Two BUSM Faculty to be Named to Professorships Nov. 29

Two BU School of Medicine faculty members will be named to professorships: Barbara E. Corkey, PhD as the Zoltan Kohn Professor in Medicine and Avrum Spira, MD, MSc as the Alexander Graham Bell Professor in Health Care Entrepreneurship. The installation will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 29 at 3:30 p.m. in the 670 Albany Street, First Floor Auditorium with a reception to follow in foyer.

Dr. Corkey is being recognized for her exceptional academic accomplishments and remarkably effective institutional service. Since 2007 Dr. Corkey has served as the Department of Medicine’s Vice Chair for Research. She brings faculty together from across the medical campus and across the university in the common pursuit of discovery and training. Her accomplishments include establishing a number of Cores including Cellular Imaging, Analytical Instrumentation, Immunohistochemistry, and Animal Resources, and High Throughput Screening, and Biostatistics, and Clinical Research Resources core within the CTSI.

Together with Dr. David Coleman she conceptualized the Evans Center for Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research, which funds interdisciplinary research initiatives involving more than 100 faculty from both campuses, other academic institutions and industry. She also has supported bridge and pilot funding programs, and a junior faculty program for internal grant review. She has developed “Fair Expectations” and “Code of Conduct” for faculty and trainees.

Dr. Corkey is internationally renowned for her research work in lipid metabolism, insulin secretion and pancreatic beta cell function, all central to a critically important public health problem – obesity and diabetes. And her findings have revolutionized understanding of the mechanism of insulin secretion.

A recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Corkey has received both of the two most prestigious awards for diabetes research: the Charles Best Award from the University of Toronto and, earlier this year, the Banting Medal for Scientific Achievement from the American Diabetes Association.

Dr. Spira is an internationally recognized leader in cancer-based genomics and in pulmonary bioinformatics. His group has characterized the genome of the airway epithelium and how gene-expression activity in these cells serves as a clinically-relevant biomarker for lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Earlier this year Dr. Spira was named BU Innovator of the Year, which recognizes a faculty member “whose cutting edge research and ideas lead to the formation of companies that benefit society at large.” He is co-inventor of five patents using airway gene-expression for early detection of lung cancer, and co-founder of Allegro Diagnostics, a molecular diagnostics company in Maynard, Mass.

Dr. Spira is the founding Chief of the Section of Computational Biomedicine in the Department of Medicine, Director of Translational Bioinformatics Program in the BU Clinical Translational Sciences Institute, member of the NIH Cancer Biomarker Study Section, Senior Editor of Cancer Prevention Research and co-chair of the lung collaborative group of the NCI’s Early Detection Research Network. He serves on NHLBI and NCI advisory committees, was elected to the American Society of Clinical Investigation, and received the Caine Halter Hope Now Award from the Uniting Against Lung Cancer foundation.

A charismatic teacher and mentor, Dr. Spira was the primary thesis advisor for 14 graduate students, 11 since 2008, who have produced 12 high-impact publications in top tier journals as part of their thesis work.

In addition to being an active and highly regarded attending physician in the Medical Intensive Care Unit, Dr. Spira developed a post-doctoral master’s program for MD’s interested in computational genomics and has mentored 10 post-doctoral clinician-scientists since 2004.