Winter 2006-07

newsletter for graduates, students, faculty and friends of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology

The Connector

HST founder Irving M. London, MD, may have his office on the fifth floor of E25, but his leg-acy is apparent as soon as one enters the building.

His portrait, by artists Warren and Lucia Pros-peri, now hangs in the lobby of HST’s headquarters at MIT. The painting, which was done in a style called optical naturalism, shows London in his of-fice. Terrill Gadde, HST’s Director of Administra-tion and Personnel and the one who shepherded this project from conception to completion, said the office setting was chosen because the artists felt that that was where HST was born.

“Setting up HST was really mostly an ad-ministrative venture that, I am sure, took lots of meetings, phone calls, meetings, and more meet-ing,” said Gadde, who has a master of fine arts degree. London’s office—with his many shelves of journals—added another visual aspect of his career to the portrait.

On Oct. 6, 2006, the painting was presented to an assembly of 125 friends, colleagues, former students, the Prosperis, and members of London’s

family. HST Director Joseph V. Bonventre began by reviewing London’s contributions to medicine in America, highlighting his founding leadership at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, his major role in the establishment of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences, and his conceptualizing, founding and leadership of HST over its almost 40 years of existence. The more than 1,200 alumni, with their many original and significant contributions to biomedical science, engineering, and the diagnosis and treatment of disease, attest to HST’s success. Many of the edu-cational innovations and principles developed here have been replicated elsewhere, giving evidence of HST’s impact. Bonventre, a graduate of the second HST MD class, also acknowledged his personal debt and gratitude to London, whom he called “the embodiment of the physician-scientist.”

HMS Dean Joseph Martin praised London’s creative energy and gracious wisdom and thanked him for his significant contributions to HMS and

HST’s newest program is out of this world, which is exactly where Bioastronautics students want humans to go.

The first four fellows of the HST Program in Bioastronautics were in the spotlight Sept. 14, 2006, when the program was officially inaugurated. Laurence R. Young, PhD, Professor of HST and the Apollo Program Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, serves as the first director of this new MEMP track.

In his keynote speech, Peter Diamandis, MD ’89, spoke on “Humanity’s Future in Space.” The Chairman of the X PRIZE Foundation and the Zero Gravity Corporation reviewed his fascination with space, which dates back to his childhood and influenced his education at MIT and HST, as well as his subsequent professional career in promoting space flight.

“The best way to predict the future is to seek it,” Diamandis said. He predicted increasing space travel and colonization, in which private enterprise will play an ever-greater role.

A panel discussion on “Perspectives in Bioas-tronautics” followed. Panelists included Jeanne L. Becker, PhD, Associate Director of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI); Jonathan B. Clark, MD, MPH, Space Medicine

This portrait of HST Founder Irving M. London now hangs in the lobby of E25. (continues on page 11)

Liaison of the NSBRI; Peter Diamandis; Sonia Rahmati Clayton, PhD, from the Center for Educa-tional Outreach at Baylor College of Medicine; and Nancy Turner, PhD, Chair of the Intercollegiate Faculty of Nutrition at Texas A&M University.

The new Bioastronautics fellows:

■ Daniel Buckland, a first-year MD-PhD can-didate, holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech and MIT, respectively.

■ Erez Lieberman is a mathematical biologist in

London’s portrait shows a man still in action

HST launches new Bioastro track

HST’s first four bioastronautics students—Kathleen Sienko, Erika Wagner, Daniel Buckland, and Erez Lieberman—are guided by Laurence Young.

L. Barry H

etherington

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The ConnectorEditor Walter H. Abelmann, MD

Managing Editor/Designer Becky Sun

Editorial Assistant Ryan Hayman

Contact InformationHarvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology77 Massachusetts Ave., E25-519 Cambridge, MA 02139-4307P: (617) 253-4418 F: (617) 253-7498 E: hst@mit.edu http://hst.mit.edu

Editorial BoardPatricia A. CunninghamBeth DoughertyLisa E. Freed, MD, PhD ’88Sang Kim (MD ’07)Leann Lesperance, PhD ’93, MD ’95Pamela McGillCatherine ModicaKonstantina Stankovic, PhD ’98, MD ’99James C. Weaver, PhDPeter I-Kung Wu (MEMP)

Ex officioJoseph V. Bonventre, MD ’76, PhDMartha L. Gray, PhD ’86

The Connector is a quarterly publication of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. The staff and board of The Connector would like to thank the HST alumni, faculty, staff, and students who contributed to this issue. Please send reports of your recent activities and personal news to the above address or email. Previous issues of The Connector can be found at http://hst.mit.edu.

Volume 21 • Number 1

D i r e c t o r s ’notes

HST said good-bye to long-time informa-tion technology manager Greg Dancer, who took a new position in MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Dancer joined HST as the IT staffer in 1998; the position was new at the time, and not well-defined. He said that he did “a little of a lot of things” and became an IT jack-of-all-trades—as he continued to be.

Over his eight-year HST tenure, he saw the Division’s becoming more sophisticated about the uses of technology, with the faculty, students and staff having higher expectations for what technology can do. Dancer was a pivotal figure in finding and adapting technology to meet the Division’s ever-changing needs. Under his guid-ance, the Division’s administration went from isolated computers—used mostly for word pro-cessing and email—to a fleet of equipment and servers used for file-sharing, linking of calendars, website hosting, and remote access. He helped design and develop HST’s website infrastructure, worked with students to set up the HST poster printer, and kept the administration’s computers running smoothly.

In addition to his superior technical skills, Dancer brought a unique spirit to his work. His diplomacy and equanimity allowed him to meet the challenges of bridging the very different (and sometimes conflicting) approaches to IT at MIT and Harvard. His ingenuity allowed him to solve technically challenging problems, while his com-munications skills and unfailing patience helped him explain basic computer tasks to computer-phobic colleagues. These qualities earned him the 2002 Steven Wade Neiterman award for “collab-orative problem-solving, coaching colleagues and team building” in IT at MIT.

As an MIT undergraduate majoring in civil engineering and literature, Dancer discovered a passion for film. After obtaining a master’s in film studies from the University of Wisconsin, he returned to MIT and put his interests in technol-ogy and film to work. He made movies and taught courses on film, including a seminar on Asian cinema, while also working at HST.

Greg’s new position allows him to combine his passions. In addition to teaching an introduc-tory film class, one of the largest of MIT’s humani-ties classes, he is working on a project integrating a video annotation tool into teaching curricula.

The HST community thanks Greg for his many years of service and wishes him all the best in his new position.

— Jennifer Weiss & Catherine Modica

IT guru leaves HST to pursue film passion

As many of you may have heard, Joe Bonventre will be stepping down as Director of HST at the end of this academic year. I’m just coming to terms with the upcoming transition. We’ve been partners in running HST for the last decade. What a ride it

has been! Joe isn’t going far, and he will continue to play a major role in HST, but I will most certainly miss his partnership.

With this news, it seems an appropriate time for reflection. Together Joe and I have accomplished many things we are proud of. We have expanded our academic program to add depth and breadth to HST’s curricula. We initiated new training programs such as the Bioinformatics Training Program, funded by the NIH, and the Graduate Education in Medical Sciences Program, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We extended mentoring activities to undergraduates through the BioMatrix program. We extended our reach “from bench to bedside” into the boardroom by forming the Biomedical Enterprise Program in partnership with MIT’s Sloan School of Management and through the creation of the HST Advisory Board and Council. And as an alumna, the recent forming of the HST Alumni Association is especially exciting.

