Ralph Clayman

Dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine Ralph Clayman, MD, will present, “Digital and Simulation Technology: Impact on Medical Education and Surgical Practice,” on Thursday, June 20 in Keefer Auditorium from 2:30-3:30 p.m.

A pioneer in minimally invasive techniques, Clayman revolutioned kidney and urinary tract surgical procedures and is listed among the “Best Doctors in America” for urology. In 1990, Clayman and his associates performed the world’s first laparoscopic removal of a kidney for a tumor, as well as the first laparoscopic removal of a kidney and ureter to treat cancer.

Clayman established the nation’s first fellowship program in minimally invasive urology in 1984. He has written multiple textbooks and more than 400 peer-reviewed papers and chapters on laparoscopic and percutaneous urologic surgery. He is the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Endourology and has 14 minimally invasive surgical instrumentation patents to his name.

Digital and Simulation Technology: Impact on Medical Education and Surgical Practice

• Ralph Clayman, MD, Dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine
• Thursday, June 20
• 2:30-3:30 p.m.
• Keefer Auditorium

School of Law Professor Keith Hylton is well known for his scholarship in law and economics. Photos by Kalman Zabarsky.

With a PhD in economics from MIT and a law degree from Harvard, Keith Hylton has melded the two disciplines in his teaching and research, using each to illuminate the other. A leader in the increasingly important field of mass spectrometry, Catherine Costello teaches and collaborates with medical researchers, pharmacologists, chemists, and clinicians around the world. For their scholarly contributions, both have been named William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professors, joining eight other faculty in an honor that will stay with them through their careers.

“Their intellectual and scholarly contributions are exemplary and help contribute to Boston University’s growing recognition as one of the best research universities in the world,” says BU President Robert A. Brown in announcing the appointments.

A former tenured professor at Northwestern University School of Law, Hylton joined the School of Law faculty in 1995 and was previously the school’s Honorable Paul J. Liacos Professor of Law. He is well known for his scholarship in law and economics and teaches courses in antitrust, torts, and labor law. Hylton says he was surprised, flattered, and honored when he was told of the professorship at a meeting in Brown’s office.

“I already know some of the holders of a Warren chair, and one thing that’s clear is at BU there are many professors who are at the top of their fields, who are the best academics in the world,” he says. “I’m honored to be part of this group and will do my best to make what’s good about this institution better known.”

He describes the thrust of his work as nurturing a greater understanding of economic concepts as they relate to the law. “The primary function of law school is to make students think like lawyers, and sometimes a lawyer has to think like an economist; for example, when they decide whether to pursue a case or settle, that’s an economic question,” he says. “I look at topics that lawyers have been arguing about for a long time and try to use economics to make sense of these arguments, and try to find some theory or explanation to allow judges to better understand what’s good or bad about what they’re doing.”

Hylton is the author of four books, most recently Laws or Creation: Property Rights in the World of Ideas (Harvard University Press, 2012), coauthored with Ronald A. Cass, a former dean of LAW. Hylton has written articles and filed amicus briefs on the function of punitive damages in cases such as lawsuits targeting Big Tobacco, an area of the law that has sparked debate among laypeople, politicians, and legal scholars. “You’re talking about penalties designed to change people’s behavior, and we must understand what people’s motivations are and how penalties would change them,” he says. “My main criticism is that the US Supreme Court has issued several decisions that cut back on punitive damages without looking very seriously at their function.”

School of Medicine Professor Catherine Costello's lab is devoted to improving the sensitivity and applications of mass spectrometry.

