medicine Back to school

vermont
medicine
U N I V E R S I T Y
O F
V E R M O N T
C O L L E G E
O F
M E D I C I N E
Back
to school
Two alumni experience
today’s medical curriculum
S U M M E R
2008
vermont
medicine
U V M
C O L L E G E
O F
M E D I C I N E
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M A G A Z I N E
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S U M M E R
FROM THE DEAN
2
COLLEGE NEWS
3
The College climbs in primary care ranking,
a former faculty and administrator heads to a
deanship in Florida, the Class of 2008
celebrates the beginning of their careers,
and more.
HALL A
PRESIDENT ’ S CORNER
CLASS NOTES
DEVELOPMENT NEWS
OBITUARIES
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28
29
31
37
2 0 0 8
10
BACK TO SCHOOL
Three decades after graduation, two
alumni return to experience the medical
curriculum of today.
by ellen andrews ’75
& james gallagher ’75
16
A SCHOLARLY PRESCRIPTION
Fourth-year projects help develop
physician-scholars at the College of
Medicine: a look at a few such members
of the Class of 2008.
photography by rajan chawla
22
THE ART OF GARAGE SCIENCE
Collaboration has been key to the
cardiology research of 2008 University
Scholar Martin LeWinter, M.D., as he and
his fellow researchers seek to understand
what drives the engine of life.
by jennifer nachbur
on the cover:
Photograph of Ellen Andrews, M.D.’75 by Raj Chawla
vermont
medicine
FROM THE DEAN
S U M M E R
COLLEGE NEWS
2 0 0 8
Associate Professor Charles MacLean,
M.D. instructs Juli-Anne Gardner '10 in
his Essex, Vt. practice.
EDITOR
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of taking part
in my first Commencement ceremony since coming to the College of Medicine last fall. It was an
honor to share that afternoon with our graduates,
and with the hundreds of friends and family
members who came to campus to take part in that
joyous occasion. As I said at the ceremony,
Commencement is significant not only because
of the celebration that takes place on that day, but
because of the acceptance of great responsibility that begins with the conferring of the degree — the responsibility for all the thousands of patients
that lay ahead of each graduate in the years ahead. Great personal growth
comes with taking responsibility for another person, and it is the depth of
those connections with others that will bring these graduates their greatest fulfillment as physicians and as people.
Those graduates joined an elite group of people, our alumni, who carry
on our tradition of excellence and extend our campus beyond its physical
borders. Two of those alumni, Ellen Andrews and James Gallagher from
the class of 1975, came up with the idea of returning to campus for an
intensive week this spring to experience first-hand what it is like to study
medicine under today’s Vermont Integrated Curriculum. As you will read
in this issue, they found the process of becoming a physician at today’s
College of Medicine similar in spirit to their student days more than 30
years ago, but greatly changed and, in their opinion and the opinion of
many others, greatly improved for the changing, complex environment of
21st century medical practice.
Dr. Andrews sent me a wonderful note after her week in residence in
which she likened the faculty collaboration she’d experienced to listening
to a fine string ensemble — each member displaying consummate artistry
and professionalism, with the whole collaborative enterprise delivering a
breathtaking performance. All of us at UVM can count ourselves lucky to
work on a campus where the spirit of collaboration and our compact physical campus allow us to build productive cooperative relationships every
day. Our graduates will need to build such professional collaborations for
the rest of their careers, and I’m glad to know that the very curriculum
which guided them is a tangible outgrowth of the collaborative spirit.
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M E D I C I N E
RAJ CHAWLA
edward neuert
ASSISTANT DEAN
FOR COMMUNICATIONS & PLANNING
carole whitaker
WRITER
jennifer nachbur
ART DIRECTOR
elise whittemore-hill
ASSISTANT
aliza mansolino
UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT
COLLEGE OF MEDICINE
DEAN
frederick c. morin iii, m.d.
EDITORIAL ADVISORS
rick blount
ASSISTANT DEAN FOR
DEVELOPMENT & ALUMNI RELATIONS
marilyn j. cipolla, ph.d.’ 97
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
OF NEUROLOGY
christopher s. francklyn,
ph.d.
PROFESSOR OF BIOCHEMISTRY
the nation, and our curriculum provides wonderful opportunities for
medical students to understand the
critical role of the primary care
physician, gain experience in a
range of clinical settings, and build a
solid foundation for lifetime learning across all disciplines.”
The College’s Vermont Integrated Curriculum integrates
basic science and clinical education from the first weeks in medical school, including experience with community
physicians and teaching hospital partner Fletcher
Allen Health Care.
“It is both a privilege and a responsibility to train
the next generation of primary care physicians in
today’s dynamic health care environment,” said
Melinda Estes, M.D., president and chief executive
officer of Fletcher Allen. “Here in Vermont, we take
that responsibility very seriously, and it is nice to be
recognized for doing this well in a rural environment.”
5th in Nation for Primary Care
The University of Vermont College of Medicine
now ranks fifth for primary care among the nation's
126 medical schools according to the U.S. News &
World Report 2009 “America’s Best Graduate Schools.”
UVM moved up from seventh last year.
“We’re proud to be recognized as a national leader in
providing top-quality medical education and training
for primary care physicians,” said College of Medicine
Dean Frederick Morin, M.D. “Primary care is an integral part of the health care system in our state and across
james c. hebert, m.d.’ 77
MACKAY- PAGE PROFESSOR OF SURGERY
russell tracy, ph.d.
SENIOR ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR RESEARCH
& ACADEMIC AFFAIRS
vermont medicine is published three times a
year by the University of Vermont College of Medicine.
Articles may be reprinted with permission of the editor.
Please send address changes, alumni class notes, letters
to the editor, and other correspondence to
University of Vermont College of Medicine Alumni
Office, Given Building, 89 Beaumont Ave., Burlington,
VT 05405. telephone: (802) 656-4014
Letters specifically to the editor may be e-mailed to:
[email protected]
Fogarty Named Dean of FSU College of Medicine
Faculty member and administrator
John P. Fogarty, M.D., who served as
Interim Dean of the College from
2006 to 2007, has been appointed
Dean of the Florida State University
College of Medicine. He will assume
the new post in August.
Fogarty joined UVM in 1995 as
Professor and Chair of the Department of Family Medicine and Physician Leader of Family Medicine at
Fletcher Allen Health Care. In recognition of his leadership role as a champion of primary care in Vermont,
Fogarty was named Associate Dean
for Primary Care in June 2006.
In July 2006, Fogarty was tapped
to serve as Interim Dean of the
RAJ CHAWLA
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College of Medicine, and over the
next 15 months provided stable
leadership during the search for a
permanent dean. During his tenure,
new chairs in Medicine and Surgery
and the president of the faculty
practice were recruited, the entering class of medical students grew in
numbers as well as quality measures, and a new Center for Clinical
and Translational Science was
approved as UVM began preparations for submission of a Clinical
and Translational Science Award
(CTSA) from the National Institutes
of Health.
“Jay has made numerous contributions to our school, to the univer-
sity and to the state of
Vermont,” said Dean Frederick
Morin, M.D. “Personally, he
was a great ally for me in my
transition to Vermont. I am
sad to see him go. However,
we are all proud of him and
know he will be a great dean John P. Fogarty. M.D.
at FSU.”
“Like UVM, the FSU College of
Medicine is patient-focused, with a
commitment to Florida and its citizens to provide medical care and
workforce solutions for them,” said
Fogarty. “My tenure in Vermont prepared me well to take on this new
responsibility, and I am looking forward to all that lies ahead.”
S U M M E R
2008
3
COLLEGE NEWS
RESEARCH MILESTONES
UVM Faculty Assume
Leadership Roles at
Pediatrics Journal
Three members of the College’s Department of
Pediatrics will serve in national editorial leadership
roles as part of an upcoming change at Pediatrics, the
peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of
Pediatrics (AAP) and preeminent journal in the world
in its field.
Jerold F. Lucey, M.D., Harry W. Wallace Professor
of Neonatology at UVM, and Pediatrics editor-inchief for the past 34 years, will step down as of January
2009 and become editor-in-chief emeritus. His successor will be Ralph D. Feigin, M.D., professor and chair
of the Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. Stepping up as the new
deputy editor will be Lewis R. First, M.D., professor
and chair of pediatrics and senior associate dean for
medical education at UVM. In addition, Jeffrey
Horbar, M.D., who is the Jerold F. Lucey, M.D. Chair
of Neonatal Medicine at UVM, will become one of
three new associate editors of the journal.
