, which cares for children with a chromosome deletion syndrome, and the cranial-facial reconstruction clinic. Pasquariello is survived by his wife, Mae; three children, Caroline, Patrick III and Ann Agnes; four grandchildren, Patrick IV, Christina, Alexandra and Julia; a sister; and nieces and nephews.
’52 Albert Livingston Amshel, 90, of Pittsburgh, died Oct. 2, 2015. A U.S. Army Air Corps veteran of World War II, he was a radio operator/gunner in the 381st Bomber Group on B-17s in the European Theater. He later completed five years of surgical residency and established a private practice in colon and rectal surgery. An avid golfer and gin rummy player at Green Oaks Country Club, he also was a tap dancer, telling all that Gene Kelly was his teacher. Amshel is survived by his wife, Ellen; two children, Bruce and Gail; and two grandchildren, Caitlyn and Eli.
’53 Jerome Abrams, 89, of Edison, N.J., died Nov. 6, 2014. A World War II veteran, he was a longtime ob/gyn in the Plainfields and Fanwood, N.J. He published numerous articles in his field and was an associate editor of the New Jersey Medical Journal and a clinical professor at Rutgers Medical School. Later in his career, he obtained a Master of Public Health degree from Rutgers University. Passionate about opera and history, in the early 1960s he was published in the Metropolitan Opera News. After retirement, he was a frequent lecturer at Rutgers Institute for Lifelong Learning in the fields of history, political science and medicine. He is survived by his wife, Rosalyn; two sons, Alan and Joseph; four grandchildren, Harrison, Emilie, Thomas and Jonathan; and a brother, Herbert.
’55 Owen A. Chang, 85, of Pennsauken, N.J., died Aug. 3, 2015. Raised in Jamaica, West Indies, he lived and raised his family in Cinnaminson, N.J., before moving to Moorestown and later Pennsauken. Chang interned at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, N.J., and served as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps from 1957-1959 before opening a solo private family practice in Cinnaminson. He was an active Fourth Degree member of the Knights of Columbus, St. John Neumann Council 1436, Delran. He also sang in the Filipino Choir at St. Charles Borromeo Parish. Chang is survived by his sons and daughters, John, Robert (’83), Owen, Anita, Kathy, Joanne, James and Michael (’97); his grandchildren, Jenny, Patrick, Ian, Keri, Thomas, Gabriel, Sarah, Micah, Lucas, Julia, Liza, Connor and Spencer; and many nieces and nephews. He was predeceased by a daughter, Elizabeth Ann. Morton J. Vallow, 89, of Blue Bell, Pa., died Aug. 18, 2015. Vallow served in Europe during World War II, during which his unit fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He loved classical music, the Philadelphia Phillies, tennis and cats. As an ob/gyn, he delivered three generations of Philadelphians. His proudest accomplishments were his three children and his tomatoes. He is survived by his wife, Ingeborg; his children, Kristen, Kara and Erik; his siblings, Ethel and Hebert; and three grandchildren, Noah, Elli and Nathan.
’57 Bronson J. McNierney, 84, of Pompano Beach, Fla., died Oct. 11, 2015. McNierney was a board-certified internist and gastroenterologist. He and his family were longtime residents of Lighthouse Point, Fla., where he based his medical practice on Sample Road, in a building that still bears his name. He practiced at North Broward Hospital from 1969-2008 and served as chief of staff in 1972. Prior to his retirement, he was a weekly volunteer at the Salvation Army in Fort Lauderdale, where he provided medical assistance to those most in need. He was an avid tennis player and enjoyed many games of table tennis and other competitions with family and friends. McNierney is survived by his wife of 55 years, Jane; three daughters, Pam, Tammy and Marci; six grandchildren, Jonah, Owen, Bronson, Canyon, Addison and Ava; a sister, Clara; and two brothers, William and Jerry. He was predeceased by a brother, Stephen, and a sister, Margaret. Raymond G. Tronzo, 87, of West Palm Beach, Fla., died Oct. 15, 2015. Tronzo served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the Korean Conflict before beginning his career as an orthopaedic surgeon as well as an educator, inventor and author. He served as an associate professor of orthopaedics at the University of Pennsylvania; a clinical professor and later professor emeritus at the University of Miami Medical College; and a private practitioner as staff orthopaedic surgeon at Good Samaritan
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Hospital in West Palm Beach. He pioneered the successful biological total hip replacement system of microporosity for bone growth stabilization in the late 1960s and wrote and edited two editions of Surgery of the Hip Joint. He received numerous recognitions for his achievements in the specialty of hip replacement, including having a lectureship in his name established at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Tronzo loved travel, photography, hunting, boating and golf. He is survived by his wife, Diana; two sons, Craig and Les; two grandchildren, Douglas and Victoria; two sisters, Geraldine and Theresa; and several nieces and nephews.
