Student Updates

Self Nominations for 2019 BUMC Emerging Leaders Program

The 2019 BUMC Emerging Leaders Program, a two-day workshop on October 25 & 26 on the Fenway Campus focuses on developing the leadership skills of our most promising junior faculty.

Sessions taught by faculty who teach in the health management MBA program will cover:

• Negotiating skills
• Leadership styles
• Financial decision making

Eligible faculty are:

• Late assistant professor or early associate professor with a full-time appointment at one of the three Medical Campus schools
• Willing to commit to attending both full days of leadership skills training
• Effective, innovative, reliable and capable of mobilizing and energizing others

Interested? Please submit your name, CV and a brief description of your promise as a leader (paragraph or two, no more than one page) to Dr. Hee Young Park, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, BUSM.

Candidates will be chosen on the strength of their promise as a leader, balance across schools and diversity of candidates’ backgrounds and expertise.

Junior Faculty Recognized with Career Development Awards

This year’s eight winners span a range of disciplines

Studying refugees in the Trump era’s political climate is, as Heba Gowayed diplomatically puts it, “suboptimal.” So the first-ever longitudinal survey she plans to do, which would take years in the best of times—measuring how easily refugees master English, find a decent job, and gain a fundamental sense of security and belonging—remains an aspiration for now.

Meanwhile, the College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of sociology has conducted plenty of other research that has won her one of this year’s eight Career Development Professorships, awarded to promising junior faculty.

Gowayed has a contract for a book that will take an up-close look at Syrian refugees resettled or granted asylum in the United States, Canada, and Germany, comparing their access to resources under these different systems. “I argue that human capital can be created, transformed, or destroyed by national incorporation policies,” Gowayed says. “My overarching goal as a researcher is to document the lives of people whose experiences are underrepresented in academic work, [using] a method by which the researcher immerses herself in others’ social worlds.”

Career Professorships, variously named for the donors and alumni who fund them, are awarded annually from among those nominated by their deans and colleagues as promising scholars in their fields. Most of the professorships are tied to specific BU schools; all are for three years and provide stipends for the recipients’ salaries and scholarship.

Gowayed has been named a Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Professor, “a tremendous opportunity that I am truly grateful for,” she says. “It provides me with the resources and encouragement to begin work on my next project. The funds offered…enable a multinational project and will enable me to involve students at Boston University to support me in what will be an important learning experience for us all.”

Sanaz Mobasseri, a Questrom School of Business assistant professor of management and organizations, was named an Isabel Anderson Career Development Professor for her scholarship in discrimination against black job applicants. Inspired by others’ research showing the difficulty applicants with criminal records securing work, Mobasseri recently studied almost 400 applications submitted to 184 employers in Oakland, Calif.

“I was expecting to find that employers varied in how negatively they interpreted a job applicant’s criminal record, and that this variation was related to their neighborhood crime level,” she says. To her surprise, she discovered that while working near recent violent crime cut the likelihood of blacks getting a callback, that happened regardless of whether they had a criminal record or not. She didn’t find the same bias in white and Hispanic callback rates.

Addressing that bias, she says, “is a difficult problem to solve, and it remains an open question for researchers” who are looking at such things as hirers being open to their bias, and intentionally blinding themselves to race on applications. Whatever the answer, her new professorship will help her with workplace-interactions data she’s been collecting, ensuring “much faster progress on building and analyzing these new data sets because I’ll be able to hire a few team members.”

On the natural sciences front, Florian Douam, a School of Medicine assistant professor of microbiology, will use his Peter Paul Career Development Professorship to advance an innovation that will strike nonexpert ears as science fiction: humanized mice.

Those are mice “engrafted with human tissues,” enabling research into human diseases that would normally be hard-pressed for subjects, says Douam, an investigator at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) studying virus threats such as yellow fever, Zika, and dengue. Using these mice, his lab will “explore at an unprecedented resolution, over time and in multiple tissues, how the human immune system mobilizes during an infection,” he says. (He made major progress on yellow fever research as a postdoc at Princeton using this tool.)

The Peter Paul Professorship, Douam says, “is going to provide me with instrumental resources that will allow me to move my research program forward better and faster.”

These are the other Career Development appointees:

Chandramouli Chandrasekaran, a MED assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology and a CAS assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, is now a Moorman-Simon  Interdisciplinary Career Development Professor. Chandrasekaran studies monkeys to find the neural basis of decision-making and cognition, a complement to others’ research into human cognition. His work combines diverse tools, from electrodes and imaging to statistical techniques.

Anne Feng, a CAS assistant professor of Chinese art, has been chosen an East Asia Studies Career Development Professor. A scholar of Buddhist art and architecture, among other topics, Feng is an expert on the Dunhuang caves in western China, repositories of ancient art first dug out in the fourth century. Her University of Chicago dissertation dealt with water imagery in the wall paintings there. She is currently preparing a monograph that explores the impact of an aquatic imaginary on the pictorial programming and immersive architectural schemes of Buddhist cave sites on the Silk Road.

Dennis Jones, a MED assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, has been named a Ralph Edwards Career Development Professor. Recruited to BU to develop a program studying lymphatic development in cancer and infections, Jones was a lead investigator on research while a Yale PhD candidate and a postdoc at Massachusetts General Hospital. He also has focused on mentoring undergraduates, especially in teaching.  