Costello, a School of Medicine professor of biochemistry and of physiology and biophysics, has a secondary appointment as a College of Arts & Sciences professor of chemistry. She arrived at BU in 1994 and established the internationally recognized BU Center for Biomedical Mass Spectrometry. She is one of four MED faculty working together to develop and apply high-end instrumentation and methods. “Having appointments in several departments is sometimes regarded as odd, but this professorship underscores the value of crossing boundaries,” says Costello, whose list of honors includes the 2010 Field and Franklin Award from the American Chemical Society.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, her lab is devoted to improving the sensitivity and applications of mass spectrometry, an analytical technique used to determine the composition of large molecules such as the proteins and carbohydrates that make up blood and other body tissues. Mass spectrometry is an increasingly valuable tool in clinical and diagnostic medicine. Used to analyze inorganic as well as organic solids, liquids, or gases, it determines the composition of compounds by ionizing them and comparing their molecular weight, or mass, before and after the process. Asked to explain her work in lay terms, Costello likes to say, “I do puzzles.”

“We can look at the structure of even very large molecules and look at how they change with the development of a disease,” she says. “If these molecules are on the surface of a cell, such as a cancer cell, we can look at markers that take the cell somewhere, and examine subtle differences in the structure of carbohydrates or proteins.” In her years of developing and refining mass spectrometry applications, Costello, who collaborates on research of cancer, infection, and antibiotic-resistant Lyme disease, has seen the field grow exponentially. “We now have the sensitivity to do things you couldn’t even think about doing before,” she says. “We can look at molecular changes contributing to cardiovascular disease in people who are obese or have diabetes.”

The William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorships are named for the University’s first president, who led BU for three decades, beginning in 1873. The endowed professorships are supported by the William Fairfield Warren Fund. Among the honorees are George Annas, a School of Public Health professor and chair of the department of health law, bioethics, and human rights and a School of Law and School of Medicine professor, and James Collins, a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering.

This BU Today story was written by Susan Seligson.

Incoming and continuing students on the BU Medical Campus are welcome to attend. Meet property managers, realtors, landlords, BU Rental Property Management, Boston’s Rental Housing Resource Center, City of Boston Inspection Services, Public Safety and more. Find a potential roommate in the Roommate Lounge. Question the panel of current students for their expert housing advice and more.

For more information contact Barbara Attianese, Housing Resources.

BUMC Housing Fair

• Friday, June 14
• 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
• BUSM Instructional Building, Hiebert Lounge
• A light brunch available to all fair participants

Ruth Rose-Jacobs, ScD. Image courtesy of Children's HealthWatch.

Ruth Rose-Jacobs, ScD, associate professor of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and a research scientist at Boston Medical Center (BMC), has received funding for a two-year study to examine the association between the presence of young children with special healthcare needs in households and food insecurity. Rose-Jacobs, also a child development researcher with Children’s HealthWatch, is the principal investigator (PI) on this $249,984 grant awarded by the University of Kentucky’s Research Program on Childhood Hunger, which is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutritional Service.

Children with special health care needs (SHCN) are children who have, or are at increased risk for a chronic physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional condition and require health and related services of a type or amount beyond that required by children generally. The research project will examine the impact of having a young child with SHCN on child and/or household food insecurity in low-income households. Food insecurity is not being able to afford enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. According to the National Survey of Children with Special Health Care Needs, approximately 15 percent of US children under the age of 17 have SHCN. Households with versus without a child with SHCN are more likely to live at or near the poverty level. The presence of a child with SHCN is associated with lower overall household adult employment due to the increased care needs of the child, which may be associated with family material hardships.

“We anticipate that households with a child with SHCN suffer disproportionately from food insecurity,” said Rose-Jacobs, who is one of three recipients of this two-year grant. “This study could have important implications for the expansion of food insecurity screening and inform practice in federal and state nutrition and non-nutrition assistance programs aimed at reducing food insecurity and other material hardships.”

The study will take place at safety-net hospitals in Baltimore, Boston, Little Rock, Ark., Minneapolis and Philadelphia.

In 2011, approximately 25 percent of American households with children under 6 years of age were food insecure at some point during the year, according to data from the USDA’s Economic Research Service. According to Children’s HealthWatch, children from food insecure households, when compared to those from food secure households, are 90 percent more likely to be reported in fair or poor health and are two thirds more likely to be at risk for developmental delays.