’58 Vernon F. “Dag” Bradley, 83, of Tyrone, Pa., formerly of Altoona, Pa., died Aug. 18, 2015. Bradley served his internship at Allegheny Valley Hospital and his ob/gyn residency at the Cleveland Clinic. He was on the consulting staff of Tyrone Hospital, Van Zandt VA Medical Center and Nason Hospital and an active staff member of Mercy and Altoona hospitals. After retiring in 1998, he taught with Altoona Family Physicians at Altoona Hospital, where he was medical director of the outpatient prenatal clinic for 10 years and was named Clinical Teacher of the Year by the family practice residency program in 1998 and received a Life Achievement Award from residents in 2003. He also was an assistant professor in the Department of Community Health and Family Practice at Hershey Medical School/Penn State College of Medicine. He was a member of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of the American Medical Association, Blair County Medical Society, American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists and Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons and an associate member of the Royal College of Physicians. Bradley is survived by his wife of 58 years, Phyllis; four children, James, Timothy (’86), Patrick and Mary Beth; two granddaughters, Lauren and Brittany; and a sister, Loretta.
’59 Murray Feingold, 84, of Bourne, Mass., died, July 17, 2015. After interning in Allentown, Pa., Feingold served a residency at New England Deaconess Hospital and a pediatrics residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and was chief pediatrics resident at Boston City Hospital. A professor for many years at Tufts University School of Medicine and Boston University School of Medicine, he became a pediatrics and genetics pioneer who wrote health columns in the Boston Globe and other newspapers and was featured on radio and TV
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broadcasts, from Channel 4’s “Feeling Fine” in the 1970s through his modern-day “Medical Minute” segments on WBZ-AM. He created the Feingold Center for Children in Waltham to help families coordinate appointments with the many specialists needed for children with birth defects, intellectual disorders and genetic diseases. Feingold’s vision in the early 1980s, when he was directing the genetic counseling center and the birth defect evaluation service at Tufts New England Medical Center, was that families would be best served by a center that coordinated appointments with top specialists so a child could see multiple doctors in one day. He eventually created satellite clinics that stretched west to Springfield and north to Maine. He supported his work by creating the Genesis Foundation for Children. Feingold is survived by his wife, Lorinda; three children, Rachael, Justin and Matthew; two brothers, Edgar and Eugene; a sister, Ruth; and six grandchildren. Elliot Zaleznik, 81, of Naples, Fla., died Aug. 9, 2015. Zaleznik served in the U.S. Coast Guard, then moved to Huntington Beach, Calif., where he and a partner owned Orange Coast Ob/Gyn for 30 years. During his career he delivered 5,000 babies, including his daughter. He enjoyed reading, classical music and collecting Judaica. Zaleznik is survived by his wife of 58 years, Joyce; four children, Larry, Stephen, Matthew and Ruth; seven grandchildren, Daniel, Hannah, Jason, Meghan, Emma, Ethan and Allen; two great-grandchildren, Mikaela and Alina; his chorkie (Chihuahua-Yorkshire terrier), Cassy; a brother, Harry; and a sister, Ida. He was preceded in death by two sisters, Bernice and Libby.
’60 Milton L. Friedman, 79, of Margate, N.J., formerly of Elkins Park, Pa., died April 17, 2014, in Florida. Friedman practiced family medicine in Northeast Philadelphia for more than 40 years. He is survived by his wife, Shirley; a daughter, Joann; a son, Mark (’95); four grandchildren, Jacob, Rachel, Laney and Raina; and a sister, Eleanor, whose husband, Leon Shmokler, graduated from Jefferson in 1951, and son, Mitchell Shmokler, graduated in 1979. Marvin E. Jaffe, 79, of Sarasota, Fla., and Skillman, N.J., died unexpectedly June 23, 2015. Jaffe served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and completed a neurology residency at Jefferson. He was a neurologist at the former Philadelphia General Hospital, then a neurologist and clinical associate professor of neurology at Jefferson. An expert in cerebral metabolism and pharmacology as well as the drug development process, Jaffe published
extensively in the field of cerebrovascular diseases. He held numerous management positions at Merck Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories, including vice president of clinical research and senior vice president of medical affairs, and brought a number of first-in-class drugs, including Sinemet (for Parkinsonism) and Mevacor (for cholesterol), to market. He had an integral role in the Astra-Merck alliance, which resulted in the development of Prilosec. He later served as president of the R.W. Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute of the Johnson & Johnson Company from 1988 until his retirement in 1994. After retiring, he was a consultant and board member for several biopharmaceutical and biotech firms. During his career he served as president of the Royal Society of Medicine Foundation and a board member of the Society for Chronic Diseases, among others. Jaffe is survived by his wife, Susan; three sons, Jonathan (’84), Matthew and Joshua; a daughter, Ondria; a sister, Elaine; and 10 grandchildren. His wife of 56 years, Joan, died in 2013.