Looking back, I also find myself contemplating the more philosophical side of our partnership. I’m often asked, “What is it like to run HST?” How do we run it without having a single director? How do we balance these intrinsically competitive institutions? To steal a phrase from our recently inaugurated governor, Deval Patrick, our mantra has been “Together We Can.” Our experience has been, metaphorically, that of being parents. As new “parents” a decade ago, we were at the same time overwhelmed and idealistic. We were full of ambition to make things better, and infused with the ideals that brought us to HST: that the integration of disciplines and professions and institutions could have an enormously powerful influence on human health.

Now, ten years later, HST students continue to be spectacular, and HST has both expanded and matured. Inevitably, there have been setbacks and disappointments, but what is more dominant⎯as it is for parents⎯is the joy in seeing the successes of the HST community, the exhilaration of being caught up in the energy of the newest students and faculty, and the pride in seeing the work of the HST community advance human health. As directors we aim to nurture, but what I’ve come to appreciate is that HST has its own “personality,” or genetic code, that we can modulate, but cannot profoundly change. And much like parents, while there are many stories of pride and accomplishment, some are just funny. If you get a chance, buy Joe a drink and ask him about the time he had purple hair.

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The Connector 3

Yarmush in Tech Hall of FameMartin L. Yarmush, MD, PhD, HST

faculty member and the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery (Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology) at HMS and MGH, was inducted into the New Jersey High-Tech Hall of Fame in the 2006 Researcher Category.

HST Alumni/Student RoundtablesThe HST Alumni Association and the

HST Joint Student Council are sponsoring 10 Alumni/Student Roundtables during the 2006-07 academic year. A roundtable consists of an HST alum meeting with no more than ten students over an informal meal. If you are interested in hosting an event, send an email to ninar@mit.edu.

Two Faculty Receive Orthopedic AwardHST director Martha L. Gray, PhD ’86, and

HST faculty Deborah Burstein, PhD ’86, Asso-ciate Professor of Radiology and HST, have been selected for the 2007 Kappa Delta Elizabeth Win-ston Lanier Award from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS) for their paper on magnetic resonance imaging of cartilage glycosami-noglycan, and for collective contributions to the field of orthopedics. Co-author Young-Jo Kim, MD, PhD ’94, Assistant Professor of Surgery at HMS and CHB, was also an awardee.

Szolovits Receives Research AwardsPeter Szolovits, PhD, Professor of HST

and EECS at MIT and head of the Clinical Decision-Making Group at MIT’s CSAIL, was recently honored twice for innovative research. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in recognition of his research in applying AI meth-ods to medical decision-making and health care information system design. He also received the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics Award for Innovation in Personally Controlled Health Record Infrastructure.” This award recognized Szolovits for “having sparked a field, setting ablaze numerous centers of activity.”

hst newsFreed Selected as Leadership Fellow

Lisa E. Freed, MD, PhD ’88, Principal Research Scientist at HST and MIT, was selected as one of the 2006 MIT Leader to Leader (L2L) Fellows. L2L is a 12-month program that offers both a theoretical leadership framework and hands-on leadership experiences. Working with current senior MIT leaders and faculty, L2L Fel-lows build skills through conversations, workshops and presentations.

New AIMBE Members Include 8 FacultyThe following HST faculty were elected to

the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) for 2006: Sangeeta Bhatia, PhD ’97, MD ’99; Emery Brown, MD, PhD; Deborah Burstein, PhD ’86; Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD; Bruce Rosen, PhD ’84, MD; Ken-neth Stevens, ScD; Peter Szolovits, PhD; and Laurence Young, ScD.

HST Welcomes New Communications Manager

Elizabeth Dougherty joined HST October 30 as the Division’s new Communications Man-ager. She graduated in 2006 from Boston Univer-sity with a Master of Science from the Center of Science and Medical Journalism, where she was

a Knight Fellow for a year. She has been published in The Boston Globe, Harvard FOCUS and other publi-cations. She also has a BA in Math-ematics and a MA in Mathematics Education from Cornell University. Before her career in science writing,

Dougherty spent about 10 years in the software engineering industry. Dougherty also joins the editorial board of The Connector, whose editors and readers warmly welcome her.

Locke Heads Flu Task ForceSteven E. Locke, MD, HST affiliated

faculty and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at HMS, co-chairs the town of Wayland’s Board of Health’s Pandemic Flu Task Force. The task force’s pandemic avian flu plan for the town includes the creation of a town-wide network of local neighborhood volunteers to provide assistance to residents during a pandemic or other public health disaster. Locke serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Harvard Center for Public Health Preparedness and is a research psychiatrist at the Harvard Center for Medical Simulation. Currently, he is using pandemic flu simulations to help businesses and organizations improve their preparedness for pandemic flu.

Kalluri to Lead New Division at BIDMCRaghu Kalluri, PhD, HST affiliated faculty

and Associate Professor of Medicine at HMS and BIDMC, has been chosen to lead the new Divi-sion of Matrix Biology at BIDMC. This division is the first of its kind in the country to reside within a department of medicine, and unique in its combination of matrix research and clinical medicine.

First MRI-Guided Removal of Brain Tumor during Live Web Cast

On October 25, Joseph R. Madsen, MD ’81, Associate Professor of Surgery (Neurosurgery) at HMS and CHB, operated on a 13-year-old patient with a oligodendroglioma, guided by MRI with functional cortical mapping, coram publicum, dur-ing a live web cast. This intraoperative MRI system, known as MR-OR, is the first and only system of its kind in a pediatric hospital in the US. Madsen is also president of the HST Alumni Association.

Tech Review’s Top 35 Includes HST Faculty and Alumna

MIT’s Technology Review magazine listed its choice of 35 top technology innovators under age 35 for 2006. Included are two members of the HST faculty and one HST alumna: Martha Bulyk, PhD, Assistant Professor of HST and Medicine and Pathology at HMS and BWH; Shiladitya Sengupta, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine and HST at HMS and BWH; and Anita Goel, MD ’05, PhD.

Folkman Receives Two HonorsJudah Folkman, MD, HST affiliated

faculty and the Julia Dyckman Andrus Profes-sor of Pediatric Surgery at HMS and CHB, received the 2006 Jacobson Innovation Award from the American College of Surgeons. He was also awarded the Helen Keller Foundation’s Prize for Vision Research. Both awards recognized his pioneering work in angiogenesis.

Sengupta Honored by Indian CommunityShiladitya Sengupta, PhD, Assistant Pro-

fessor of Medicine and HST at HMS and BWH, received a Global Indus Technovators Award for 2006 from the Indian Business Club at MIT. He received this honor for his “innovative work at the forefront of biotechnology and healthcare, materials and devices, information technology and grassroots technology.”

Magazine Lists Church in Top 50George M. Church, PhD, HST affiliated fac-

ulty and Professor of Genetics at HMS, was named one of Scientific American magazine’s top 50 science and technology leaders. Church was recognized for his contribution to “off-the-shelf” technology to greatly reduce the cost of DNA sequencing, which will ultimately permit the decoding of a person’s genes for routine medical purposes.