“It has been an honor for the UVM College of
Medicine, and for Vermont, to house the editorial
office of this prestigious publication, and we are proud
to have three of our faculty serving in these leadership
roles,” said Dean Frederick Morin, M.D. “We are particularly grateful to Dr. Lucey for his outstanding service to the journal, to the College, and to our community.”
During his tenure at Pediatrics, Lucey has overseen
numerous innovations, including the launch of foreign
editions and Pediatrics Electronic Pages, which greatly
Lewis R. First, M.D. and Jerold F. Lucey, M.D.
expanded the journal's scope and impact. A resident of
Burlington who joined the UVM faculty in 1956,
Lucey established Vermont's first neonatal unit and
pioneered several innovations in premature infant
care, including phototherapy to control jaundice and
surfactant therapy to treat respiratory distress. He is
also founder and president of the Vermont Oxford
Network, a cooperative international program that
links over 700 Neonatal Intensive Care Units around
the world, and organizer of the “Hot Topics in
Neonatology” conference, which brings more than
1400 of the world’s newborn specialists to Washington, D.C. each year. He was elected a senior member
of the Institute of Medicine in 2000. In 2004, he
received the Vermont Medical Society’s Distinguished
Service Award, and in 2007 received the Alfred I.
duPont Award for Excellence in Children’s Health
Care.
First will continue as professor and chair of pediatrics and chief of pediatrics of Vermont Children’s
Hospital, but as the Pediatrics deputy editor position
requires a 30 percent time commitment, he will be
stepping down from his position as senior associate
dean for medical education at UVM as of January 2009.
Class of 2010 Celebrates Transition to Clinic
Melinda
Estes, M.D.
4
During the first week of March,
members of the Class of 2010
experienced a host of clinical orientation activities — touring
Fletcher Allen Health Care, sampling special-diet hospital food,
lectures on antibiotics and medical records, hospital
computer instruction, and attending a unique performance on mental health. On March 6, the class celebrated their transition to clinical clerkships at a Student
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
Clinician’s Ceremony held in Carpenter Auditorium.
Following an introduction by Dean Frederick
Morin, M.D., and a welcome from G. Scott Waterman,
M.D., associate dean for student affairs, Fletcher Allen
President and CEO Melinda Estes, M.D., presented
remarks to the group. Estes encouraged students to be
mindful of three things as they embarked on their
transition: bringing a human approach to the practice
of medicine, being open to change and pursuing lifelong learning.
RAJ CHAWLA
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PHILLIPPE RECEIVES MARCH OF DIMES GRANT TO STUDY
INFECTION ’ S ROLE IN PRE -TERM LABOR
The preterm delivery rate among the four million infants born
annually in the United States reached 12.5 percent in 2004
and continues to rise. Roughly half a million babies in the
United States are born prematurely each year and 50 percent
of those premature births have no known cause. Often faced
with serious health complications due to their prematurity,
these newborns can require long-term neonatal intensive
care unit stays and suffer lifelong health consequences, costing an estimated $18 billion in related hospital expenses. The
March of Dimes has continued its support of innovative
research at UVM/Fletcher Allen with a $395,965 Prematurity
Research Initiative Grant awarded to Mark Phillippe, M.D.,
professor and chair of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences.
“The March of Dimes recognizes UVM/Fletcher Allen
as an emerging center of
excellence in the fight against
prematurity,” says Roger
Clapp, state director of the
March of Dimes’ Vermont
Chapter. “This research, which
is made possible through
fundraising efforts in our
state and across the country,
Mark Phillippe, M.D.
will make a difference in the
lives of real Vermonters.”
Phillippe’s current laboratory research focuses on
intrauterine inflammatory signaling pathways in response to
infection during pregnancy. The March of Dimes grant will
help support his investigation of a group of intracellular proteins known to play a role in stimulating preterm labor as a
part of the immune response related to this type of infection.
“Even though the biological sequence of events leading to
preterm delivery remains unclear, current evidence suggests
that intrauterine infection and/or inflammation contribute to
many of these deliveries, especially before the 30th week of
pregnancy,” says Phillippe.
According to Phillippe, preterm delivery occurs in about 13
percent of deliveries at Fletcher Allen Health Care. Though
the leading risk factors for preterm birth are multifetal pregnancies, a past history of preterm delivery, and uterine and/or
cervical abnormalities, a growing body of research evidence
LEFT: ROSE MURPHY ; RIGHT: RAJ CHAWLA
supports the belief that infection could also cause this event.
Phillippe’s Prematurity Research Initiative Grant is the second to be received at UVM/Fletcher Allen and one of only ten
Prematurity Research Initiative
Grants awarded nationally in
2008.
HOLMES ’ RESEARCH TARGETS
GROWTH OF TUMORS
Assistant Professor and Clinical
Instructor of Medicine Chris
Holmes, M.D., Ph.D., is the
recent recipient of a nearly
$800,000 grant from the
American Cancer Society (ACS).
Under the grant, Holmes and
her associates will study anti- Chris Holmes, M.D., Ph.D.
angiogenesis therapy.
Angiogenesis is the process of new blood vessel formation
and is pivotal to tumor growth and metastasis. A complex
process, angiogenesis is controlled by blood and platelet proangiogenic and anti-angiogenic proteins, as well as proteins
from the tumor and surrounding tissue. Vascular endothelial
growth factor (VEGF) and endostatin (ES) are two examples of
important angiogenic proteins that are found in a tumor,
blood and in platelets.
Platelets, the small cells that circulate in blood and form
blood clots as well as deliver proteins to sites of tumor growth
and blood vessel injury, have been shown to be important in
laboratory and animal models of cancer and angiogenesis.
When platelets become “activated” by tumors, they release
angiogenic proteins such as VEGF and endostatin that are pivotal to tumor blood vessel formation and thus tumor growth.
“Since platelets contain and can release over 30 different
angiogenesis proteins (like VEGF and ES) when activated, we
are interested in studying the pathways that control platelet
protein release with the goal of inhibiting the release of proangiogenic proteins,” says Holmes. The inhibition of proangiogenic protein release by the platelet has the significant
potential advantage of simultaneously controlling many proteins involved in angiogenesis (there are up to 30 different
such proteins). In contrast, the most commonly used antiangiogenesis drug (bevacizumab) only targets one major
angiogenic protein, VEGF. The platelet, therefore, has the
potential to be a far more efficient target for treatment of
cancer than a single pro-angiogenic protein like VEGF alone.
COLLEGE NEWS
Residency Matches for the College of Medicine Class of 2008
ANESTHESIOLOGY
Emily Anderson
Gregory Manske
Tandik Evazyan
Walter Schuyler
William Swartz
MEDICINE
- PRELIMINARY
UVM/Fletcher Allen
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Univ. of Southern California
Maine Medical Center
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Amylynne Frankel
Gulnar Pothiawala
Univ. of Alabama
NEUROLOGY
MEDICINE
SUNY Stony Brook
Univ of Texas SW Med School
– PRIMARY
Joan Newell
Megan Harris
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Med Center
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Med Center
DERMATOLOGY
Caitlin Kennedy
Megan Moran
Viktoria Totoraitis
DIAGNOSTIC RADIOLOGY
Brett Schneider
Elizabeth Watson
Sarah Stilwill
David Grant Med Center/Travis AFB
NY Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell
University Of Utah
EMERGENCY MEDICINE
Adam Goldstone
Annie Quysner
CLASS OF 2008 CELEBRATES A SUCCESSFUL MATCH DAY
“Match Day,” the day when graduating medical students find out where they will
complete their clinical subspecialty training, took place on March 20, 2008. This
event marks the culmination of months and months of effort, in addition to school
and clinical work, involving applying for residency interviews, traveling to interviews, and ranking potential residency institutions in order of preference.
At UVM, the pre-Match scene involves groups of students gathering in the halls
of the College that lead to the mailboxes in the Given Building. A few minutes
before noon, UVM College of Medicine Dean Frederick Morin, M.D., and
Associate Dean for Student Affairs G. Scott Waterman, M.D., carried the Match
envelopes down the stairs of the Health Science Research Facility Gallery to the
mailroom, where they and Patricia Alberts, Given mail services supervisor, swiftly
delivered the letters to each of the students’ mailboxes by noon.
A total of 77 UVM College of Medicine students received news of their residency match results March 20.