Robert Metcalfe, a Questrom assistant professor of markets, public policy, and law, is the latest Reidy Family Career Development Professor. A behavioral economist, Metcalfe uses extensive data sets to help large companies address managerial problems, from health to the environment to digital matters. One recent article he authored studied hundreds of airline captains across 40,000 flights and found that if they knew their fuel efficiency was being monitored, they improved in that area, which lowered carbon dioxide emissions.

Derry Wijaya, a CAS assistant professor of computer science, is this year’s University Provost’s Professor. An expert on machine learning, Wijaya researches automatic translation between languages that don’t have vast, transcribed passages (Uzbek to Samoan, in an example cited in her nomination for the professorship). She also evangelizes for computer science to middle school girls and low-income students with the aim of diversifying those working in the field.

“Key to any research institution’s vitality and long-term health is an energized and talented class of rising faculty,” says Jean Morrison, University provost. “BU is proud to employ some of the very best emerging educators and researchers in the world across dozens of disciplines and to invest in their growth and success with career development professorships. This year’s cohort is no exception. From medicine and public health to science, technology, business, and the humanities, all are making tremendous early impact in their fields, and we are excited to see what the future holds for them.”

This BU Today story was written by Rich Barlow.

Parking and Transportation Services for Labor Day, Monday, Sept. 2

The following schedule and services will be in effect for Labor Day:

Parking: All parking facilities will be open. Employees with 610 Garage access may park in the 710 Garage on Labor Day. Those without parking garage access, may park in the 710 Garage for $8 on the holiday.

Shuttles: No shuttles will be operating, including the BU Shuttle Bus and the Healthnet Shuttle.

MBTA:
All subway trains, streetcars, buses, trackless trolleys and commuter rail trains will run on a Sunday schedule. All buses will operate on a Sunday schedule except for Crosstown buses #1 and # 3 which will not operate on the holiday. For additional information on routes and schedules, please call the MBTA Customer Service Center at 617-222-3200 or visit www.mbta.com.

Deborah Stearns-Kurosawa Appointed GMS Associate Provost Ad Interim

Deborah Stearns-Kurosawa, PhD, Associate Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, has been appointed Associate Provost/Dean ad interim for Graduate Medical Sciences (GMS), effective September 1.

Dr. Stearns-Kurosawa will be a member of the senior leadership teams of the School of Medicine and Medical Campus. She will oversee curricula and execution of all graduate programs including recruitment, admissions, ongoing program activities, new program development and student outcomes. In addition, she will continue to foster the collaboration of the basic science and clinical departments in education and graduate research.

Dr. Stearns-Kurosawa, who joined BU in 2008 as assistant professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, had previously served as an assistant member at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and as chief research scientist at a pharmaceutical corporation in Tokyo. She earned her BS in biochemistry from Pennsylvania State University, PhD in chemistry from Cleveland State University with graduate research at the Cleveland Clinic, and completed post-doctoral training in a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) laboratory at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation focused on mechanisms of blood coagulation. She holds multiple patents and for two decades has continuously served as principal or co-investigator of numerous NIH and organizational grants.

Dr. Stearns-Kurosawa was a core faculty member of the BU Faculty Innovation Network that supported development of the $20m Innovate@BU initiative. The university-wide pioneering entrepreneurship resource for BU faculty, students and alumni is designed to educate and provide resources to facilitate entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial innovation, technology transfer and product development.

She serves on numerous School of Medicine and GMS committees and is a master educator in immunology for first-year medical students and directs GMS PA510 medical immunology and GMS PA810/811 Seminars in the Business of Science. She co-directs SDM MD520/GMS OH700 General Pathology for dental and graduate students, and lectures in other graduate and medical student pathology courses.

New BUMC Public Safety Phone Number

Public Safety services between Boston University and Boston Medical Center have been separating over the past several months. The final separation step is the call dispatch function. Effective at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 3, the phone number to reach BU Medical Campus Public Safety services will be 617-358-4444. Boston Medical Center Public Safety will continue to use the existing number, 617-414-4444. Calls made from BU landlines should dial 8-4444.

Programming the new number into your cell phone is encouraged. If you inadvertently dial the BMC number from a cell phone, Boston Medical Center dispatch will immediately notify BU Public Safety of the emergency call. Routine calls will be transferred.

If you have any questions, please contact BU Chief of Police Kelly Nee or Medical Campus Public Safety Director Stephen Taranto.

Nominations for 2019 IHSIP & BUMC Emerging Leaders Program

The Provost’s Office is looking for candidates for the 2019 IHSIP & BUMC Emerging Leaders Program. The two-day workshop will be held Oct. 25-26 at BU’s Institute for Health System Innovation & Policy (on the Fenway Campus) and focuses on developing the leadership skills of some of our most promising junior faculty.

Sessions taught by faculty who teach in the health management MBA program will cover:

• Negotiating skills
• Leadership styles
• Financial decision making

Eligible faculty are:

• Late assistant professor or early associate professor with a full-time appointment at one of the three Medical Campus schools
• Willing to commit to attending both full days of leadership skills training
• Effective, innovative, reliable and capable of mobilizing and energizing others

Interested? Please discuss this with your department chair or center director, who should submit your name, CV and a brief description of your promise as a leader (paragraph or two, no more than one page) by Friday, Sept. 20 to Dr. Hee Young Park, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, BUSM.

Chairs/Center Directors: Two, diverse candidates from each department preferred.

Candidates will be chosen on the strength of their promise as a leader, balance across schools and diversity of candidates’ backgrounds and expertise.