Peter Szolovits thanks the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics after receiving its innovation award.

Elizabeth Dougherty

Joon Lee

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hst news

Thousands of miles away from the VA Hospital in West Roxbury, where we completed our HST 201/202 preceptorships, the All

India Institute of Medical Sciences' hallways, outpatient clinics and outside grounds teemed with patients and frenetic activity some could only call controlled chaos. This scene brought to mind the phrase, “Toto, we aren’t in Kansas anymore!”

India, a captivating land of contradictions, proved a unique setting for our HST 203 clinical preceptorship. On any given day we could spend a morning seeing pulmonary/extra-pulmonary tuberculosis and tropical disease cases such as ma-laria and typhoid, and then spend the afternoon watching an experimental urologic robotic surgery to remove a cancerous tumor and construct a new bladder. It was not uncommon to see one patient with malnutrition followed by a patient with the so-called “lifestyle” diseases like CAD and diabetes. Witnessing healthcare in India this past summer was the experience of a lifetime.

It was fascinating to spend time learning how the Indian medical system manages to serve 1 billion people, 40 percent of whom are illiterate and almost half of whom live below the poverty line. During our stay in India we spent time in private and government hospitals, primary and tertiary healthcare centers, and urban and rural care facilities. Perhaps of most interest to us was learning about the government’s focus on preventative healthcare, specifically children’s and maternal health and education in the rural and urban health care pilot programs. Healthcare workers visit each home within these rural and urban resettlement colonies twice a month to maintain an accurate medical census of all family members, provide antenatal care, prescribe antibiotics, and verify medicine regimes. During our visit to the urban center, we rounded with a nurse who was providing in-home postnatal care and teaching health education. During rounds we had the opportunity to assist the nurse in treating a young woman’s vaginal infection and educating her about her mother-in-law’s superstition that new mothers cannot ingest milk.

From Cambridge to IndiaThis trip was organized as a result of hearing

Kristian Olson, MD, speak last fall at a HST 590 seminar about his experiences with Refugee Medicine in Darfur and along the Thai-Burmese Border. We were inspired to try something a little off the beaten path to satisfy the HST 203: Clinical Experience in Medical Engineering and Medical Physics requirement. With the support of HST Director Martha Gray and the assistance of HST faculty member Shiladitya Sengupta, PhD, we arranged a preceptorship in Delhi, India, for July and August 2006. In order to finance our trip, we applied for travel and lodging funding from the Indo-US Technology Forum. The MIT India

Program also kindly provided us with financial and logistical assistance. Our program entailed spending six weeks rotating through the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the Rockland Hospital in New Delhi. This unique opportunity to rotate with Indian clinicians allowed us to compare and contrast medical technology and how it is used in India versus the United States. The differing patient loads between US and Indian hospitals also provided a study in diagnostic techniques including reliance on physical exam versus clinical tests.

AIIMS, the premier public medical college in India, was an obvious choice to observe the best practices in Indian medical care since it is a teach-

photos courtesy of Christina Silcox and K

athleen Sienko

Kathleen, HST Director Martha Gray and Christina in front of Humayun’s Tomb, which was the inspiration for the Taj Mahal. Gray was in India to chair a US delegation that met with high-ranking officials from the Indian Ministry of Science & Technology to discuss an Indian health science and technology initiative.

Becoming the Path

T

The HST 203 experience in India

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.Siddharta Gautama, Hindu prince & founder of Buddhism

by Kathleen Sienko and Christina Silcox

The Connector 5

ing institute. As a public hospital, it treats over 1.5 million patients a year and thus has developed efficient practices to handle the enormous patient load. This includes a greater reliance on physical exam over clinical tests and innovative surgical and medical interventions. AIIMS also manages a 60-bed hospital in the Comprehensive Rural Health Centre at Ballabgarh in Haryana, which allowed us a glimpse at preventative medicine as practiced in India. Rockland Hospital, another premier hospital, offered the contrasting view of private health care in India with its Western-style construction and smaller patient load.

Between AIIMS and Rockland Hospital, we completed rotations in cardiology, neurology, gastroenterology, pediatrics and community care medicine. Additionally, we visited a stem cell research and treatment facility, organ transplant center, and the Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Allied Sciences.

Different diseases, different styles, different priorities

In certain medical departments at AIIMS, some clinicians saw upwards of 100 patients dur-ing a four-hour long outpatient clinic. The huge patient load and advanced state of disease among many of the patients meant that we were able to appreciate the physical exam skills taught in HST 201/202. For example, during our week in cardiol-ogy at AIIMS, the senior cardiologist pointed out patients with interesting heart sounds —our cue to quickly perform a focused exam and report our findings. It was not uncommon to see 10 or more patients with comparable symptoms throughout the four-hour clinic. The repetition allowed us to master the symptoms of certain cardiovascular diseases rare in the West, such as rheumatic mitral valve disease. In addition to spending time at AIIMS and Rockland Hospital, we spent several mornings completing pulmonary exams on more than 60 patients during ward rounds at Chark Palika Municipal Hospital.

Professor of Urology Ashok Hemal and Kathleen stand behind Christina as she tries out the surgical console of the da Vinci surgical system at AIIMS. They later observed Dr. Hemal as he performed surgery.

Unlike in the US, the average patient in a developing country does not have health insurance. Because of this, India provides healthcare in the form of free outpatient visits, hospita l s tays , and surgical procedures at government-sponsored primary, secondary, and tertiary facilities. However, patients are responsible for paying for their own medicines (costs for prescription drugs are a tenth or a hundredth of the cost in developed countries), investigations (MRI, CT, blood chemistries), and medical devices. For example, if a patient requiring a cardiovascular stent cannot afford one, he/she will have an alternative procedure such as a balloon angioplasty because the cost of the latter is minimal. Even so, the balloon—designed to be disposable—is often reused to distribute costs among multiple patients. Therefore, Indian clinicians are generally aware of the cost of the drugs and tests that they prescribe and will work with the patient to provide healthcare in an affordable manner.

Another major difference we noticed between American and Indian healthcare was the difference in sanitary standards. Given the emphasis in the US on blood-borne pathogen training and practice of universal precautions, we were surprised to see many clinicians examining bloodied patients without gloves and neglecting to wash their hands between patient physical exams. This was of particular concern, given that

India has the second highest HIV infection rate in the world. When queried, the clinicians and interns said the high patient load does not give them enough time to wash hands between exams, and cost prevented them from wearing gloves on a regular basis.

A lot of work and some playAlthough we typically spent six days a week

at the hospital, we still found time for sightseeing. We explored Delhi, visited the Taj Mahal in Agra, and rode elephants around the Amber Fort in Jaipur. Towards the end of our seven-week stay we headed to the southwest state of Kerala to visit the Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences & Technology's biomedical technology wing with facilities for developing medical devices from a conceptual stage to commercialization, and their patient care facility specializing in cardiovascular and neurological diseases. This institute was of particular interest to us because, like HST, it focuses on the convergence of medical sciences and technology. On our trip we canoed through the labyrinthine backwaters of Kollam, trekked through the Periyar Tiger Reserve, and learned how coconuts are processed to produce cooking oil, rope and ornaments.