The Class of 2008 will begin residencies at nearly 50 institutions across the
country this summer. A glimpse of two of those graduates reveals some of the forces
that led them to medicine and the subspecialty they each have chosen to pursue:
A former German tour guide and translator, Michigan-born
Sarah Stilwill also worked as a clinical research coordinator before
attending medical school. Her German grandmother’s Alzheimer’s
disease led her to investigate the field of functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and fostered a love of radiology. Soon to be a
third-generation physician, Stilwill chose her specialty because of
“the dynamic nature of radiology, its incredible technology, the necessary crucial communication and critical thinking skills and daily
interactions with every subspecialty provider.”
California native Alyssa Wittenberg looked at medical schools all
over the country before deciding to attend UVM. Seeking a residency in obstetrics and gynecology, she is the great-granddaughter
of a Wisconsin midwife and the daughter of a nurse-midwife. “I am
so proud to be continuing on this tradition and to be the first doctor in our family,” she said.
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RAJ CHAWLA
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Carl Eben Barus
Cristopher Amanti
Danielle Williams
Ronald Van Ness-Otunnu
Shannon O’Keefe
Terence Kolb
Michelle Crispo
FAMILY MEDICINE
Ann Marie Johnson
Christina Wong
Jenne Wax
Jenny Connery
Letizia Alto
Natalie Speck
Peter Wilhelm
Rachel Humphrey
Rebecca Joyce
Sara Delaporta
Yana Little
Mountain AHEC (N.C.)
Presbyterian Intercommunity Hosp (CA)
Brown Medical School
Univ. of Colorado
Swedish Medical Center (Seattle)
Oregon Health Science Univ./
Cascades East
Naval Hospital, Bremerton (WA)
UVM/Fletcher Allen
Texas A&M
Brown Medical School
Maine Medical Center
GENERAL SURGERY
Deanna Nelson
Dorian Korz
Krista Evans
Maseeha Khaleel
Thai Lan Tran
NEUROSURGERY
Sarah Garber
OBSTETRICS
North Shore Univ. /LIJ
Christus Spohn Memorial Hospital
(Texas)
SUNY Upstate Med University
Boston University Med Center
Oregon Health Science Univ.
Rhode Island Hospital/Brown Univ.
Boston University Med Center
Duke Univ. Med Center
Maine Medical Center
UVM/Fletcher Allen
Sinai Hospital of Baltimore
Univ. of North Carolina Hospitals
Univ. of Nebraska Affiliated Hosp
UC Irvine Medical Center
NY Presbyterian Hosp.
Univ. of Pittsburgh Med Center
University of Utah
& GYNECOLOGY
Alyssa Wittenberg
Anna Benvenuto
Jennifer Mueller
Univ. of Southern California
UVM/Fletcher Allen
Maine Medical Center
OPHTHALMOLOGY
Anne Rowland
Louisiana State Univ./Ochsner Clinic
ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY
Derek Chase
Jesse Hahn
Jonathan Hall
Lee Jae Morse
UC San Diego Med Center
UVM/Fletcher Allen
UVM/Fletcher Allen
UC San Francisco
OTOLARYNGOLOGY
Ryan Winters
Tulane Univ. Health Science Center
PATHOLOGY
Katherine Livingstone
UVM/Fletcher Allen
PEDIATRICS
Alyssa Mann
Camille Michaud
Elizabeth Hunt
Emily Fagan
Emily Kolpa
Erika Schumacher
Erin Flaherty
Faranek Davalian
Kerrin DePeter
Mikaila Pence
Noah Diminick
Whitney Casares
UVM/Fletcher Allen
Univ. of Virginia Hospitals
Massachusetts General Hosp
Vanderbilt University
Univ. of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics
Yale–New Haven Children’s Hospital
Univ. of Utah Affiliated Hospital
UVM/Fletcher Allen
Massachusetts General Hospital
Children’s Mercy Hospital
Univ. of Pittsburgh Med Center
Stanford Univ. Programs
INTERNAL MEDICINE
Allison Collen
Carl Kapadia
Chuan-Ju Gwen Pan
Colby Halsey
Gentian Lluri
Jennifer Palminteri
Karin Doehne
Lauren Schuler
Lily Honoris
MaryEllen Antkowiak
Pallabi Sanyal
Univ. of Southern California
Barnes-Jewish Hospital (MO)
UC Irvine Medical Center
Barnes-Jewish Hospital
Univ. of Illinois at Chicago
Maine Medical Center
Lehigh Valley Hospital
Scripps Clinic/Green Hospital
Loma Linda Univ. Med Center
UVM/Fletcher Allen
Scripps Clinic/Green Hospital
PSYCHIATRY
Ashley Zucker
Carolyn Yoo
Ian Crooks
Lawrence Peacock
Mark McGee
Rachel Allen
Duke Univ. Med Center
NY Presbyterian Hosp. Columbia
Austin Med Ed Programs
Duke Univ. Med Center
UVM/Fletcher Allen
Maine Medical Center
S U M M E R
2008
7
COLLEGE NEWS
Levin Named VCC Interim Director
Health and Human Rights
Activist Geiger Addresses
Medical Graduates
The College’s 2008 graduates participated in two
important ceremonies during the weekend of May 1718. Paula Tracy, Ph.D., interim chair and professor of
biochemistry, was the keynote speaker at the Graduate
College Hooding Ceremony held May 17 in Patrick
Gymnasium. On May 18, Dean Frederick Morin,
M.D., officiated during the College’s Commencement
Ceremony in Ira Allen Chapel. A total of 81 members
of the Class of 2008, including one student who completed an M.D./Ph.D., received medical degrees, and
an additional 16 students received doctoral degrees
and eight students earned master’s degrees.
H. Jack Geiger, M.D., the Arthur C. Logan Professor Emeritus of Community Medicine at City University of New York (CUNY) Medical School, delivered
the commencement address. Geiger, who noted that
Jesse Hahn, M.D.; Gulnar Pothiawala, M.D.;
Noah Diminick, M.D.
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V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
H. Jack Geiger,
M.D., (at far left)
delivered the
2008 Commencement address;
(at left) Ira Allen
Chapel filled with
graduates, family,
and faculty for the
May 18 ceremony.
he graduated from Case Western Reserve School of
Medicine 50 years prior on May 18, counseled graduates that “the practice of medicine is a treaty with society." As a founding member and past president of
Physicians for Human Rights, Geiger was a co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for Peace in 1998. In 1985, as a
founding member and past president of Physicians for
Social Responsibility, the U.S. affiliate of International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, he
received his first Nobel Prize for Peace.
In early April Dean Frederick
Morin, M.D., announced that
Bernard Levin, M.D., had agreed
to serve as interim director of the
Vermont Cancer Center (VCC).
Levin began serving in this position
in early May on a part-time basis.
He replaces John Fogarty, M.D.,
who served as interim director of
the VCC since 2006.
A colorectal cancer expert,
Levin retired in 2007 as vice president for cancer prevention and
population sciences at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson
Cancer Center in Houston. For the
past several months, he and colleagues have been working with the
College of Medicine and UVM
leadership, with input from VCC
members, to map out strategic next
steps for the VCC.
“As the search for a permanent
director moves to the next stage of
interviews with top candidates,
having an experienced cancer center leader join our team will be of
great benefit to our institutions,
our members and our community,”
said Morin.
Before assuming his role in
Vermont Cancer Center Interim Director
Bernard Levin, M.D.
events contributing to cancer
development. He has served in
numerous national leadership roles
at the National Cancer Institute
and the American Cancer Society,
and in 2004 received the American
Cancer Society Award from the
American Society of Clinical
Oncology for his significant contributions throughout his career to
preventing and managing cancer.
COURTYARD BUILDING STARTS TO SOAR
Among the members of the Class of 2008 are Jesse Hahn, M.D., who served
as president of the College’s student council and is a lifelong native of Essex,
Vt. Coincidentally, he is also one of three UVM senior medical students who
were in Essex High School teacher Adam Weiss’ AP Biology class their senior
year, in 1999. “I’m honored that these amazing students still cite our class as
meaningful—even after undergrad and medical school experiences,” says
Weiss. For Hahn, a graduate of the University of Richmond (Va.), returning
to Vermont for medical school was never really a question. “I didn’t really
entertain other options,” admits Hahn, who applied to a number of schools,
but made UVM his first choice. “It felt right; the area really clicked with me
and so did the small institution.” Hahn got his first choice again in March.
That’s when he found out he will be able to stay in Vermont a bit longer,
serving a five-year orthopaedics residency at Fletcher Allen.