’61 Philip John Morgan, Jr., 83, of El Cerrito, Calif., died Nov. 23, 2015. Morgan served in the U.S. Army in Europe. He was an emergency room physician at Kaiser Permanente in South San Francisco and a longtime volunteer at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. He was an avid backpacking hiker, both near his home and in the Sierra Nevada mountains. A longstanding member of the San Francisco Folk Music Club, he served as treasurer and vice president; he had a beautiful voice and knew a wealth of songs. He is survived by his wife, Margot; her children, Thomas Edward and Mary Louise; his daughters, Maureen and Myvanwy; a grandson, Zachery; two sisters, Betsy and Connie; three nieces, Heather, Karen and Megan; and a nephew, Brock. William H. “Bill” Wanger, 79, of Alna, Maine, died Dec. 14, 2014. A veteran of the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine program, he served as physician aboard the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson. He continued to serve in the Naval Reserves and retired with the rank of Captain. Wanger entered private medical practice in Martinsburg, W.Va., followed by a career in emergency medicine. He served as the school physician at Shepherd College, on the faculty of the West Virginia University School of Medicine, as coordinator of emergency services for the State of West Virginia and as an officer in state medical associations. In Maine, he served as the emergency department director for Rumford Community Hospital and later as a physician at the Department of Veterans Affairs
In Memoriam
hospital in Togus. He also served as school physician at Hebron Academy. He retired to his home in the small town of Alna. He was a licensed pilot, a passionate woodworker and an outdoor enthusiast who loved hiking, climbing, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing. Wanger is survived by his wife, Joyce; a brother, Alex; a sister, Mary Martha; six children and stepchildren, Laura, Beth, Tula, Brita, Lara and David (’00); 12 grandchildren, Bret, Sarah, Samantha, Sydney, Richard, Alex, Brandon, Alice, Alex, Katie, Emma and Michael; and three great-grandchildren, Gemma, Sophia and Madison. Thomas A. Ward, 80, of Bethlehem, Pa., died Sept. 15, 2015. Ward did his postgraduate training at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Newport, R.I., and served as a flight surgeon after attending the U.S. Naval School of Aviation Medicine in Pensacola, Fla. He completed his orthopaedic surgery residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Lieutenant with the U.S. Navy Medical Corps from 1961–1964. He was a member of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons; Eastern Orthopaedic Association; and Pennsylvania Orthopaedic Association. Ward was a board-certified orthopaedic surgeon in private practice for more than 39 years in Bethlehem. He also worked at Lehigh Valley Orthopaedics and was a consultant for the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Coatesville, Pa. He was team physician for Lehigh University’s football and wrestling programs and a member of Saucon Valley Country Club, where he was an avid golfer. His guilty pleasures were Porsches, fine food and cigars. Ward is survived by his wife of 54 years, Dorothy; a son, Michael; four daughters, Kimberly, Kelly, Tracy and Erin; 12 grandchildren, Chelsea, Alexander, Nathaniel, Aidan, Sarah, Regina, Nigel, Max, Josephine, Peter, Jakob and Abigail; and a sister, Patricia. He was preceded in death by a sister, Louise.
’62 Clark Dickson McKeever, 79, of Houston, Texas, died July 26, 2015. During his second year of orthopaedic residency at Jefferson, McKeever was drafted into the U.S. Air Force and over the next four years completed his residency at Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, achieving the rank of Major. Upon honorable discharge in 1970, he returned to Houston to join his twin brother, Grant, in starting the McKeever Orthopedic Clinic, and so began his 45-year career in orthopaedic surgery. They were among the original 10 doctors at Memorial City Hospital.