It is our hope that the long-term outcome of this six-week clinical experience will be a regular exchange program between HST and AIIMS hospital to allow students of each institution the opportunity to see how cultural and regional dif-ferences influence how medical care is provided. Identification of and exposure to the scientific and medical challenges that know no borders are crucial for budding physicians, scientists and en-gineers. It is our belief that only when such issues are identified can solutions can be derived.

If you are interested in an amazing HST 203 experience, or want to know more about oppor-tunities in India, please contact Dr. Sengupta at shiladit@mit.edu for more information.

Kathleen and Christina take an elephant ride up the cobbled pathway to Amber Fort in Jaipur.

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faculty profile

W e’ve all heard the expression “Get a life!” But few of us approach this dictum in the way Leonid Mirny does. One can

imagine him wondering aloud to the beloved molecules he studies: “How do you get a life?” Granted, the life of a junior faculty member at MIT is not an easy one, as Mirny freely admits. But how, he wonders, does a soup of molecules become a life? How does evolution happen? How does a “random” group of molecules become you and me? This mystery is the compelling center of his life’s work.

Mirny, Associate Professor of HST and Phys-ics, grew up in Moscow in a family of scientists. His father is a cardiovascular researcher turned environmental engineer, and his mother an ex-perimental physical chemist.

Mirny quips, “I had no choice but to become a scientist.”

It was his father’s work on artificial cardiac valves that first stimulated Mirny’s lifelong interest in the interface of biomedicine and physics. In his junior and senior years at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute—the “MIT of Moscow”—he began his research in biological physics. Upon graduation (as a married man at the age of 20), he left Moscow to pursue a master’s focusing on biology and biophysics at the Weizmann Institute of Sciences in Rehovot, Israel. Meanwhile his wife, Anna, stayed in Moscow to finish her undergradu-ate degree in education.

After two years in Israel, Mirny applied to graduate schools in the US and went to the Har-vard biophysics program to continue his study of molecular biophysics.

“I think it’s one of the best graduate pro-grams in its field. It’s similar to HST; it gives students tremendous freedom to choose their field and explore a multi-disciplinary background,” he said. “Now as co-director of HST’s Bioinformat-

ics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) program, I [find I] am both consciously and unconsciously trying to model BIG after the Harvard Biophys-ics program.”

He joined HST in 2001—when he was 30 years old—and has been a MEMP advisor for two years through the BIG program.

“We have very bright kids in the BIG pro-gram,” he said, “I [am not one for] committee work, but I like all the ‘stuff ’ to do with students, like graduate admissions and helping them find an advisor.”

Mirny got his PhD at Harvard quickly, in three-and-a-half years. Although this did not set a record, he did set a record for the shortest time between qualifying exam and thesis defense.

“I delayed my qualifying exam until I could decide what I wanted to [focus] it on…I decided I wanted to explore in vitro RNA evolution, and this was not related to my research topic. This is the point [at which] I started thinking about evolution more seriously,” he said.

After his PhD, Mirny was selected as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, a golden time in his life.

“This was a tremendous opportunity: three fantastic years with no responsibilities except to attend one dinner and two lunches every week,” he reminisces wistfully. “This is where I got to connect evolution and biophysics, my two big interests. This was a real privilege.”

Mirny explains the current focus of his work: “I thought we could do some theoretical model-ing of evolution itself. We need validation for our

theories; the traditional way is to collaborate with experimental labs, but I decided we can find vali-dation in genomics and bioinformatics. I thought we could also develop bioinformatics to validate the theories, use bioinformatics not as a goal but as a tool for validation. We use bioinformatics to con-nect computation and theory to events happening in the cell. We use bioinformatics and genomics as a research tool to validate our models, [so it’s] complementary to experimental validation.

“We do collaborate with experimental labs. However, you can think of what we do with bio-informatics as analogous to the use of microscopy as a technique to connect the in vitro and the in vivo. This is similar to our use of bioinformatics, a technique to connect our computer modeling in silico, to the in vivo. The unique thing about this is that most people work with bioinformatics as an end in itself, as the goal, but we’re using it as a research tool to connect theoretical modeling and live biological systems. For example, early on in the development of microscopy, developing a better microscope was an end in itself, and a necessary one. Then the focus became using the microscope to connect the lab (in vitro) work with the processes in cells (in vivo). Most bio-informatics labs develop bioinformatics as tools. We do develop tools, as we need them, [but only] in service to the goal of connecting theories to biological systems.”

Mirny points out that experimental labs, for example, try to bring about mutations in the genes they are studying. But nature, he says, has already tried a lot of mutations.

Young HST professor probes life’s

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“Bioinformatics allows us to read the lab journal of nature—by looking at the genomes and mutations they experienced and tolerated (or took advantage of ) through evolution. This doesn’t re-ally replace experiments, but it can complement them and eliminate the tedious trial-and-error process of finding the right mutation.”

Mirny says his lab is covering very different poles on the biological spectrum—looking, on the one hand, at how individual molecules interact, and on the other, at events in the whole cell.

“This is unusual, but it gives us the power to connect microscopic things to the macroscopic,” he said. “So we ask, for example, how can we

connect microscopic events like mutations to the action of a drug in disease and healing? The scale and the size of the ends of the issue are opposite. We deal with a single molecule, one nanometer in length, and also with the whole cell, up to a millimeter in diameter. The time scale varies dra-matically too—from very short molecular events in nano-seconds to the evolutionary process that has taken millions of years.”

Lest you think that Mirny is a one-sided scientist, his alter ego has been on full display in a comedy/musical/improv performance group he helped form in his pre-doctoral days at Har-vard—inspired by a Russian reality TV show from the late ’60s. Invited by students of an MIT Russian Club, he helped initiate a friendly competition between the Russians at Harvard and MIT. With Anna, an accomplished singer and actress, by his side, Mirny was the captain of the Harvard team. The goal was to be the funniest act. The first competition was a small event, but out of this grew 25 teams from around the country

who would get together regularly in Boston, New York, Berkeley, San Francisco and Chicago, to compete—with 1200-1500 people cheering them on from the audience.

“All in Russian!” he exclaimed. “We were the champions two years in a row, traveled with performances for another five, and my son Dan-iel, who is now 10, grew up at these rehearsals. Unfortunately, we don’t participate to the extent we used to, but I can say I performed in Madison Square Garden!”

The Mirnys, with Daniel and Naomi, age 4, love to travel.

“When I go to conferences in Europe, we all

go,” Mirny said. My son now loves to travel and because of this seems to have a strong interest in archaeology, in excavation. He’s been traveling since he was six months old.”

Even family vacations can lead to unexpected scientific gains, he said.

“Last summer in Woods Hole I dropped by a laboratory at the Marine Biology Labs we collaborate with. It was serendipity because I noticed interesting features in the measurements they were doing. I suggested they look at other measurements that I thought could shed light on the properties of the system they were studying. At first they were skeptical, but then they called to say it’s just as you predicted, and this has now become one of our biggest collaborations. So the family vacation at Woods Hole led to a big experimental collaboration.”

But the family’s busy schedule does not lend itself to many family vacations. Anna, who earned her EdD from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, works for Sesame Street.

“Being a junior professor is very intense,” Mirny said, “because of all the things we have to do. But going home to the family is always a relief. The question is whether we have enough time to go home and spend time with the kids.” In addition to work and family, he has expended much time and energy helping his parents get settled since they immigrated to Boston from Russia five years ago.