ANDY DUBACK AND RAJ CHAWLA / MEDICAL PHOTOGRAPHY
cancer prevention, Levin served
as chairman of M.D. Anderson’s
department of gastrointestinal
medical oncology and digestive diseases. He earned his medical
degree from the University of
Witwatersrand Medical School in
Johannesburg, South Africa, and
completed his surgical and medical
internships there. He moved to
Chicago for an internal medicine
residency and then completed fellowships in biochemistry/pathology and gastroenterology at the
University of Chicago. He held
academic appointments at the
University of Chicago from 1971
until 1984, when he joined the faculty at M.D. Anderson to develop a
multidisciplinary gastrointestinal
cancer program.
For nearly three decades, Levin
furthered the science and application of cancer prevention through
developing and implementing multidisciplinary programs in research,
service and education, and his
leadership of many collaborative
research projects resulted in identification of lifestyle factors, genetic
predispositions and molecular
A groundbreaking ceremony was held on June 7 to commemorate the official start
of the Courtyard Building Project, an innovative building that will add 35,000 additional square feet of space to UVM’s medical campus. Dean Morin spoke at the
event, and was joined by UVM President Daniel Mark Fogel, Fletcher Allen Health
Care President and CEO Melinda Estes, M.D., and Senior Associate Dean for
Research and Academic Affairs Russell Tracy, Ph.D. The speakers all noted the
important expansion of research-oriented space that the new structure will make
possible at Vermont’s academic health center. Then each speaker moved to a position at one of four pillars erected with attached balloon bouquets. At Dean Morin’s
signal, each speaker used a ceremonial scissors to cut the tie holding the balloons,
which floated up to the Courtyard’s glass-domed roof. Construction of the new
building began in earnest immediately after the ceremony, and is estimated to run
through summer 2009.
RAJ CHAWLA
S U M M E R
2008
9
back
to
school
Three decades after earning their M.D.s,
two alumni return to experience today’s curriculum.
We graduated from the College of Medicine in 1975 soon
by ellen andrews, m.d.’75
& james gallagher, m.d.’75
Ellen Andrews, M.D.’75 (at bottom center) listens to a lecture in Foundations.
photography by raj
chawla
after the last “new” curriculum of 1967 began. This spring we
spent a week on campus to see first-hand the Vermont Integrated
Curriculum (VIC), introduced in 2003. We describe here what’s
new and include our reactions as alumni and veteran clinicians.
Thirty-five years ago, when we took our first elective away
from UVM, we wondered if medicine might be practiced differently outside Vermont. What if we’d been coddled at UVM and
wouldn’t be able to keep up with the big boys? Students at UVM
need not worry about that now. Today’s medical students are scrutinized very closely. In today’s curriculum their competency is
tested relentlessly by scores of people. There’s no coddling here.
First, for our fellow alumni, an explanation of some terms. The
block of time we knew as Basic Science is now Foundations, a
composite of Fundamentals, Systems Integration and Convergence; Clerkship is still Clerkship; Senior Major is now called
Advanced Integration.
There are more tests now, big and small. Written tests, lab
tests, and tests of clinical examination skills. If you need remediation, you’ll know and you’ll get help. Feedback on tests is prompt.
Optional sessions allow students to review test results individually or in small groups. One student explained to us that the teachers don’t have to do this, but “they want us to understand and
11
succeed.” Physical diagnosis skills are
taught early with generous opportunities to practice, thanks to the use of
standardized patients. Even the standardized patients grade the students.
Local doctors who welcome students
every week to their offices also grade
them. Gradually students are expected
to examine patients more thoroughly, to
present them in more detail, and to discuss diagnosis and management with
more sophistication. Students grade
the faculty regularly too. Today’s national board exams have grown more
complex, intrusive, and daunting. (See
www.usmle.org to learn more.)
But what a sumptuous banquet is laid
before today’s students! All the fundamentals are still taught, but taught better, in our opinion. It is less like college,
where miscellaneous courses are taken
simultaneously. Truly integrated, courses now connect to each other. Each
week the content is woven together as
beautifully as a capillary network.
4
(Far right) Dr. Andrews in
an Emergency Dept. seminar
for third- and fourth-year
students; (at right) a secondyear Cognitive Bridge session.
Now this material has
attained legitimacy as a
consistent activity throughout Foundations. Finally,
the curriculum section
called Convergence is
structured to refine problem-solving and differential
diagnosis.
4
MEDICAL CURRICULUM THEN… AND NOW
In 1975 it was called
In 2008 it’s called
BASIC SCIENCE CORE
FOUNDATIONS
Fundamentals
Systems Integration
Convergence
The Foundation segment lasts 18
CLERKSHIP
CLERKSHIP
months. Alumni would recognize much
(Clinical Science Core)
of Fundamentals: anatomy, physiology,
and biochemistry. For instance, stuSENIOR MAJOR
ADVANCED INTEGRATION
dents study gross and microscopic
anatomy of the lungs for two weeks, but
with an important difference: simultaneously they’re learning pulmonary physiology, people deal with missing genes or a missing lung.
radiology of the chest, interpretation of blood gases,
Systems Integration is aptly named. Attending
and physical examination of the chest.
class was like watching a jeweler hold a precious
Our example, pulmonary medicine, reappears in stone up to a lamp, examining every facet. The
Systems Integration, this time as part of the College’s virtuosic faculty are the jewelers here. In
“Cardiovascular, Respiratory, and Renal” unit. At another course, “Nutrition, Metabolism and
this point, students dive deeply into pulmonary Gastro-intestinal,” the faculty define how the brain,
patho-physiology, but only after a test on what liver, pancreas, duodenum, visceral fat, and skeletal
they’ve learned in Fundamentals. For this course muscle all cooperate to control glucose. By week’s
the finale is a week spent studying shock, a dramat- end, the logic of modern-day treatment of diabetes
ic example of three organ systems bound together. is unassailable, so meticulously have they reviewed
Meanwhile, students learn pertinent physical exam- basic metabolism and endocrinology. The
ination skills. Local Vermonters come to class to inescapable conclusion is that biochemistry and
describe their struggles with relevant diseases. All physiology are wonderful tools at the bedside.
instruction is grounded in hard-core science but the Surgeons concurrently teach examination of the
spotlight sweeps repeatedly to the clinic, where real abdomen, again linking content to practice.
12
V E R M O N T
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The whole curriculum is on-line at a secure website. COMET (College of Medicine Educational
Tools) is our award-winning educational technology. Lecture material is available on COMET as
PDF files and podcasts, but printed handouts are
available in class too. There are interactive and virtual COMET tools to dazzle and tempt any student. (You can get a taste of these tools by trying the
demo’s on the College’s website.) Students study
everything on-line from histology and gross specimens to digital x-rays. Scheduled on-line quizzes
appear every week. More comprehensive tests are
taken together in class on-line. COMET materials
enliven classrooms and exam rooms which are all
wirelessly connected. If you visit the campus, do
take advantage of any opportunity to tour the new
Medical Education Center, with rooms designed to
accommodate various activities, including streaming of video from the Operating Room and from
sites off-campus. Teaching of clinical skills takes
place in an adjacent, compact cluster of twelve exam
rooms equipped with video monitoring.
Lectures comprise only part of the week.
Students “Doctor in Vermont” weekly for a year
with a local physician before clerkships begin.
Another dimension of scrutiny is self-scrutiny. In
their leadership groups, students analyze their
emerging identity as professionals and team leaders.
They study conflict resolution, ethics, community
and cultural issues. Such subjects were once quarantined in psychiatry or mentioned only in passing.
Next comes the year of
clerkships. This was familiar territory: required
rotations on Surgery, Ob-Gyn, Internal Medicine,
Neurology, Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Family
Practice. Now though, even before they start, students have considerably more experience examining
patients and presenting findings than we did as we
began our clerkships. The clerkships are now linked
differently, too. Surgery pairs with Ob-Gyn, for
example, to emphasize connections between those
disciplines. Teaching of basic surgical skills can then
be shared, enhancing the experience for both students and faculty. The students retain access to the
computerized curriculum materials throughout
clerkships. In fact, even after graduation those
materials remain available to them electronically.
One embellishment of clerkships is called Bridges.
These are days when students leave the wards to
review pertinent topics. For example, those on the
pediatrics, family practice, and outpatient medicine
rotations meet to consider eating disorders, with
their metabolic havoc and family impact. Those on
neurology, psychiatry and inpatient medicine review
delirium and dementia. The Bridge mandate is to
treat a topic from multiple perspectives. With fresh
clinical experience to share, students reconsider pertinent basic science and practical management.