Read more about the study here.

These elegant images were created by Andrew Ellison, chief research MRI technologist at the School of Medicine, who creates them by scanning fruits and vegetables. Photo by Cydney Scott

It began with an orange. As chief research MRI technologist at the School of Medicine, Andrew Ellison is entrusted with costly, sophisticated scanning equipment that he must warm up and calibrate for accuracy day after day. Since MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is a diagnostic tool that looks at soft tissues, Ellison decided on a whim one day to do one of these routine test scans on a piece of fruit. The resulting image of an orange was so stunning he began scanning other fruits and vegetables, including a strawberry, an artichoke, a pomegranate, an ear of corn, celery root, and a tomato. He then posted them on Reddit. Seen anew through this rare lens, they are works of art.

“We were testing different protocols and parameters and wanted something a little more complicated than a bottle of water, which we’d been using as a so-called phantom,” recalls Ellison, who graduated from Suffolk University in 2007 with a degree in biology and has been working at BU for seven years. “So we scanned an orange, and I was like, wow, that looks really cool, and from then on out anytime I needed to do quality assurance on the machine I would use a different type of fruit rather than a boring phantom.”

Almost immediately after he created those first images in spring 2008, Ellison found his work drawing attention from both the science and the food worlds. Within months, the images, and animations he crafted from them, were showing up in media from Science to Bon Appetit to Business Insider. A July 2010 story invited Salon.com readers to look “into the soul of fruit with MRI scans.” That same year, Science ran a short piece about Ellison titled “Art from Produce,” and a National Public Radio story focused on his “ghostly produce.”

Ellison created this animation from MRI scans of broccoli. Image courtesy of Andrew Ellison

More recently, Discovery.com showcased his images in an October 2012 feature: “MRI Undresses Fruits and Vegetables.” To date, Ellison has scanned more than 60 fruits and vegetables. The images now live on his popular blog.

Prints of the black-and-white images also adorn the halls of the corridor outside Ellison’s office, where he often toils alone. A cross section of a pineapple is reminiscent of a shadowy X-ray of a human chest. The folds of an artichoke seem reflected in water, and a slice of pomegranate could be mistaken for a microscopic glimpse of a living cell.

“It’s interesting; I didn’t have the foresight to see this going in as big a direction as it went,” says Ellison, who shares the images and GIF (graphics interchange format) animations for free. “I get huge hit numbers from foodies, artists, and scientists, so the blog sits very happily in this realm of big internet hit generators.” The blog images get thousands of hits from US viewers each month, as well as from as far away as Mexico, Indonesia, Hungary, Russia, Spain, Australia, and the Netherlands, where one of his fruit scans was used in a poster for an Amsterdam food festival.

Unlike the busy MRI unit down the road at Boston Medical Center, the MED unit is exclusively for research, so there’s a lot of downtime, and scanning fruits is a good way to keep the machine active, Ellison says. To scan the fruits, he freezes a series of 10 to 15 images the thickness of a millimeter or less. “It’s a good way to make sure the machinery can keep up to the level it needs to be at, because there are about 40 different pieces of equipment that all need to be in working order,” he says of the Philips Tesla MRI, which is used on animal as well as human subjects.

His creations have drawn the attention of the MRI manufacturer as well. “Philips has a publication, and they gave me a whole-page spread,” says Ellison, who has begun “experimenting for the sake of art.” His latest forays involve using thick fruit and vegetable slices, which, he says, “look wicked cool.”

This BU Today story was written by Susan Seligson. Slideshow by Kristina Roman (COM’08)

The researchers observed that “diet-cycling” increased CRF, a hormone key mediator of anxiety, in the amygdala, an area of the brain involved in processing of emotions and responses to stress.

