News and Highlights
June 2009
Media and Publicity
Nathaniel Hupert, MD, MPH, Associate Professor of Public Health and Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, and Director of the Preparedness Modeling Unit of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was interviewed for a podcast with Perot Systems. The topic of their discussion was “Looking Forward: The Use of Health IT in Crisis Control.” Click here to listen to the podcast or read the transcript.
Dr. Hupert’s appointment as Director of the CDC’s Preparedness Modeling Unit is continuing to receive publicity. It was reported by Supercomutingonline and HPCWire.com; the later was placed in the newsletter of the UPMC Center for Civilian Biodefense.
The presentation by Dr. David Skorton, President of Cornell University, at this year’s Medical Ethics Division Seminar Series celebrating the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, was covered in the Dean’s Bulletin. Dr. Skorton’s talk was titled “Bridging the Two Cultures Divide in Medicine and the Academy.” The event and the series were organized by Dr. Joseph J. Fins, Professor of Medicine, Public Health, and Medicine in Psychiatry and Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics.
Lawrence P. Casalino, MD, PhD, MPH, Chief of the Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness Research, was quoted in an article in Industry.bnet.com called “Should MedPAC Be Given Authority Over Medicare Payments?” Dr.Casalino expresses his support of a proposal to give the Medicare Advisory Payment Commission (MedPAC) new powers to determine Medicare reimbursement of providers, saying “I think the MedPAC commissioners are very good, and they can make decisions that would be hard for the politicians to make.”
Public Health Department Faculty Prominently Featured in Spring 2009 Weill Cornell Medicine
Dr. Nathaniel Hupert and his work in the field of disaster preparedness was the subject of a feature article in the Spring 2009 issue of Weill Cornell Medicine magazine. The article, “In the Event of an Emergency” (page 24), explored his current research as well as his background and experiences that helped form his interests. Cornell University Professor Jack Muckstad, who with Dr. Hupert co-directs the Cornell Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness, was also mentioned in the article, as was his colleague Dr. Wei Xiong, Instructor of Public Health in the Division of Outcomes and Effectiveness Research.
The Spring 2009 issue of Weill Cornell Medicine magazine also discussed the work of a number of other faculty members in the Department of Public Health. These mentions included two in the Talk of the Gown section of the magazine: The study, “A simple algorithm to predict incident kidney disease” (Archives of Internal Medicine, December 2008), was described on page 20. The study authors included Phyllis August, MD, MPH, Professor of Medicine and Public Health; Heejung Bang, PhD, MS, Associate Professor of Biostatistics in Public Health; Madhu Mazumdar, PhD, MA, MS, Professor of Biostatistics in Public Health and Chief of the Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology; and Lisa Kern, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medicine.
Dr. Pablo Rodriguez del Pozo’s lesson to premedical students at Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar using The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy was described on page 23. Dr. Rodriguez del Pozo, who is Associate Professor of Public Health/Qatar in the Division of Medical Ethics, used the novel to illustrate how a patient’s experience and concerns can differ from a doctor’s.