They’ll consider economics, epidemiology, and endof-life issues, reinforcing that routine care is built on
the armature of basic science and that disciplines
overlap and buttress each other.
What we knew as “senior major” in the 1967 curS U M M E R
2008
13
OUR NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE 100 YEARS AGO
riculum is now Advanced Integration. It
lasts one year and requires an emergency
rotation, a surgical rotation, an internal
medicine acting internship, plus another
AI. There’s time committed to teaching
and other scholarly work, and still a generous block for electives and interviews.
The new emphasis is on honing clinical
and analytic skills before beginning residency. Here again the use of standardized patients is
invaluable. Encounters are timed, taped and analyzed. Written notes must describe findings and justify the student’s reasoning. Clinical dilemmas presented to them escalate in complexity and urgency.
Advanced Integration serves the students well,
drawing them back into basic science while refining
their clinical skills. National boards and specialty
exams will require facility in both.
The best ideas from the 1967 curriculum were
adapted for the VIC. Each curriculum in its time
addressed changing national trends in medical practice and in education. Obviously, this effort required
enormous collaboration. It was supported in part by
a million dollars of grant money over six years.
Students, faculty, and community members took
part, as did all our deans. We remain indebted to
Diane Magrane, M.D., associate dean for medical
education from 1996 to 2002, who, along with many
other hard-working people, launched the project.
Dr. Andrews and a
standardized patient
during an abdominal
exam session in the
Student Assessment
Center; (at right)
Dr. Gallagher uses a
COMET module.
14
V E R M O N T
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4
Building this curriculum was one thing. Running it
now is another. We couldn’t help but be struck by
the effort involved. So many departments collaborate! But both faculty and students seem to be having more fun. Content is so varied that no two days
are the same. Watching the faculty for a whole week
is like watching a meteor shower: a sudden burst of
gleaming light appears and another follows quickly
after that. Their collaboration reveals the College
to be a thrillingly interdependent and complex
organism, a metaphor for the human beings we
aspire to understand.
We’re grateful to the collective Scheherazade’s
who designed the curriculum. We become
ensnared, wanting more. Generously, the curriculum repeats and amplifies information. Out in practice too, we feel everything goes by too fast. We
catch only a glimpse but never enough. What we
see and hear every day as physicians is astonishing.
It keeps us coming back for more. In this way, the
new curriculum prefigures beautifully what’s ahead
VM
for students.
Ellen Andrews, M.D.’75, is a retired neurologist who
lives in North Carolina; James Gallagher, M.D.’75,
was associated with the Geisinger Clinic
for many years and lives in central Pennsylvania.
If only Henry Tinkham could
see the Vermont Integrated
Curriculum. He was the
feisty dean of the College of
Medicine from 1898 to 1925.
Without him, there might
not be a College of Medicine
today at all.
Early on Dean Tinkham
had urgent problems. The
fire that burned down the
headquarters of the school
in 1903 was the least of
them. After the fire, enrollment declined. Since tuition
didn’t cover expenses, faculty salaries dropped. Meanwhile a relativelyyoung American Medical Association was
pushing for reform of medical education and
even beginning inspections of the schools. The
Association of American Medical Colleges was
wielding its clout. Individual states established
requirements too, including insisting that
medical school applicants first attend at least
one year of college. It was rare to find Vermont
students who had even completed four years of
high school! This threatened to decrease
enrollment even further. Dean Tinkham eventually formed alliances with the University and
state legislators in order to stay afloat financially. He was a formidable lobbyist, strenuously objecting that new regulations placed an
inordinate burden on small rural schools.
Meanwhile he went about improving the facilities and staffing.
The practice of medicine then was anarchic.
Reformists proposed a survey of the state of
American medical education. In 1908 Abraham
Flexner was hired by the Carnegie Foundation
to survey all 155 medical schools. He took a dim
view of Vermont, pointing out that the school
had “low standards,” only one full-time
teacher, no library, no museum, and practically
no teaching charts or models. Being too far
from big cities, it couldn’t provide enough clinical cases. It had no endowment. Flexner saw
the College as beyond repair. Besides he said,
there were too many doctors in New England
and Harvard and Yale supplied more than
enough. Bowdoin, Dartmouth, and Vermont
were old schools, but not adequate schools.
His recommendation? At most they should be
two-year pre-clinical programs.
Bowdoin did fold. Dartmouth resigned itself
to being a two-year school, remaining so until
1970. But in Burlington, fearless Henry Tinkham
had no intention of giving up. Even when AMA
site visitors drew the same conclusions Flexner
had, the Dean simply pressed on. He increased
the number of full-time faculty (to five), and
collaborated regionally to make more patients
available for students. He endured one year
when only six students met admission requirements. He traveled and pleaded for second
chances of all kinds while building the College’s
resources to a respectable level.
By 1921, he could finally devote time to refining the curriculum. He reportedly forced scientific and clinical professors to consider the
relationships between their disciplines “for the
first time.” Faculty meetings became case conferences where professors were made to discuss
a case together. He knew he was on to something when he later heard that same idea proposed at national conferences. He embraced
another trend developing then: introducing
clinical work into the curriculum as early as the
first and second years of medical school.
Henry Tinkham’s fight for the medical
school was fierce. His vision of what the
College could become is embodied in today’s
curriculum. We believe he would see this integrated curriculum as fundamentally sound and
quite to his liking.
S U M M E R
2008
15
A
scholarly
prescription
Developing physician-scholars among fourth-year medical students.
“T
aking a question you have in your head and turning it into
something publishable, that’s a very interesting scenario, and
one that really excited me,” says Adam Goldstone, M.D.’08,
Like many fourth-year students, Alyssa Wittenberg,
M.D.’08 chose a project with a strong relation to her
future focus in medicine: “Recommendation for
Improving Sexual Health Curricula in Medical
Schools.” “I’m going into obstetrics and gynecology,”
Wittenberg explains, “So knowing more about how
to talk about sex and sexual health will be very
important to me throughout my career. I’m very
interested in medical education, so I wanted to find
out how students at a medical school view the role
of sexuality in their learning, and I wanted to talk to
patients and see what their interactions around
sexuality are with their providers.” Working with
faculty mentor Judith Gerber, Ph.D., Wittenberg
designed a survey, and spent much of the year
administering it to undergraduate and graduate
students and third- and fourth-year med students.
The results, crunched through a huge multi-page
spreadsheet, will be published in the near future in
the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
Refining Curricula
just a few days prior to being awarded his medical degree.
Goldstone and dozens of his classmates followed just such a
plan during their last year at the College, Under the Vermont Integrated
Curriculum (VIC), students can opt to fulfill either a teaching requirement or a
scholarly project. Those who chooses the scholarly project path sign on for an
experience that will entail hours of data collection and analysis on a project based
on either the clinical or basic sciences, and the ultimate pleasure of seeing the
hypothesis point toward a conclusion.
“The scholarly project’s purpose is to encourage those students to become fullfledged physican-scholars,” says Eileen CichoskiKelly, Ph.D., the College’s director of educational instruction and scholarship. “Through this experience, they
learn to polish their communication skills, and their powers of inquiry and analysis.” Scholarly projects are formally presented to the UVM on the same day, about
a week before commencement, when the student-scholars give either a verbal or
poster presentation of their work.
The scholarly project has been a formal part of the College’s curriculum for
much of the past decade. Going back even further is the related Surgery Senior
Major Scientific Program. Since 1970, seniors in this specialty have had the
chance to present research projects to the assembled faculty in the department and
their fellow students.
What follows in these pages is just a sampling of the broad process of inquiry
recent medical graduates have gone through.
16
photography by raj chawla
17
Helping EMT Choices
Danielle Williams, M.D.’08 found her scholarly
project subject matter in the same area that
originally helped her focus on becoming a
physician. For four years, while earning her
undergraduate degree, she had worked as an
emergency services technician. “I put feelers out
to see what kind of research people in the field
in Vermont were interested in,” she says.