Pietro Cottone

“Diet-cycling produces an elevation of CRF in the amygdala; this hormone causes a negative emotional affect which in turn drives overeating” said senior study author Pietro Cottone, PhD, assistant professor of Pharmacology and Psychiatry at BUSM as well as co-director of the Laboratory of Addictive Disorders. “The changes we observe in the brain of diet cyclers are strikingly reminiscent of the ones seen in drug addicts.”

Attilio Iemolo

“In this study, we wanted to determine whether blocking one of the receptors to which CRF binds, CRF1, in the amygdala could block both the negative emotional response and the excessive eating of junk food” added Attilio Iemolo, postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Addictive Disorder and first author of the study. Therefore, researchers administered a CRF1 blocker drug into the amygdala, and observed that the anxiety and compulsive eating of diet cyclers were gone.

Also contributing to this study were Angelo Blasio, PhD, Stephen St. Cyr, BA, Kenner Rice, PhD, Valentina Sabino, PhD. The Laboratory of Addictive Disorders at Boston University School of Medicine is continuing this line of research to better understand the neurobiology of compulsive eating, with the hope of ultimately developing new therapeutic agents for the treatment of eating disorders and obesity.

Funding for this study was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. In addition, funding was made available by the Peter Paul Career Development Professorship and by Boston University’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.

Robert J. Vinci

In addition to this honor, Vinci was appointed Chief of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center (BMC) as well as the Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at BUSM.

For the past 20 years, Vinci has served as Vice Chair and Clinical Chief of the Department, providing leadership for the significant expansion of pediatric clinical services. His commitment to the community and to patients is highlighted by his central role in a number of initiatives. He co-founded the Kids Fund at BMC, which provides assistance for children’s most basic needs to give them a foundation for a healthy and bright future; led the campaign to establish a window fall prevention program for children in Boston, called Kids Can’t Fly, which has led to a dramatic decrease in the number of window fall-related injuries; and in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, Dr. Vinci provided leadership to establish the Massachusetts Emergency Medical Services Program for Children, which created training protocols and guidelines for children in the statewide EMS system.

Vinci received his medical degree from the College of Medicine and Dentistry-Rutgers Medical School, now known as the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He completed his pediatric residency at the former Boston City Hospital (now BMC), serving as chief resident, in 1983. He joined the Department of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine in 1984 and two years later he established the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine at Boston City Hospital.

An innovative leader in medical residency education throughout his career, he founded the fellowship program in Pediatric Emergency Medicine here in 1988 and has directed Pediatric residency training at BMC since 1989. In 1996, Vinci, along with Frederick H. Lovejoy, MD, established the Boston Combined Residency Program in Pediatrics, one of the nation’s leading Pediatric residency programs. He has also championed research activities, global health training and flexible training opportunities for pediatric residents. Vinci has authored more than 60 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters on the topics of pediatric emergency medicine and pediatric education.

Vinci has received numerous awards for teaching and mentoring, among them BUSM’s Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award in 2010. He is a member of the National Board of Directors for the Association of Pediatric Program Directors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Academic Pediatric Association and the Academic Pediatric Society.

To RSVP for the event, email nsims@bu.edu or call 638-4570 by June 7.

Joel and Barbara Alpert Professor of Pediatrics Installation

• Date: Wednesday, June 12
• Time: 5 p.m.
• Location: Hiebert Lounge

Reception immediately following ceremony

Submitted by Amy Gorel.

Patients with schizophrenia suffer from a life-long condition that can produce delusions, disordered thinking, and breaks with reality. A number of treatments are available for schizophrenia, but many patients do not respond to these therapies or experience side effects that limit their use.

This research focused on key components of the brain known as NMDA receptors. These receptors are located on nerve cells in the brain and serve as biochemical gates that allow calcium ions (electrical charges) to enter the cell when a neurotransmitter, such as glutamate, binds to the receptor. Proper activation of these receptors is critical for sensory perception, memory and learning, including the transfer of short-term memory into long-term storage. Patients with schizophrenia have poorly functioning or “hypoactive” NMDA receptors, suggesting the possibility of treatment with drugs that positively affect these receptors. Currently the only way to enhance NMDA receptor function is through the use of agents called agonists that directly bind to the receptor on the outer surface of the cell, opening the gates to calcium ions outside the cell.