“It’s not easy for them,” he said, “but they’re happy to be with their family. It’s a new culture, a new language, a new lifestyle. They live close to us and are an enormous help with two young children. And they are very proud of my brother

and me.” His younger brother, who works for a Washington, DC-based NGO, was previously a journalist with the BBC.

In the midst of this busy, demanding and rewarding life, what keeps Mirny motivated is his profound interest in finding out what life is.

“We know that all living systems are built of molecules, but molecules are not a life,” he said. “Cells are alive, however. So, the mystery is, how do molecules come together to form a life. This is a challenge: connecting the infinitesimal molecular scale to the relatively sizeable cellular scale.”

Gazing at a colorful German poster he just received—a diagram of pictures of life from the very earliest cellular structure all the way to primates—Mirny muses: “Somehow the system becomes a cell, no longer a soup of molecules. The question is where does the soup of molecules become a cell?”

We can be sure that Leonid Mirny will con-tinue to plumb the depths of this mystery until he finds a satisfactory answer.

We know that all living things are built of molecules, but molecules are not a life. Cells are alive, however. So, the mystery is, how do molecules comes together to form a life.

Or ask him about the time he didn’t come home with all his clothes. On second thought, maybe that wasn’t Joe, but ask him anyway.

I will personally miss having Joe as a partner in running HST, but we both know that the real energy behind HST comes from the extraordinary students, faculty, alumni, and staff. We are both confident that we will continue to see remark-able HST-led advances in human health and a continuing stream of extraordinary students in the decades to come.

Joe, thanks for all you have taught me and done for HST. I look forward to many more years of working with you. And to all the faculty, staff, alumni, and students—thanks for your con-siderable effort and support over the last decade. Together we have accomplished a great deal, and we will continue to do so.

— Martha Gray

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Directors’ NotesNed Parsons joined HST on October 30 as

the Information Technology Coordinator, replac-ing Greg Dancer (see page 2). He will oversee all of HST’s administrative and academic IT needs. Before joining HST, Ned was a Macintosh systems consultant and Filemaker Pro database developer for firms such as Gearon Hoffman Advertising, Red Advertising and Mystic Artists Films. He has an extensive background in computer sys-tems administration and has managed a wide spectrum of technology issues including hardware maintenance and repair, software installation and configuration, upgrades, network configuration and server setup and maintenance.

Terrill Gadde, Director of Administration and Personnel at HST, said, “We are very excited about this addition to our staff and look forward to the many ways Ned’s experience will weave itself into solving many new exciting IT ventures.” Ned Parsons

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New IT guru joins HST family

8 Winter 2006-07

research newsLong Work Hours Increase Risk of Percutaneous Injuries in Interns

Charles A. Czeisler, MD, PhD, HST af-filiated faculty and the Frank Baldino Jr., PhD Professor of Sleep Medicine at HMS and BWH, is senior author of a study correlating work hours and injuries. Analyzing 498 percutaneous injuries reported by 2,737 interns in the US, the study found that lapses in concentration and fatigue were the most common contributory factors. Percutaneous injuries were more frequent during extended work hours, occurring after a mean of 29.1 consecutive work hours. (NT Ayas et al., JAMA 2006, 296: 1055-62.)

Today, Spider Silk—Tomorrow, Stronger Synthetic Materials?

MEMP student Nikola Kojic is first author of a study explaining how a spider silk can be strong enough to catch small birds and can even be used to make fishing nets in South America. He and his colleagues extracted the spinning material from the major ampullate glands of Nephila Clavi-pes, the golden silk orb-weaving spider. A sliding plate micro-rheometer was used to measure the steady-state shear viscosity of approximately 1 ml samples of silk spinning material—known as spin-ning dope—from individual specimens. While the viscosity of the spinning solution decreased 10-fold as it flowed through the spinning canals, the viscoelastic resistance to stretching increased more than 100 fold during spinning. The authors concluded that tailoring the rheological properties of artificial spinning dopes to match the ex vivo properties of the natural dope may help to produce a strong, novel synthetic material. (J Exp Biol 2006; 209:4355-62.) This work was done in the Hatsopoulos Microfluids Laboratory at MIT.

Air Travel Influences the Introduction and Spread of Influenza

John S. Brownstein, DPhil, and Cecily J. Wolfe, PhD, of HST’s Children’s Hospital Infor-matics Program are first and co-author, and Ken-neth D. Mandl, MD, HST affiliated faculty and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at HMS and CHB is senior author, of a study of how the frequency of air travel in the US affects the spread of influenza. The inter-regional spread and timing of influenza in the US was analyzed from 1996 to 2005, using data from the Center for Disease Control. They found that domestic airline travel volume in November is predictive of influenza mortality. Also, the ban on flights after Sept. 11, 2001—and the subsequent decrease in air travel—was associated with a delayed and prolonged influenza season. In France, where flight restrictions were not imposed, no delay was seen. The limitations of this study and possible implications for control of influenza are discussed. (JS Brownstein, PLoS Med 2006; 3:e401 [Epub ahead of print].)

Binaural Unmasking With Bilateral Cochlear Implants

Christopher J. Long, PhD ’00, is first author of a report on bilateral cochlear implants. In speech comprehension, normal subjects com-pensate for the deleterious effects of background noise by processing the differences between the waveforms reaching the two ears. Four deaf patients with bilateral cochlear implants were studied under varying conditions. All manifested significantly better signal detection when the signal was presented out of phase at the two ears than when it was in phase. This work suggests that patients with binaural cochlear implants have the advantage of better speech comprehension in noisy environments than patients with only one implant, which has been the therapy for nearly 100,000 deaf persons. (J Assoc Res Otolaryngo 2006; 7:352-60.) This work was done at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK.

Molecular Basis of Monogenetic DiseasesVamsi K. Mootha, MD ’98, Assistant Pro-

fessor of Systems Biology at HMS and MGH, is senior author of “Systematic identification of human mitochondrial disease genes through integrative genomics.”

This study advances the understanding of inherited mitochondrial disorders by using an integrated set of genomic techniques to expand the catalog of human mitochondrial proteins. Though mitochondria have their own DNA, the majority of mitochondrial disorders result from mutations of nuclear genes that encode proteins that target the mitochondria. The techniques normally used to identify such genes provide clues as to the likelihood that a protein targets the mitochondria by analyzing specific features of the proteins, but these approaches also have high false positive prediction rates. To reduce the false positive rate, Mootha and his colleagues brought together eight complementary genomic approaches. They integrated them into an overall computation that has a significantly lower false discovery rate than any single method.

Using this integrated technique, they identi-fied 368 novel predictions with a 10 percent esti-mated false prediction rate, expanding the known collection of genes encoding mitochondrial proteins to 1,080. They also identified candidate genes for eight mitochondrial disorders. “The integrative approach promises to better define the role of mitochondria in both rare and common human diseases,” write the authors. (S Calvo et al., Nat Genet 2006; 38: 576-82).

Hope for Patients with DementiaDavid E. Housman, PhD, HST faculty

and the Ludwig Professor of Biology at MIT, is co-author of “Pharmacological Promotion of Inclusion Formation: a therapeutic approach for

Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases.” In these diseases, misfolded proteins, such as huntingtin and alpha-synuclein, respectively, accumulate and may form cytoplasmic or nuclear inclusions. Screen-ing a library of chemical compounds, the authors identified a compound that promotes the formation of inclusions in cellular models of these diseases and prevents Huntingtin-mediated proteasome dysfunction and reduces alpha-synuclein-mediated toxicity. These findings suggest a new therapeutic approach for neurodegenerative diseases caused by protein misfolding. (RA Bodner et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 2006; 103: 4246-51.)