Associate Professor Wayne Misselbeck, M.D. and
staff members of the Vermont Office
of EMS and Injury Prevention were
eager to learn about issues around the
How much CT-scanning is necessary? That’s the question Adam Goldstone,
criminal background of applicants for
M.D.’08 sought to answer through his scholarly project. “I was interested in
EMS positions, and the extent to
patients with a history of kidney stones,” he says. “Particularly those who
which screening measures can be
present to physicians multiple times with recurrent symptoms.”
developed to deal with the small numGoldstone’s mentor was Assistant Professor Andrew Bushnell, M.D. “I
ber of applicants that fall into this catworked with Dr. Bushnell in the Emergency Department. He’d noted that
egory. “The literature does not have a
patients coming in with the same type of pain after previously having had
lot about this subject,” she says.
a kidney stone got a CT-scan nearly every time.” Computed Tomography
“Having been one, I realize the impor(CT) scans have become the gold standard for the diagnosis of kidney
tant role EMTs have. Since the data
stones, Goldstone notes, but such scans are not completely harmless. “One
were few, I thought we’d look at it in
abdominal CT-scan is equivalent to approximately 500 chest radiographs,”
an epidemiological way. We collected
he says. The student and mentor culled data from the Fletcher Allen datadata from various sources that the
base. Repeat kidney stone patients rarely have their diagnosis changed,
Office of EMS recommended.” They
they found, which points the way toward further evaluation of the treatwere able to point the way toward
ment of such patients.
recent applicant trends, and are looking ahead to publication in the future.
Decreasing CT Exposure
S U M M E R
2008
19
Data to Help
Alleviate Pain
Jonathan Hall, M.D.’08 (at left in photo)
spent a good deal for the past year in South
Burlington, Vt., offering people cones — not
the kind with ice cream packed inside but,
rather, the bright orange rubber kind usually
used to detour traffic. Working at the Spine
Institute of New England, Hall introduced
patients with degenerative lumbar spinal
stenosis and neurogenic cladication (the
narrowing of the spinal canal, which causes
pain) to a “shuttle walking test” in which
they were required to walk a ten-meter
course between two cones. A CD-player
beside the course played pre-timed signals
to show when the start of the walk should
begin, and when it should be over, and the
intervals were slowly decreased until a subject was unable to complete the course in
the allotted time. All the patients had undergone extensive radiographic examination
beforehand, says Hall. “This study allowed
us to understand the relationship between
what the radiographs say is happening in
the spine, and what a patient’s own selfreported health and functional status is. This
could point the way to a better determination of how close some people are to needing surgical intervention.” Hall worked with
several members of UVM Department of
Orthopaedics & Rehabilitation, with Clinical
Instructor Tucker Drury, M.D., (at right) serving as mentor. Drury and Hall (who begins
his residency in orthopaedics at Fletcher
Allen this summer) hope to present their
findings at an orthopaedic conference in
Hong Kong later this year.
A Wide-Ranging Seminar
Through the 38th annual Surgery Senior Major Scientific Program,
ten fourth-year students on the verge of graduation gained the valuable experience of shaping data into a form that would be acceptable for publication, and presenting that work at what is, in effect, a
small scientific seminar. To the audience of faculty members, students, and invited guests
gathered in Hall B in the Given Building on May 1, seniors presented findings on a wide range
of topics— leg fractures among skiers and snowboarders, abdominal pain and appendicitis
diagnosis in children, and useful genetic “markers” for certain carcinomas were but a few of
the subjects. Krista Evans, M.D.’08 (at right, above) won the third place award at the program
for her project that explored the role of HbA1c (a test for abnormal glucose metabolism) as a
predictor for complications after coronary bypass surgery. Dorian Korz, M.D.’08 (at right) won
the second place award for his project on the use of anticancer agents in the mammary ductal network. First place at the seminar was awarded to Thai Lan Tran for her project, which
focused on an aspect of the treatment of the lung cancer mesothelioma.
20
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
S U M M E R
2008
21
G R Ge
G R Ge
THE ART OF
“There is nothing more fun than being able to improvise in a group,” says Martin
LeWinter, professor of medicine and molecular physiology and biophysics, as he stands in his
lab in the Health Science Research Facility. Now in his third decade as a researcher and
clinician at the College of Medicine and Fletcher Allen Health Care, LeWinter, a 2008
University Scholar, has made a point of fostering the close, collaborative relationships he
fondly calls “garage science” — researchers with different skills openly and creatively
sharing their know-how to bring forth a better understanding and treatment of the
engine of human life — the heart.
by jennifer nachbur
CeN e
CeN e
photography by sally mccay
22
23
Nearly everyone
has had his or her blood pressure taken. This measurement, which determines the pressure applied to
the walls of the arteries as the heart pumps blood
through the body, is dependent on the force and
amount of blood pumped, and the size and flexibility of the arteries. Elevated blood pressure and
its effects on the heart has been a consistent
focus throughout the research career of Martin
LeWinter, M.D.
More than 5 million Americans are living with
heart failure, according to the American Heart
Association. Originally believed to be caused by
depressed contraction function, heart failure today
has changed along with the increased aging population. Now patients are just as likely to have a
normal or preserved ability to squeeze, with the
malfunction rooted in a stiffening of the heart muscle when the heart fills with blood between each
contraction.
The latest chapter in LeWinter’s research will be
guided by a five-year, $3.4 million grant he has
recently received to study advanced glycation endproducts (portions of sugar molecules that become
chemically attached to various proteins in the body)
and the ways they contribute to heart dysfunction in
patients with diabetes and hypertension.
“As you age, everything gets stiff, less flexible,”
explains LeWinter, professor of medicine and
molecular physiology and biophysics and a 2007-08
University Scholar. (His University Scholar
Lecture in April was titled “A Paradox: Failing
Hearts That Contract Normally.”) “When the
heart fills, which is like blowing up a balloon, the
pressures during filling can cause heart failure if
they get too high.”
A music major at Columbia University and longtime pianist, LeWinter could as easily be summing
up his 36-year career as a leading heart failure
researcher as describing the attraction of playing in
a jazz band when he says, “There’s nothing more
fun than being able to improvise in a group.”
RELYING ON A CROSS - DISCIPLINARY
APPROACH ?
Improvisation has been one of the keys to
LeWinter’s research success. He has always made a
point of collaborating with a cross-disciplinary mix
of physicians and scientists at UVM. As a result, his
24
V E R M O N T
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research focus has included not only his original
specialty area — how the heart relaxes after contracting and how this function is affected by diseases
— but also how the heart uses energy and the proteins involved in heart function.
A graduate of New York University School of
Medicine, LeWinter was an intern, resident and
chief resident in internal medicine at Bellevue
Hospital in New York City before traveling across
the country for a cardiology fellowship at the
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
School of Medicine. Then a brand-new medical
school, UCSD’s faculty featured major innovators
such as Eugene Braunwald, M.D., whose research
discovery established heart attack as a progressive
event; John Ross, M.D., who established a nowwidely-used principal for diagnosing coronary
artery disease; and Burton Sobel, M.D., UVM professor of medicine and biochemistry and former
chair of medicine.
“UCSD was truly a hotbed of research in heart
disease and cardiovascular
function,” LeWinter says.
“It was a fantastic environment that allowed me to be
productive early on and
opened my eyes about how
to do research. That was a
life-changing thing.”
LeWinter joined the
UCSD cardiology faculty following his fellowship.
In 1975, he published his first major paper in the
journal Circulation Research, which established how
the heart functions regionally and comes together
to form a contraction. His work continued, with a
focus on how the heart relaxes, then moved into the
examination of the influence of external forces such
as the pericardium — the thin membrane that surrounds the heart and the roots of the heart’s aorta
and the pulmonary artery — which plays an important role in determining filling pressures when the
heart becomes enlarged. In 1985, he moved to
Vermont to become chief of cardiology at UVM
and the former Medical Center Hospital of
Vermont, now Fletcher Allen Health Care. He was
attracted by UVM’s physiology department, led by
the late Norman Alpert, Ph.D., who founded
Vermont’s Biotek Instruments, Inc., and the opportunity to meld his clinical cardiology interests with
Dr. LeWinter has worked with Senior
Research Technician Stephen Bell
(above right) for more than twenty years.
Together they established a physiology
lab in Given that now functions as a
core facility for other researchers.
his research training in physiology and mechanics of
the heart.
At UVM, LeWinter delved into the study of
mechano-energetics and how the energy utilized by
the heart changes in heart failure. Surprisingly,
LeWinter explains, the heart actually becomes
more energy-efficient as it fails, in the same manner
that an underpowered car gets better mileage. The
problem, he says, is that the heart may not get
enough “gas.” The stiffness of the arteries creates a
bigger workload for the heart and results in consequences for diastolic function. Identifying the caus-
es and stresses that lead to that poor function,
whether disease or a genetic mutation, is critical to
identifying effective treatments.