In this study, the researchers discovered a novel “non-canonical” pathway in which NMDA receptors residing inside the cell are stimulated by a neuroactive steroid to migrate to the cell surface (a process known as trafficking), thus increasing the number of receptors available for glutamate activation. The researchers treated neural cells from the cerebral cortex with the novel steroid pregnenolone sulfate (PregS) and found that the number of working NMDA receptors on the cell surface increased by 60 to 100 percent within 10 minutes. The exact mechanism by which this occurs is not completely clear, but it appears that PregS increases calcium ions within the cell, which in turn produces a green light signal for more frequent trafficking of NMDA receptors to the cell surface.

Although still in the early stages, further research in this area may be instrumental in the development of treatments not only for schizophrenia, but also for other conditions associated with malfunctioning NMDA receptors, such as age-related decreases in memory and learning ability.

View the paper online here: http://molpharm.aspetjournals.org/content/early/2013/05/28/mol.113.085696.full.pdf+html

Citation Information: Emmanuel Kostakis, Conor Smith, Ming-Kuei Jang, Stella C. Martin, Kyle G. Richards, Shelley J. Russek, Terrell T. Gibbs, David H. Farb. The neuroactive steroid pregnenolone sulfate stimulates trafficking of functional NMDA receptors to the cell surface via a non-canonical G-protein and Ca++ dependent mechanism.

Vaughan has received every major teaching award at BUSM. Her great respect for students is the hallmark of her academic engagement: “I tell new faculty that the first thing you must have is respect for the students,” she says. “Respect for who they are, for their time, and respect for what they are asked to accomplish.”

While diverse learning styles is a relatively new phenomenon in education theory, Vaughan has been adjusting her teaching methods to accommodate students for a very long time. “I am very organized, and when I become too rigid in my teaching presentations to someone who is a random thinker, they can become frustrated,” she says. “I realized many years ago that to be successful with students I needed to try a variety of ways of communicating. Now I work to help other faculty members use the most appropriate methods and encourage them to hone their skills in this way.”

Mark Moss, PhD, a member of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology since 1982 and department chair for 15 years, has known Vaughan for a good portion of her academic career. “Dr. Vaughan is the consummate educator,” he says. “Her ability to make subject matter interesting and relevant and to convey information in an efficient and durable manner—coupled with her commitment to the discipline and professionalism—is unparalleled. Her prowess as an educator has been recognized by her colleagues and students with eight teaching awards, including the Stanley Robbins award, the most prestigious conferred by the School of Medicine.”

Vaughan never planned to teach or work in the field of human medicine. “As a child, I wanted to be a veterinarian, but women just didn’t go into that field then,” she recalls. “And frankly, I was from a family where women weren’t expected to aspire to a career.”

As a high school student in Concord, New Hampshire, she trained horses for dressage events and taught equitation. “Once I was asked if I aspired to be a teacher and I said no, but then I recalled that from about the ninth grade, I was teaching horses to perform very specific movements and people the skills to read and communicate nonverbally with the horses,” she says.

Vaughan attended the University of Vermont as an undergraduate in a medical tech program majoring in biology. “While it became apparent that I enjoyed science and research, I didn’t want to go into medicine because I am one of those people who feel uncomfortable around sick people and in hospitals,” she says.

She completed her PhD in biology at Boston University in 1971 and a post-doctoral fellowship in neuroanatomy with Alan Peters, then chair of the BUSM Department of Anatomy. In 1972, she joined an interdisciplinary program project on aging and the nervous system (headed by F. Marott Sinex, chair of the Department of Biochemistry from 1957 to 1977) focusing on neuroscience and connective tissue and the effects of advancing age.

