Alpha
Omega Alpha Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Awards, 2001
By
Edward D. Harris, Jr., M.D.
David
C. Dale, M.D., President of Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society,
presented the Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Awards to
four prominent medical educators. Each winner receives $10,000
for continued activities as a teacher, his medical institution
is given $5,000 for teaching programs, and the school’s Alpha
Omega Alpha chapter is awarded $1,000.
Walter
J. Bo, Ph.D.
Professor
of Neurobiology and Anatomy,
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
on the Bowman Gray campus.
Walter Bo is now 78 years old, and it appears that his love of
teaching keeps him young! After earning his Ph.D. at the University
of Cincinnati in 1953, Dr. Bo joined the medical faculty at the
University of North Dakota, and reached the rank of associate
professor before moving to Bowman Gray in 1963, where he has taught
for the past 43 years. He is one of the first faculty to meet
matriculating students, instilling discipline, preparation, responsiveness,
and respect for life.
Although much of Dr. Bo’s career antedated the computer revolution,
he has emerged as a passionate proponent of the power of technology
in medical education. His widely recognized textbook, Basic
Atlas of Cross Sectional Anatomy, used in many anatomy courses,
has been set in an interactive web-based format. Dr. Bo’s laboratory
research generated NIH funding from 1963 through 1977. He has
received the Basic Science Teaching Excellence Award at Wake Forest
eleven times and in 1991 was presented with the Outstanding Service
Award of the School of Medicine. In each of three decades Dr.
Bo was given the School of Medicine Excellence in Teaching Award.
Dr. Bo’s continued vigor is attested by his leadership role in
guiding the faculty through a recent reform of the curriculum
at Wake Forest. He has taught anatomy to more than 3,800 medical
students over these 43 years and is described as the “quintessential
teacher with a heart of gold.”
J.
John Cohen, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor
of Immunology,
University of Colorado School of Medicine
“JJ,”
as Dr. J. John Cohen is known around the Denver campus, earned
both his Ph.D. in biochemistry/immunology and his M.D. during
eight years at McGill during the 1960s, and after a postdoctoral
fellowship with Dr. Henry N. Claman at the University of Colorado
and with Av Mitchinson at Mill Hill in London he joined the Colorado
Medicine faculty and has served there for 29 years. His research
in programmed cell death and apoptosis has been widely acclaimed.
As an example, the chapter he wrote on apoptosis in the immune
system in Frank Dixon’s 1991 Advances in Immunology has
been cited more than 2,000 times.
Dr. Cohen is the only teacher the University of Colorado Excellence
in Teaching Award every year for the past 18 years. He has been
the Teacher of the Year five times, has received the President’s
award for teaching twice, and the Chancellor’s award from the
graduating class twice. His exams are keyed to Magerian learning
objectives, constituting a contract with the students. The course
web site (http://mama.uchsc.edu) contains all of the objectives
and complete notes, and is enhanced with practice tests, animations,
and self-directed learning modules. Going beyond his expected
duties, Dr. Cohen has over the past 12 years developed a Mini
Med School, consisting of free lectures for the general public,
that draws a standing-room-only crowd.
Dr. Cohen says of his students and postdocs, “I care about their
development as people as much as I care about their development
as physicians and scientists. I try to create an environment in
which they are comfortable and can work at the level they’re happy
working at.”
Douglas
S. Paauw, M.D.
Associate
Professor of Medicine,
University of Washington School of Medicine
Doug Paauw earned his doctor of medicine degree at the University
of Michigan in 1985. After his residency at the University of
Washington, he joined the faculty there in 1990. Despite his relative
youth, in 2000 Dr. Paauw was awarded an endowed chair given by
the Rathmann Family Foundation for Patient-Centered Clinical Education.
In 1991 Dr. Paauw took on the task of directing the core medicine
clerkship and helped expand the program to include sites in Alaska,
Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. His syllabus for the clerkship (Guide
to Internal Medicine) is used by many scholars. A case-based
problem-solving approach that parallels the core curriculum can
be found on the internet at eduserv.hscer.washington.edu/med665/.
Dr. Paauw founded the student-run “Osler Club” for generating
interest in internal medicine. Recently, Dr. Paauw developed a
curriculum that addresses patient communication issues and physician
ethics for the clerkship. He has been a leader in developing effective
use of standardized patients for assessing HIV risk and identification,
and will be sharing his accomplishments as clerkship director
by publishing a handbook for those in this important role in medical
schools.
Dr. Paauw’s teaching efforts have been recognized by his receipt
of the Distinguished Teaching Award at the University of Washington
in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997.
Dr. Paauw’s nomination for the Robert J. Glaser Distinguished
Teacher Award stated, “His door is always open.”
Steven
E. Weinberger, M.D.
Professor
of Medicine,
Harvard Medical School
A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Medical School
(where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha in 1973), Dr. Weinberger
was a resident in medicine at the University of California at
San Francisco, and then served as a clinical associate in the
Pulmonary Branch at the NIH in Bethesda. In 1980, he became an
assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and
15 years later achieved promotion to professor. Dr. Weinberger’s
hospital base at Harvard has been at the Beth Israel Hospital
and, after serving for four years as Chief of the Pulmonary and
Critical Care Division, he was named Vice Chairman and Associate
Physician-in-Chief in the Department of Medicine in 1998.
Since 2000, he has been Executive Director of the Shapiro Institute
for Education and Research at Harvard Medical School. His priorities
at the Shapiro Institute have been to support trainees, aid in
faculty issues facing medical education at a national level.
Dr. Weinberger’s passion for innovation in teaching is illustrated
by two electives that he initiated for Harvard students, including
an inter-institutional pulmonary clinical elective with a common
didactic series, and an advanced biomedical science course named
Everything You Wanted to Know from Core Medicine but Were Afraid
to Ask.
Dean Joseph Martin points out that Dr. Weinberger “has received
more teaching awards than any other faculty member in the history
of Harvard Medical School.” These include the S. Robert Stone
Teaching Award (1986), the Preclinical Teaching Award (1990, 1992,
1994, 1996, 2000 and 2001), and awards by the Class of 2002 for
excellence in both Lecturing and Tutoring.#
Reprinted
from The Pharos, Autumn 2001, pp. 26-30. Copyright 2001, Alpha
Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society.
Education Update, Inc., P.O. Box 20005, New York, NY 10001. Tel:
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