Over the years he has collaborated with fellow
faculty in molecular physiology and biophysics to
look at how contractile proteins work in failing
hearts, and colleagues in the cardiothoracic division
of surgery to examine cells at work in the cardiac
tissue biopsied from failing hearts. He sees this willingness to collaborate as one of UVM’s greatest
strengths.
“It’s rare to do ‘garage science’ these days,”
LeWinter explains. You need a group with different
skills to look at how the heart works at multiple levels from the most basic aspects of cardiac contraction to the whole organ and everything in between.”
S U M M E R
2008
25
HALL A
P R E S I D E N T
C L A S S
’
S
28
29
31
37
C O R N E R
N O T E S
D E V E L O P M E N T
N E W S
O B I T U A R I E S
In 1905, when the College of Medicine completed its third home at the corner of Prospect and Pearl streets
in Burlington, the main lecture room where students spent so much of their time was named Hall A.
The Hall A magazine section seeks to be a meeting place for all former students of the College of Medicine.
Both Associate Professor Peter Van
Buren, M.D.’87 and Assistant
Professor Markus Meyer, Ph.D.,
collaborate with Dr. Lewinter.
NEW RESEARCH , NEW ADVANCEMENTS ?
One of LeWinter’s more recent research targets are
the proteins involved in the passive stiffness of the
heart. One protein — called titin from “titanic” for
its large size — works like a big spring inside the
heart muscle cells. Collagen, the main protein
found in connective tissue, also helps determine
stiffness. LeWinter aims to find out how diseases,
like diabetes, might modify that stiffness.
“Rarely will you find a clinician scientist who
can bridge the expanse of knowledge between the
amazing function of the human heart and the tiny
molecular motors that make it contract,” says
David Warshaw, Ph.D.’79 professor and chair of
molecular physiology and biophysics. “Marty has
that capacity and the unique ability to instill the
enjoyment of basic science into his clinical fellows.”
In addition to his very active research enterprise,
LeWinter sees patients in the cardiology clinic at
Fletcher Allen once a week and covers two rotations
per year as an attending cardiologist in the hospital’s
inpatient cardiology unit. He also teaches UVM
medical students. In 2006, he was awarded a $1.25million, five-year grant from the National Heart,
Lung and Blood Institute as the principal investigator of a new regional consortium for conducting
heart failure research in northern New England.
After a year and a half of planning, the network acti-
26
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
vated its first protocol this spring.
Always ready to explore a different angle on
heart failure, LeWinter would like to further examine several aspects of heart failure in women.
Diastolic heart failure, including stiffness in the vessels and heart, is more common in elderly women.
At about age 75, there is a large increase and separation between the rate of occurrence of this type of
heart failure in men and women. By examining the
effects of experimental drugs on human cardiac
biopsy tissue, LeWinter hopes to identify potential
drug treatments for this stiffness. Women also have
a tendency to do better than men when they get
heart failure, with one exception — women with
heart failure who have diabetes. According to a discovery found in cardiac biopsies, these women
appear to have a contractile deficit, which LeWinter
and colleagues believe may be the result of oxidative
damage.
There’s no doubt that his years of research and
clinical care have benefited numerous heart failure
patients in Vermont, across the country and
throughout the world.
“Dr. LeWinter is a nationally and internationally respected investigator,” says David Schneider,
M.D., professor of medicine and chief of cardiology. “His research has advanced our understanding
of heart failure and improved our ability to care for
VM
patients.”
S U M M E R
2008
27
PRESIDENT ’S CORNER
M.D. CLASS NOTES
H A L L A
H A L L A
UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT
COLLEGE OF MEDICINE
DEVELOPMENT &
ALUMNI RELATIONS OFFICE
ASSISTANT DEAN
rick blount
This will be my last letter to you as president of your
Medical Alumni Association, since my term has ended.
I’m very glad to tell you that Dr. Ruth Seeler, Class of
1962, will be taking over as president and that the
Association will be in very competent, inspiring hands.
She has been a dedicated member of the Alumni
Executive Committee for many years and she has often
proven her mettle, making the sometimes difficult trip to
Burlington from her home in Chicago for our meetings
without a complaint. As the Alumni Association Executive Committee’s
President, Ruth will be leading a terrific group of alumni who represent
graduates of classes ranging from 1943 to 2000. They are all devoted to us,
the alumni, as well as to the College of Medicine, its faculty, staff and the
current students.
During the years that I’ve served on the Alumni Executive Committee,
I’ve seen first-hand how the Medical School has grown and flourished, both
physically and intellectually under a succession of truly fine deans, from
John Frymoyer, to Joseph Warshaw, John Evans, John Fogarty, and now,
Rick Morin.
Perhaps the most important decision the Committee made while I’ve
been a member has been to shift our fund raising efforts from providing
loans to medical students to making direct grants to them. This was done
in recognition of the increasingly high level of debt with which the graduating seniors have been severely burdened. It is extremely gratifying to
know that so many of you, the alumni, have responded to this significant
change by increasing substantially your level of support for UVM’s medical
students. So much talent and effort on the part of the excellent staff of Rick
Blount’s Development and Alumni Relations Office has been absolutely
crucial to the success of this endeavor. There are many indications that the
current students are deeply appreciative of these alumni grants and that
they plan to continue the tradition of giving when they are in a position to
do so.
You have my very best wishes for a great summer. For those of you who
returned to UVM recently for your reunion, I hope that you had a wonderful experience reconnecting with your classmates and the College of
Medicine.
Marv Nierenberg, M.D.’60
28
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
DEVELOPMENT OPERATIONS MANAGER
ginger lubkowitz
DIRECTOR , MAJOR GIFTS
manon o ’ connor
DIRECTOR , MEDICAL ANNUAL GIVING
sarah keblin
DIRECTOR , MEDICAL ALUMNI RELATIONS
cristin gildea
DEVELOPMENT OFFICER
travis morrison
ASSISTANTS
jane aspinall
james gilbert
cristal legault
UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT
MEDICAL ALUMNI ASSOCIATION
ALUMNI EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
OFFICERS
( TWO -YEAR TERMS )
PRESIDENT
marvin a. nierenberg, m.d.’60
(2006-2008)
PRESIDENT- ELECT
ruth a. seeler, m.d.’62
(2006-2008)
TREASURER
paul b. stanilonis, m.d.’65
(2006-2008)
SECRETARY
james c. hebert, m.d.’77
(2006-2008)
EXECUTIVE SECRETARY
john tampas, m.d.’54
(ongoing)
MEMBERS - AT- LARGE :
(6-YEAR TERMS )
leslie s. kerzner, m.d.’95
(2002-2008)
frederick mandell, m.d.’64
(2002-2008)
don p. chan, m.d.’76
(2002-2008)
mark allegretta, ph.d.’90
(2003-2010)
mark pasanen, m.d.’92
(2004-2010)
h. james wallace iii, m.d.’88
(2004-2010)
naomi r. leeds, m.d., ’00 m.p.h.
(2004-2010)
betsy sussman, m.d. ’81
(2007-2012)
carleton r. haines, m.d. ’43
(2006-2012)
jacqueline a. noonan, m.d. ’54
(2006-2012)
If you have news to share, please contact your class agent
or the alumni office at [email protected] or
(802) 656-4014. If your email address has changed, please
send it to: [email protected].
1943
Francis Arnold Caccavo
(M.D. Dec. 1943)
51 Thibault Parkway
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 862-3841
[email protected]
Carleton R. Haines
(M.D. Dec. 1943)
88 Mountain View Road
Williston, VT 05495
(802) 878-3115
Harry M. Rowe
(M.D. March 1943)
65 Main Street
P.O. Box 755
Wells River, VT 05081
(802) 757-2325
[email protected]
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1944
Wilton W. Covey
357 Weybridge Street
Middlebury, VT 05753
(802) 388-1555
1945
Robert E. O’Brien
414 Thayer Beach Road
Colchester, VT 05446
(802) 862-0394
[email protected]
H. Gordon Page
9 East Terrace
South Burlington, VT 05403
(802) 864-7086
1946
Howard MacDougall
writes: “I was the only one
that showed up for our
60th reunion in ’06 and
I'd like to know about any
other classmates. You may
find my Email address
below. I still drive to
Florida for every January
and February, and we just
had our 57th wedding
anniversary. We had five
offspring but have lost
two, one to cerebral palsy
and another to lung cancer (a nonsmoker). Old
age-Blah!” Email Address:
[email protected].