“At that time, aging research was not very highly thought of,” says Vaughan. “Our work was one of the first to apply the rigor of quantitative science to this area, and the project, now focusing on anatomy and behavior, is in its fortieth year of research. We made significant contributions to early aging studies.” Vaughan eventually studied peripheral nerve regeneration under her own National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, focusing on how advancing age affects the ability of neurons to regenerate peripheral axons.

In 1996, Peters asked Vaughan to direct the histology courses for the anatomy and neurobiology department, which meant giving up her research to focus on teaching—and she’s been engaged by it ever since. “I love to see the student who gets excited by the beauty of medicine . . . who can go from viewing the vocabulary of black dots to nuclei and cytoplasm when they see something on their computer screen that clicks for them.” She cites the student who hands her a journal article that he or she now understands because of the vocabulary and concepts learned in Vaughan’s class and from her lectures, and the one who recently sent her a link to a website featuring dinner plates with histological designs on them that both agreed were beautiful.

Vaughan notes the changes in medical student demographics and medical education. “Twenty-five years ago, our students were mainly male Caucasian with a very intense premedical education that included comparative anatomy, embryology, and physiology,” she says. “With a homogeneous, pre-trained student population, faculty could be laboratory based and lecture on their research, which didn’t necessarily have much to do with the context of the course they were teaching.

“Now that we have recognized our population of physicians should be a more diverse group socioeconomically, by gender, academic background, race, and religion, we have to be more professional in our approach to teaching. We have to know about different learning styles, about the neurobiology of learning, and how the information we are teaching will be used clinically.” She also emphasizes the richness that comes from having a diverse student population and the effect it has on faculty, students, and—most importantly—the patients who will be cared for by these physicians.

Continually thinking of ways to improve her teaching, Vaughan revamped the process by which histology is taught at BUSM. “Back in the mid-90s, we decided to hold labs before lectures so that the students would know the vocabulary and would have invested some time in the material before coming to the lecture,” she says. “They would be familiar with the microscopic images, making them better prepared for the lecture and allowing class time to be spent talking about the clinical relevance of what they had been looking at and studying.”

Vaughan has been a leader in adopting innovative technology that advances teaching and learning. She notes that virtual microscopy, whereby digitized microscope slides can be manipulated as if in a microscope but are viewed on a computer, has revolutionized histology; any number of students can view slides independently from anyplace, enabling them to study together more easily. “With virtual microscopy, students can take a screenshot, email it to me, and then get their questions answered quickly,” she says. She also cites technologies like the audience response system that offers immediate feedback to faculty on how well students understand their lectures, and Blackboard, the learning management system where faculty can manage all of their course materials online and students can access them anytime. “So many of these technologies involve opportunities for self-study producing lifelong learners, which is what we want our students to be,” she says. She also pioneered the adoption of computer-based examinations for the pre-clerkship years of medical school.

At the same time, she is cautious about technology—students no longer have to attend class as all lectures are videotaped—and worries that they are losing some face-to-face communication skills by missing the facial expressions and body language so important to the practicing clinician: “They tend to interact in a virtual way, so my concern is that technology is allowing them to miss out on an important aspect of our complete education. We can’t force them to come to class, so my current push is to encourage our faculty members to make our lectures value added—give them spontaneity, make them interactive, and provide some clinical context that excites discussion.”

What she does must be working, as students rate her very highly. “This is an amazingly well-run course,” writes a student evaluating Vaughan’s class. “I never thought histology would be even remotely interesting, and somehow Dr. Vaughan made the topic not only interesting but relevant to our future practice.” Another writes, “Dr. Vaughan is amazing, and a very devoted and knowledgeable professor.”