Throughout his career, McKeever worked as an active reserve undercover narcotics detective with the Harris County Sheriff's Department for 17 years; a team doctor for Stratford High School for 20 years; chief of orthopaedic surgery at Memorial City Hospital; an osteoporosis researcher and expert who traveled the world to lecture; and a skilled carpenter and craftsman. Later in his career he took a fellowship in age management medicine so he could better serve his older patients. He had the opportunity to work alongside his younger brother, John (’65), also an orthopaedic surgeon, in Corpus Christi, Texas, for two years. In addition to his brothers, McKeever is survived by his wife of 51 years, Pat; two sons, David and Jeff; a daughter, Pam; and three grandchildren, Luca, Kailey and Cade. Rodney L. Sponsler, 77, of Altoona, Pa., died July 27, 2014. Sponsler completed his residency at Children’s Hospital, Pittsburgh. He was a pediatrician with Blair Medical Associates, retiring in 1997, and taught in the residency program at UPMC Altoona from 1997-2014. He was a member of and physician for the March of Dimes and belonged to the Everett Masonic Lodge 524. He was an avid golfer and enjoyed hunting, working in his yard, Penn State football, playing baseball and spending time with family, especially his grandchildren. Sponsler is survived by his wife, Diane; three daughters, Robyn, Lori and Rebecca; a son, Todd; 13 grandchildren, Brittany, Claire, Brandon, Haley, Ian, Cameron, Zane, Brady, Austin, Jessica, Colby, Xavier and Isabel; and a sister, Linda.
’65 Joseph Patrick Leddy, 75, of Mantoloking, N.J., died Aug. 15, 2015. A U.S. Air Force veteran, Leddy had a 40-year career in orthopaedic surgery and education. His surgical internship was at New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center, and he completed training at New York Orthopaedic Hospital at ColumbiaPresbyterian Medical Center. He then served a fellowship in hand surgery at USC Medical Center. Leddy retired in 2005 as chairman of the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Robert Wood Johnson Hospital. He had served as chief of staff at St. Peters Hospital and chief of the hand surgery service at both hospitals in the past while also maintaining hospital privileges at Princeton Medical Center. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgery, American Orthopaedic Association and American Society of Surgery of the Hand. He was a Diplomat of the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery, a member of the AOA Honor society, former
president and member of the New York Society for Surgery of the Hand, the Irish American Orthopaedic Society, the Stinchfield Orthopaedic Club and a founding member of the Joseph Boyes Hand Surgery Club. Leddy is survived by his wife of 49 years, Mary Jo; four sons, Timothy (’96), Terence, Christopher and Robert; two brothers, Mark and Brian; and four grandchildren, J.P., Grace, Topher and Willy. He was predeceased by a son, Joseph Jr., in 1984.
’67 Matthew White, of Gig Harbor, Wash., died Dec. 17, 2014. White served an internship at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Newport, R.I., and a residency at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Jacksonville, Fla. He was a private practicing physician in Pierce County, Wash., for 36 years and was a founding member of the Northwest Physicians Network, established in 1995. As a private practitioner, he also worked with Physician Care NW, Franciscan Health System and the Rainier Health Network. He enjoyed salmon fishing and traveling.
’68 Donald G. Urban, 72, of Glenolden, Pa., died Nov. 3, 2015. Urban served in the Vietnam War as a Battalion Surgeon, First Marine Division, and later with the U.S. Naval Reserve, reaching the rank of Commander. He was an emergency room physician at Harrisburg Hospital before establishing his own family medical practice in Newville, Pa. On the way to the office one morning, he suffered a stroke that required simultaneous heart and brain surgery. He recovered and served as a Naval doctor at Quantico, Va., and eventually a supervisor at the Veterans Administration in Clarksburg, W.Va. He moved to Pennsylvania in 1994. Urban is survived by his brother, Harry; his sister, Lois; a nephew, Donald; two nieces, Laura and Rebecca; and five great-nieces and great-nephews.
’69 John T. DelGiorno, 72, of Somerdale, N.J., died Aug. 20, 2015. After completing a residency in pediatrics at both St. Christopher's and Jefferson, he fulfilled his two-year military commitment with the U.S. Army Medical Corps. In 1975, he formed DelGiorno Pediatrics in Blackwood, N.J., and actively worked until his retirement in February 2015. Over 40 years he treated three generations of patients. Following in his footsteps, his sons
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In Memoriam
Joseph (’98) and John (’12) continue the DelGiorno Pediatrics legacy. DelGiorno is survived by his wife, Mary. In addition to Joseph and John, he is also survived by four other children, Thomas (’97), Charles (’03), Tamara (’05) and Michele; seven grandchildren, Thomas, Jillian, Addison, Leo, Alex, Claudia and Nina; and a brother, Thomas. His son-in-law, Marc Fisicaro (’05), and daughter-in-law, Julie Weber DelGiorno, BSN ’97, are also Jefferson graduates.