Error in Intravenous Delivery of DrugsMark A. Lovich, PhD ’97, MD ’99, is first

author of “The delivery of drugs to patients by continuous intravenous infusion: modeling predicts potential dose fluctuations depending on flow rates and infusion system dead volume.” Using phenyl-ephrine as a model compound, this study computed the steady-state mass of drug stored in the infusion set dead volume and found it to increase with con-centration of the drug and decrease with flow rate. Thus, the dead volume may contain a large mass of drug, available for an inadvertent bolus. Cessation of carrier flow reduced drug delivery significantly. Intravenous drug infusions thus have the potential for significant errors in dosing. (Anesth Analg 2006; 102:1147-53.) An HST Research Associate, Lovich is a member of the Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care at MGH.

Acupuncture May Benefit Patients with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

Vitaly J. Napadow, PhD ’01, Instructor in Radiology at HMS and MGH, had demonstrated in a previous paper (V Napadow et al., Neuroimage 2006; 31:520-30), by means of cross-sectional fMRI, that carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is not only manifested in the periphery, but is also char-acterized by maladaptive cortical plasticity demon-strating more extensive and stronger contralateral sensorimotor cortical representation compared to healthy controls. Now, he and his associates demonstrate that acupuncture, a somatosensory conditioning stimulus, “shows promise inducing beneficial cortical plasticity.” CTS patients dem-onstrated increased fMRI activity in contralateral Brodmann Areas 1 and 4. These abnormalities were significantly decreased after five weeks’ acu-puncture therapy (V Napadow et al., Hum Brain Mapp 2006 Jun 7; [Epub ahead of print]). This work was done at the HST Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH.

Therapeutic Value of Alcohol’s ToxicityMichael A. Fifer, MD ’78, is senior author,

and Gus J. Vlahakes, MD ’75, is co-author, of “Pathologic effects of alcohol septal abilation for hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy.” Hav-ing demonstrated previously (DS Jassal et al.,

The Connector 9

research newsEurHeart J, 2006; 27:1805-10) in one to two year follow-ups after successful alcohol septal abilation (ASA) in 30 patients with HOCM that significant improvement in echocardiographic measures of diastolic function were sustained, these authors examined myocardial biopsies from three pa-tients and autopsy specimens from one, two days to 14 months after successful ASA. Histology early after ASA revealed coagulative necrosis of both the myocardium and the septal perforator arteries. Affected arteries were distended and oc-cluted by necrotic intraluminal debris, without platelet fibrin thrombi. Thus, ASA resulted in acute myocardial infarction with vascular necrosis clearly distinguished from infarction secondary to coronary artery disease. (AL Baggish et al., Heart 2006; 92:1773-8.)

First Demonstration of Cerebral Plasticity after Recovery from Stroke

Bruce R. Rosen, PhD ’84, MD, Director of the HST Athinoula A. Martinos Center of Biomedical Imaging and Professor of Radiology at HMS and MGH, is co-author of “Structural and functional plasticity in the somatosensory cortex of chronic stroke patients.” Motor recovery after experimental stroke in animals has been associated with re-organized neural activity, or functional plas-ticity, in sensorimotor cortical areas that also exhibit morphological changes, or structural plasticity. Whereas functional plasticity has been described in patients recovering from stroke, structural plasticity has not been demonstrated in man. Nine patients with chronic ischemic strokes were studies by struc-tural and functional MRI during unilateral tactile stimulation and compared to nine control subjects. The patients showed a significant increase in the activation response in areas of the ventral postcen-tral gyrus as well as significant increase in cortical thickness in those areas compared to controls. Control areas showed no difference in thickness or activation response between the groups. Thus, functional plasticity is accompanied by structural plasticity in patients recovering from stroke. (JD Schaechter et al., Brain 2006;129:2722-33.)

Predicting the Potential for MalignancyMEMP student Scott Carter is first author

of “A signature of chromosomal instability inferred from gene expression profiles predicts clinical outcome in multiple human cancers.” This report presents a computational method to characterize aneuploidy (imbalance in the number of chro-mosomes or chromosome segments) in tumor samples based on aberrations in expression of genes localized to each chromosome region. Net over-expression predicted poor clinical outcome in 12 cancer data sets representing six types of cancer. (Nat Genet 2006; 38:1043-8.)

Carter is a student in the Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics training program, a track in MEMP. Co-author on the paper is Isaac S.

Kohane, MD, PhD, head of this training pro-gram and the Lawrence J. Henderson Associate Professor of HST.

New Therapy For Singers’ Polyps, CystsSteven M. Zeitels, MD, is first author, R.

Rox Anderson, MD ’84, is senior author, and Robert E. Hillman, PhD, is co-author of “Pulsed angiolytic laser treatment of ectasias and varices in singers.” Varices and ectasias in singers are typically the result of phonotraumatic shearing stresses and/or collision forces on the microcirculation within the superficial lamina propria. These lesions can be debilitating in performing vocalists because of the effect of recurrent hemorrhage and/or as a contributing factor to the morbidity of other mass lesions such as polyps, nodules, and cysts. Current therapies are risky and thus not satisfactory. A trial of two types of pulsed lasers was carried out in 39 patients with varices and ectasias associated with other phonotraumatic mass lesions. All patients have resumed full vocal activities without hemor-rhage or vocal deterioration. (Ann Otol Rhinol Laryngol 2006; 115: 571-80.)

Zeitel, Anderson and Hillman are members of the HST affiliated faculty. Zeitels is the Eugene B. Casey Associate Professor of Laryngeal Surgery at HMS and MGH, Anderson is Professor of Dermatology at HMS and MGH and Director, of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at MGH, and Hillman is Associate Professor of Surgery at HMS and MGH.

Stem Cell Research in ChinaIn the September 2006 issue of the New

England Journal of Medicine (355: 1191-4), Fiona Murray, PhD, HST affiliated faculty and Associ-ate Professor of Management at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, reports on the strengths and limitations of stem-cell research in China. This article, which includes a table listing the location and research focus of seven researchers, is based on a study trip she undertook with Debora Spar, PhD, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.

(VEGF)-C Aids Lymphatic MetastasesRakesh K. Jain, PhD, HST affiliated faculty

and the A. Werk Cook Professor of Radiation Oncology at HMS and MGH, is senior author, and Timothy P. Padera, PhD ’03, Instructor in Radiation Oncology at HMS and MGH, is co-author of “Imaging steps of lymphatic metastasis reveals that vascular endothelial growth factor-C increases metastasis by increasing delivery of cancer cells to lymph nodes: therapeutic implica-tions.” In tumors growing in the tips of mouse ears, the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)-C in the transport of tumor cells to lymph nodes was imaged and quantified by means of intravital microscopy. (VEGF)-C was found to be over-expressed in cancer cells, re-

sulting in hyperplasia in peritumor lymphatics and increasing lymphatic flow rates, as well as lymph node metastases. An anti-VEGF receptor antibody reduced both lymphatic hyperplasia and the delivery of tumor cells to the draining lymph node, resulting in a reduction of lymph node metastasis. (T Hoshida et al., Cancer Res 2006; 66:8065-75.)