She is also highly regarded by her colleagues. “Debbie Vaughan is an exceptional person, a wonderful colleague, and an outstanding educator,” says Jarrett Rushmore, PhD, assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology. “Her effectiveness as a professor comes in part because she is willing to work harder than anyone for her students. She is constantly adapting and improving her teaching, and she incorporates new thinking and technology to that end. I think what really makes her a first-rate professor is that she fundamentally believes that education is not simply about imparting knowledge, but lies more in challenging students (and colleagues) to be more than they are. She has high and clearly stated expectations of her students—she gives them the tools to achieve their goals and guides them with devotion and unflagging energy. Her students invariably find that over the course of the semester, they are able to achieve at levels they did not think previously possible, and they are better for having taken her course.”

Vaughan credits BUSM with supporting and promoting faculty dedicated to teaching. “This demonstrates a true commitment to the mission of medical education,” she says. “We have some faculty who are hired solely as educators and whose research focuses on medical education, and others, like me, who have been allowed to retire our research to teach full time.” She notes that almost every basic science department has full-time educators as their course directors: “We are available to serve on the committees, we mentor new teachers, keep up with technology, and give direction to this high quality product that is a BUSM education.”

When Vaughan is not teaching or mentoring, she is reviewing applications and interviewing potential students. A member of the Admissions Committee for 17 years and an assistant dean of admissions for 10, Vaughan is extremely familiar with the student body. “I know how exceptional our students are, and faculty need to understand the breadth of experience they have and how accomplished they are,” she says. “In all fairness, we also have to be explicit about our expectations and realize that understanding doesn’t come easily and immediately to everyone at the same pace.” She also worked for 10 years with the Admissions Office and IT to develop and implement an automated admissions information management system.

“Over the last decade, BUSM has taken a lead role, at the national level, in advancing a program of holistic review of all applicants, and Dr. Vaughan has been a key member of the leadership team,” says Robert Witzburg, MD, BUSM associate dean for admissions. “She is a role model, and we all have developed great respect for her integrity, her commitment, and her ability to find innovative solutions to complex problems.”

Vaughan is always in great demand. In addition to her many other activities, she serves on the BUSM Student Services and Medical Education Committees, is an advisor in the Academy of Advisors, and chairs the Pre-clerkship Curriculum Subcommittee. She has also served as thesis advisor in the Master of Medical Sciences Program for the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences, has been a PhD research committee member for 11 students, and serves on the MD-PhD Steering Committee and the Planning Committee for the Neuroscience of Education Program. Her all-University commitments include co-chairing the Teaching and Learning Technologies Governance Committee and membership in the University Committee on Student Life and Policies.

“I have known Debbie Vaughan for 17 years,” says Doug Hughes, MD, associate dean for academic affairs. “She is a luminary who has graciously mentored generations of both medical students and junior faculty. Debbie’s modesty is matched only by her brilliance.”

Vaughan says she has remained at BU for 40 years because she feels she is in sync with the philosophy of the institution: “I love the attitude of doing your best for others, the quality of the students, and my colleagues. This is one very satisfying job, and I thoroughly enjoy it.”

This story first appeared in Campus & Alumni News

The Jean Hamburger Award recognizes outstanding research in nephrology with a clinical emphasis. The award was established in memory of Jean Hamburger, the “Professeuer de Paris,” pioneer of clinical nephrology and founding president of the ISN.

The International Society of Nephrology is dedicated to advancing the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of kidney diseases in the developing and developed world. The society aspires to eliminate kidney disease worldwide.

“Beginning with basic research in experimental models, we now made the recent discovery of a major target antigen in a common form of autoimmune glomerular disease,” said Salant. “This award really recognizes the contributions of a succession of outstanding colleagues and fellows at BUSM over the past three decades.”

Salant has written several key papers on immunological kidney diseases, as well as editorials, reviews and book chapters on glomerular diseases and vasculitis of the kidney. He has delivered keynote lectures at major scientific congresses and he served as chairman of the American Board of Internal Medicine Subspecialty Board of Examiners in Nephrology.

Salant earned his medical degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He completed his residency at Johannesburg General Hospital, where he also gained extensive experience in renal transplantation, dialysis and other aspects of clinical nephrology before coming to BMC and BUSM. He also is director of the renal training program at BUSM.