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What’s New? To submit a class note or obituary for the Bulletin, contact the Office of Institutional Advancement: By phone
215-955-7751 By email
alumni@jefferson.edu by mail
125 S. 9th St. Suite 700 Philadelphia, PA 19107
John Michael van Summern, 66, of Pittston, Maine, died Oct. 20, 2015. He had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a malignant brain tumor, in September 2013. Van Summern served a family medicine residency at the Maine Dartmouth Family Practice Program and subsequently opened a private practice in Gardiner, Maine, with a peer from Maine Dartmouth. He stayed with the practice for almost 37 years, enjoying the continuity of care from generation to generation and making house calls to his elderly patients. For several years he was the home-game physician for the Gardiner Tiger football team. He was a member of the Kennebec Valley Medical Center Board of Directors and the MaineGeneral Rehab and Nursing Care Board of Directors and chair of family medicine at MaineGeneral in 2002 and again from 2006-2013. From 1979-1986, he and his wife, Maggie, sponsored three Vietnamese refugee families, with whom they became very close. He enjoyed his family’s assortment of pets and spending summer vacations in shore towns in New Jersey and Maine. In addition to Maggie, his wife of 38 years, van Summern is survived by his daughter, Lucy; his son, Michael; his mother, Matilda; three sisters, Diane, Michele and Suzanne; a nephew, Daniel; two nieces, Kathryn and Adrienne; an uncle, Bob; an aunt, Jane; and several cousins.
’82 Garrett Dean Kine, 58, of San Francisco, originally of Philadelphia, died Nov. 2, 2014. Following residency and fellowship training in anesthesiology and pain management in Boston, Kine moved to California, where he worked first in Los Angeles as an anesthesiologist, then in San Francisco as a pain specialist with SpineCare Medical Group. He enjoyed astronomy, music, art, photography, science fiction and television. Kine is survived by his mother, Stella, and sister, Cindy.
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’06 Michael L. Zahaczewsky, 38, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., formerly of Marlton, N.J., died July 18, 2015. Zahaczewsky completed his radiology residency at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, N.J., and served fellowships in neuro-radiology and interventional radiology. He then practiced in Fort Lauderdale. He is survived by his parents, Michael and Genevieve; two sisters, Natasha and Melissa; a niece, Maggie; two nephews, Billy and Daniel; and several aunts, uncles and cousins.
POST-GRADUATE ’58 Herbert W. Lohmuller, 91, of Bluffton, Ind., died May 27, 2015. A U.S. Army veteran, Lohmuller served as a Captain and Company Commander at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, and later at the Arizona Navajo Ordnance Depot. After being discharged in 1956, he worked in private practice as a hematologist and oncologist in Philadelphia. He joined the Caylor-Nickel Clinic in Bluffton in 1968 and spent the next 20 years there, also serving as president of the Wells County Chapter of the American Cancer Society and establishing a free clinic to serve migrant farm workers. He was instrumental in the establishment of the Indiana Tumor Registry. After retiring from medical practice in 1989, he volunteered at the Wells County Public Library. Lohmuller is survived by his wife, Nora Genevieve; five sons, Bernard, Martin, John, Paul and Joseph; five daughters, Mary, Theresa, Margaret, Catherine and Elizabeth; a brother, Martin; 29 grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; 11 great-grandchildren; and eight step-great-grandchildren.
by the numbers
Curriculum Overview Foundation Blocks 1. Fundamentals
5. GI/Liver
9. Musculoskeletal/Integumentary
2. Host Defense/Blood
6. Renal/Urology
10. Neuro/Sensory/Psychiatry
3. Cardiovascular
7. Endocrine
11. Synthesis
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8. Reproductive
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USMLE Prep & Vacation: 2 months
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Pha se 2 : 12 Cl i n i
Resident-ready in 45.5 months
Curriculum Threads Anatomy
Evidence based medicine
Biochemistry
Physiology & pathology
Clinical skills
Pharmacology & therapeutics
Population health & health systems Infection & immunity
Professionalism, medical ethics & jurisprudence Wellness
JeffMD, a new curriculum that will launch in summer 2017, will continue Jefferson's long tradition of excellence by educating SKMC students for the future of medical practice. JeffMD will integrate science instruction and clinical experience across all four years of medical school, even as the balance shifts from a more scientific focus in Phase 1 to a more clinical focus in Phase 2. Students will be able to spend their last year in electives and clerkships related to a specialty.
More teaching and learning will take place in small groups that engage students in problem-solving and teamwork, while an individual research project will hone investigative skills. A humanities component will build students' empathy and awareness of the context in which health and sickness occur. Here’s an overview of the new curriculum.
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