3-D Miniature EndoscopySenior author Guillermo J. Tearney, MD,

PhD, and co-author Brett Bouma, PhD, intro-duce a single optical fiber that acts as a flexible probe, which can “transmit a superior image of an internal landscape” in three dimensions. Using a technology called spectrally encoded endoscopy (SEE), multicolored light from a single optical fi-ber—introduced through a probe about the width of a human hair—is broken into component colors and projected onto tissue, with each color illuminating a different part of the tissue surface. The reflected light is analyzed by a spectrometer and an interferometer, providing three-dimen-sional images. The authors demonstrated SEE’s potential for minimally invasive application by imaging ovarian tumor nodules, metastatic to the peritoneum of a mouse. They anticipate that SEE will give rise to new procedures that permit diagnosis and microsurgery in areas of the body previously inaccessible to endoscopy. (D Yelin et al., Nature 2006; 443:765.)

Tearney is a member of the HST affiliated faculty and Associate Professor of Pathology at HMS and MGH. Bouma is an HST faculty member and Associate Professor of Dermatology at HMS and MGH. Their work was done at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at MGH, a research center affiliated with HST.

Apoptotic Leukocytes Remove Pro-inflammatory Mediators

Charles N. Serhan, PhD, affiliated HST faculty and the Simon Gelman Professor of Anaesthesia at HMS and BWH, is senior author of “Apoptotic neutrophils and T cells sequester chemokines during immune response resolution through modulation of CCRS expression.” This research studied an experimental model of mice deficient in the chemokine CCR5, which binds the chemokines CCL3, CCL4 and CCL5 involved in inflammation and autoimmunity. During resolution of acute peritonitis in this model, the chemokine receptor ligands CCL3 and CCL5 per-sisted. CCR5 expression on apoptotic neutrophils and activated apoptotic T cells sequestered and cleared CCL3 and CCL5 from sites of inflam-mation. The authors concluded that “apoptotic leukocytes can actively participate in terminating chemokine signaling by reducing the quantities of those mediators in the local milieu during the resolution of inflammation.” (A Ariel et al., Nat Immunol 2006; 7:1209-16.)

10 Winter 2006-07

alumni news1970s

Norman A. Mazer, MD, PhD ’78, Associate Professor of Medicine at Boston University, was the 2006 recipient of the North American Meno-pause Society/Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Androgen Research Award. This award rec-ognizes an individual “whose recently published research has advanced the understanding of the role of androgen (endogenous or exogenous) in postmenopausal women.” In 2000 Mazer and colleagues published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Trans-dermal Testosterone Treatment in Women with Impaired Sexual Function after Oophorectomy.” At Boston University he directs the Androgen Clinical Research Unit and continues his HST passions by developing mathematical models of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axes in men and women.

1980s

NIH has awarded a $7.8 million grant to the laboratory of Judy Lieberman, PhD, MD ’81, to study development of an HIV-microbicide. A pioneer in the clinical application of RNA interfer-ence, Lieberman is Professor of Pediatrics at HMS and CHB, and also a senior investigator at the CBR Institute. The four-year grant will allow her lab to study the uses of RNAi technology against HIV. The first step will be to determine which cells would be effectively targeted. The ultimate goal of the grant is to create a gel that can deliver small interfering RANs (siRNAs ) in the right cells to prevent infection.

She also heads the HMS Division of AIDS, which has developed research protocols and clini-cal trials in Vietnam, South Africa and India.

Elazer R. Edelman, MD ’83, PhD ’84, has been elected to the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academy of Sciences. Edelman is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, and Professor of Medicine at HMS and BWH.

The X PRIZE Foundation, of which Peter H. Diamandis, MD ’89, is chairman, announced on October 4 another $10 million prize. The Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, the largest one in medical history, will be awarded to the group that can sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days, and a further 100 within six months.

1990s

Merit E. Cudkowicz, MD ’90, received the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s 2006 Diamond Award. She was honored for her leadership in drug development and clinical trials. Cudkowicz is Professor of Neurology at HMS and MGH.

George Q. Daley, MD ’91, Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at HMS and CHB, was presented the American Philosophical Society’s 2006 Judson Daland Prize in a ceremony in San Francisco on November 10. The Daland Prize recognizes out-standing achievement in patient-oriented clinical research. His work focuses on disease processes and therapies using stem cell biology.

Ralph de la Torre, MD ’92, Instructor in Surgery at HMS and section chief of cardiac surgery at BIDMC, reports the establishment of a new hybrid catheterization/surgery/electro-physiology (EP) operating room at BIDMC’s west campus. This facility is the only one of its kind in the US and allows the diagnosis and therapy of some of the most complex and high-risk patients in one setting.

In November, Daniel K. Sodickson, PhD ’94, MD ’96, assumed the position of Director of the Center for Biomedical Imaging (CBI) at New York University School of Medicine. The mission of the CBI, which was established in 2003 and now houses over 60 researchers and administrative staff, is to develop new imaging technologies for the improved medical care of patients. Previously, Sodickson was Assistant Professor of Radiology and Medicine at HMS and BIDMC, member of the HST faculty, and Director of the Laboratory for Biomedical Imaging Research at BIDMC.

Elaine Lee, PhD ’95, wrote that she “reads every HST newsletter with interest” and sent her personal update:

“After a brief postdoc at Virginia Tech, I’ve been working on tissue engineering or regenerative medicine projects in medical device companies. I was at Baxter Healthcare (Renal Division) in Illi-nois before moving to Silicon Valley, where I live now. I spent several years with Boston Scientific (Neurovascular Division), and I recently started as a program manager with Kyphon, a company that focuses on minimally invasive treatments of spinal disorders. I’m helping to start a program for biologic therapies.

“But the really big news in my life is that my husband, Wilson Tsang (PhD ’94 MIT), and I became the parents of boy-girl twins, Carter Tsang and Nadia Lee, in December 2004. As I imagine others have found, parenting is much more chal-lenging than earning a PhD! And, in case anyone is wondering, I still have my long tail (braid)!”

Joshua M. Kosowsky, MD ’96, has been promoted to Assistant Professor of Medicine at HMS and Clinical Director of the Department of Emergency Medicine at BWH.

Scott S. Rauch, MD, CITP-M ’96, Associ-ate Professor of Psychiatry at HMS and MGH, has been appointed president and psychiatrist in

chief of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. He is also Chair of Partners Psychiatry and Mental Health.

The MIT Deshpande Center for Technologi-cal Innovation awarded Sangeeta N. Bhatia, PhD ’97, MD ’99, one of six 2006 research grants to for “Human liver models for faster, safer drug development.” This miniature human liver tissue could lead to safer, faster and more cost-effective drug development by measuring toxicity at an early stage in the development process.

Vamsi Mootha, MD ’98, is one of the first 13 recipients of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Physician-Scientist Early Career Award. The prize provides $150,000 over three years to promising physician-scientists in their early years as tenure-track faculty at academic medical centers. Mootha is Assistant Professor of Systems Biology at HMS and MGH.

Stephen A. Boppart, PhD ’98, MD ’00, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Bioengineering and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been named Director of the Mills Breast Cancer Institute there. He and his associates have devel-oped a new approach to diagnostic intra-operative imaging.

David A. Shaywitz, MD ’99, PhD, Instruc-tor in Medicine at HMS and MGH, and member of the MGH Neuroendocrine Clinical Center, has joined the newly formed Division of Experimen-tal Medicine at Merck in Rahway, NJ. His wife, who is also a physician-scientist, will join him at Merck in the spring. He writes, “The motivation was to pursue a life-long interest in translational research, and in driving good science into clinical application, something that obviously is a key fo-cus of industry (and certainly of the experimental medicine division at Merck).”

2000s

Michael P. Harms, PhD ’00, writes: “I’m excited to let you know that I’ve begun the next phase of my career as a Senior Scientist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, where I’ll be working in a group (headed by Dr. Csernansky) that uses MR imaging to study structural changes in the brain of patients with schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. We are also beginning a project in an APP mouse mode.”

Fa-Hsuan Lin, PhD ’04, a faculty mem-ber of the HST Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH, was awarded the annual Sam Williamson Prize at the 15th International Conference on Biomagnetism in Vancouver, Canada, in August. Lin received the

The Connector 11

M i s s i n g A l u m n i / a e

Michael J. Kaplan, MD ’77Michael C. Scally, MD ’80Elly Trepman, MD ’82Lyle J. Borg-Graham, PhD ’92Peter M. Li, MD ’93Adam M. Brook, MD ’96, PhDSanjay R. Patel, MD ’96Paul Powen Wang, MD ’97Marta K. Taylor, MD ’98Wing Sze Cheung, MD ’99Ravi Vivekanand Joshi, MD ’00Christopher Brian Reid, MD ’00, PhDBenjamin Chih-An Sun, MD ’00 Nachman Ash, MD (MS-SM ’01)Roy Hoshi Hamilton, MD ’01Christopher R. Wright, MD (CITP ’01)Siobhan Hutchinson, MD (CITP ’02) Jerry Wynie Lin, MD ’02Orlando Rodriguez, MD (CITP ’02)Nam Chul Yu, MD ’02J. Alan Groff, PhD ’04

Help the HST Alumni Office locate missing graduates. If you have contact information for any of the following alumni/ae, contact The Connector at hst@mit.edu. Thank You!

medical education overall.HST Director Martha L. Gray, an early

graduate of the MEMP program, led the audience through the progression of HST’s paradigm shift, evolving from enthusiasm combined with skepti-cism, to resistance, to—finally—its acceptance as “old hat.” She attested to London’s pioneering and innovative spirit and how his continued presence at HST’s headquarters has been one of her inspirations.

Former MIT President Howard Johnson, PhD reflected on the background of HST and its early days of planning, which occurred during his tenure. “There would be no HST without Irv’s persistent commitment and self assurance that it could be done,” Johnson said. He also praised the high quality of the first HST students, who played a major role in the success and survival of the program.

David Cohen, MD, PhD, a graduate of the program and now a member of the HST faculty, introduced the guest of honor. London had been

an advisor to Cohen’s father at Einstein, as well as to himself at many points in his career. Thus, he has known him as a teacher, supervisor, advi-sor, and now co-course director at HST, and for this he expressed his deep personal admiration and gratitude.

Lastly, London conveyed his thanks and ap-preciation for this recognition. He paid tribute to the extraordinary hard work of many colleagues, and expressed his appreciation for the strong interest and support of former MIT President Jerome Wiesner and former HMS Dean Ebert. He also acknowledged the commitment and loy-alty from the countless faculty members of both universities, and the stalwart support of his late wife and family.

The Prosperis have been commissioned for several works in the New England medical com-munity. They painted “Ether Day, 1846,” a large mural-size painting of the first public demonstra-tion of general anesthesia, which hangs in the Ether Dome at MGH.

HST Director Martha Gray relates to the audience of how Irving London’s presence at HST’s headquarters has been one of her inspirations throughout the years. (from left) Joseph Bonventre, Howard Johnson, Joseph Martin, and London.Ju

stin

Kni

ght

Williamson Prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field by an investigator early in his or her career, for his research in both MRI and MEG analysis methods.

Anita Goel, PhD, MD ’05, founder and CEO of Nanobiosym, Inc., received the 2006 MIT Global Indus Technovators Award in the category of Biotechnology/Medicine/Healthcare. This award is one of 10 given to outstanding individuals at the forefront of technology and entrepreneurship.

Nanobiosym, Inc. investigates fundamental questions at the interface of physics, medicine and nanotechnology, and works to develop the next generation nanobiosensors for rapid clinical diagnostics.

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London portrait

the MEMP/BIG program through the Divi-sion of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard. He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Princeton.

■ Kathleen Sienko, a MEMP student through the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, is conducting research on bal-ance disorders at the Vestibular Diagnostic Lab at MEEI.

■ Erika Wagner, also a MEMP student through Aero/Astro, studies the effects of partial grav-ity on the musculoskeletal system at the MIT Man-Vehicle Lab.

Funded by the NSBRI, with support from NASA and its Johnson Space Center (JSC), this program’s goal is to raise up this century’s bioas-

tronautics leaders. It combines the biomedical and engineering disciplines of MEMP with space life science and human factors specialization, and hands-on experience in the human space flight arena. In addition to the MEMP requirements, bioastronautics students take three space life sci-ences foundation subjects and one further subject from a list of bioastronautics restricted electives. They also spend a summer experiencing practi-cal space activities, normally a month’s course at JSC, followed by an internship at NASA or an industrial laboratory. Their clinical preceptor-ship is combined with the Aerospace Medicine clerkship at JSC. Thesis research is normally conducted under the supervision of a Harvard or MIT faculty member who is a Principal Investi-gator of a NSBRI or NASA Life Sciences grant. For further information, contact Cathy Modica at cmodica@mit.edu.

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Bioastronautics

12 Winter 2006-07

The Harvard-MIT Division ofHealth Sciences and Technology77 Massachusetts Ave., E25-519Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

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On November 13, more than 200 HST supporters had a fabulous time at An Evening of Anatomy and helped raise $40,000 for student research. Held at the Boston Museum of Science amidst the atmosphere of Gunther von Hagens’ “Body Worlds 2,” this was the first time in HST’s history that an event was held to raise funds to support students.

This event was the inspiration of Richard Anders, a member of HST’s Advisory Council and of the Museum’s board, and of Joseph Madsen, MD ’81, president of the HST Alumni Associa-tion. The HST Advisory Board and Council, to-gether with HST’s Alumni Association, sponsored this event, which was also supported by many individual and corporate donors.

Guests were guided through the evening by HST faculty docents and MD students. After viewing the exhibit, attendees enjoyed dinner and then were treated to a presentation by Farish A. Jenkins, PhD, Professor of Anatomy at HST and the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zool-ogy at Harvard. His scintillating lecture—in his inimitable style, so admired by generations of HST students—illuminated the long path to his discovery of Tiktaalik roseae, the fish-tetrapod transition, in the Canadian Arctic.

Anatomy event raises funds for student body

Farish Jenkins regales Alan D’Andrea, MD ’83, and Bonnie Fendrock with an anecdote during the cocktail reception portion of An Evening of Anatomy. D’Andrea is the Fuller American Cancer Society Professor of Radiation Oncology at HMS/DFCI. Fendrock, his wife, is a member of the Biomedical Enterprise Program Board.

Justin Knight