1947
George H. Bray
110 Brookside Road
New Britain, CT 06052
(860) 225-3302
As this issue went to press,
word reached us that
Class of 1947 member
Porter Dale died on June
12, 2008. A full obituary
will appear in the fall
issue.
1948
S. James Baum
1790 Fairfield Beach Road
Fairfield, CT 06430
(203) 255-1013
[email protected]
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1949
James Arthur Bulen
4198 North Longvalley Rd.
Hernando, FL 34442
(352) 746-4513
[email protected]
Joseph C. Foley
32 Fairmount Street
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 862-0040
[email protected]
Edward S. Sherwood
24 Worthley Road
Topsham, VT 05076
(802) 439-5816
[email protected]
UPCOMING EVENTS
August 11–15, 2008
Medical Orientation
Eunice Simmons retired in
November 1991, and then
began being a volunteer
doctor at a clinic for the
homeless and underserved
on a weekly basis until the
end of 2007. She now volunteers for “Home for the
Homeless.”
1950
Simon Dorfman
8256 Nice Way
Sarasota, FL 34238
(941) 926-8126
August 18, 2008
Seventh Annual Peter A. Martin
Brain Aneurysm Research Fund
Golf Tournament – Vermont
National Country Club, South
Burlington, Vt.
October 4, 2008
COM Cares Day & Picnic
UVM Campus
October 11, 2008
2008 American Academy of
Pediatrics National Conference –
Hynes Convention Center,
Boston, Mass.
October 11, 2008
Fall Medical Alumni Executive
Committee Meeting in
conjunction with Medical Family
Day, UVM Campus
1951
Edward W. Jenkins
7460 South Pittsburg Ave.
Tulsa, OK 74136
(918) 492-7960
Monday, October 13, 2008
2008 American College of
Surgeons 94th Annual Clinical
Congress – San Francisco, Calif.
1953
June 11-14, 2009
UVM Medical Reunion 2009
Richard N. Fabricius
17 Fairview Road
Old Bennington, VT 05201
(802) 442-4224
For updates on events see:
www.med.uvm.edu/medalum
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1954
John E. Mazuzan Jr.
366 South Cove Road
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 864-5039
[email protected]
1955
Marshall G. London
102 Summit Street
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 864-4927
[email protected]
1956
Ira H. Gessner
1306 Northwest 31st Street
Gainesville, FL 32605
(352) 378-1820
[email protected]
S U M M E R
2008
29
M.D. CLASS NOTES
DEVELOPMENT NEWS
H A L L A
1957
surgery and academic
career.” George Mastras
writes: “I am enjoying my
retirement and my hobbies
keep me busy. I am still
alpine skiing and my wife
and I spent Christmas
with our family in Park
City, Utah.” Best regards
to all.
Larry Coletti
34 Gulliver Circle
Norwich, CT 06360
(860) 887-1450
[email protected]
1958
Peter Ames Goodhue
Stamford Gynecology, P.C.
70 Mill River Street
Stamford, CT 06902
(203) 359-3340
Neil Diorio writes: “Evelyn
and I will celebrate our
53rd anniversary in Beijing
aboard the M.S. Statendam with the Gnassis on a
32-day cruise. Our six
children and eleven grandchildren are getting more
widespread but we still
have monthly family gatherings. I’ve been writing
medical fiction stories and
have one published, entitled, “The Will.” We both
still enjoy a good game of
tennis.”
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1959
Jay E. Selcow
27 Reservoir Road
Bloomfield, CT 06002
(860) 243-1359
[email protected]
Herb Deutsch is enjoying
his practice in Cherry
Hill, N.J. He has taught
four grandchildren how to
ski in Vermont; only 4
more to go! Bernard
Passman writes: “I’m
enjoying an office-based
reduced gynecology practice, while Marc Passman,
M.D. ’91 is very happy with
an ever-expanding vascular
30
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
1960
Marvin A. Nierenberg
15 West 81st Street
New York, NY 10024
(212) 874-6484
[email protected]
Melvyn H. Wolk
Clinton Street
P.O. Box 772
Waverly, PA 18471
(570) 563-2215
[email protected]
1961
Wilfrid L. Fortin
17 Chapman Street
Nashua, NH 03060
(603) 882-6202
[email protected]
1962
Ruth Andrea Seeler
2431 North Orchard
Chicago, IL 60614
(773) 472-3432
[email protected]
Warren E. Johnson writes:
“In January I left my last
paying part-time job in
medicine and joined the
ranks of the fully retired.”
1963
John J. Murray
P.O. Box 607
Colchester, VT 05446
(802) 865-9390
[email protected]
H. Alan Walker
229 Champlain Drive
Plattsburgh, NY 12901
(518) 561-8991
Leigh Kendall writes:
“After 24 years in surgery,
eleven years in University
Student Health and eight
years as a medical director,
I have finally retired on
July 1, 2007. It’s the fifth
attempt; so far so good.” J.
Donald Capra writes:
“Retired but continuing
nearly full time as (1)
coach of a Dean, a company president and an institute president and (2)
advising two biotech
investment funds and (3)
chairing two scientific
advisory boards of two
biotech companies.”
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1964
Anthony P. Belmont
211 Youngs Point Road
Wiscasset, ME 04578
(207) 882-6228
[email protected]
1965
George A. Little
97 Quechee Road
Hartland, VT 05048
(802) 436-2138
george.a.little@
dartmouth.edu
Joseph H. Vargas III
574 US Route 4 East
Rutland Town, VT 05701
(802) 775-4671
[email protected]
Tom Dow was just promoted to Medical Direcor of
the Care Center for
Mental Health in Key
West. His email address is:
[email protected].
Sharon Hostler is serving
as interim vice president
and dean of the school of
medicine at the University
of Virginia. “And we are
still number 23 in U.S.
News and World rankings.”
1966
Robert George Sellig
31 Overlook Drive
Queensbury, NY 12804
(518) 793-7914
[email protected]
G. Millard Simmons
3165 Grass Marsh Drive
Mount Pleasant, SC 29466
[email protected]
1967
John F. Dick II
P.O. Box 60
Salisbury, VT 05769
(802) 352-6625
Bruce Poitrast writes: “I
have taken a new position
as director of health initiatives for Eastman
Chemical Co.”
1968
David Jay Keller
4 Deer Run
Mendon, VT 05701
(802) 773-2620
[email protected]
Timothy John Terrien
14 Deerfield Road
South Burlington, VT 05403
(802) 862-8395
Todd Gladstone
[email protected]
Nelson H. Sturgis III is
“Still working full-time in
a Community Health
Center with challenging
patients. Three grandchildren keep us busy. Mary
Jean works part time now.
Looking forward to
UVM MEDICAL PHOTOGRAPHY
HELLO ! A RECORD GIFT OVER THE PHONE
The College of Medicine’s semi-annual calling program
often yields generous gifts from alumni of the school. But
this spring’s program set a new record. An enthusiastic
member of the University’s “Chatty Cats” program made the
call to Thomas Sullivan, M.D.’66, and asked for his renewed
annual gift to support the College. With little persuasion, Dr.
Sullivan pledged one of the largest unrestricted gifts ever
given to his medical alma mater. Dr. Sullivan, who is a
recently retired anesthesiologist from New Hampshire,
shared with the caller his deep appreciation for the career
that was possible because of his education and training at
UVM.
NEW ASSESSMENT ROOMS NAMED
Four rooms in the College’s Student Assessment Center have
been named in recognition of alumni and their families
from classes stretching back over the past five decades:
Jean and Michael Abdalla, M.D.’58 have generously supported the College in honor of Dr. Abdalla’s 50 years as a
physician. In addition to his support of the College, Dr.
Abdalla, an orthopaedist from Orange, Calif., has been recognized by Rotary international for his humanitarian efforts
on behalf of the Rotary El Salvador Prosthetic Project,
through which Dr. Abdalla and his colleagues help to outfit
many patients with below-the-knee amputation with free
prosthetic limbs.
Anne and Peter Goodhue, M.D.’58 have enthusiastically
supported the College’s development efforts in Dr.
Goodhue’s 50th Reunion year. An obstetrician/gynecologist
practicing in Stamford, Conn., Dr. Goodhue has deep roots in
Vermont: he is directly related to Grace Goodhue Coolidge,
first lady of the United States from 1923 to 1929.
Since her introduction to the UVM College of Medicine as
the only woman in the class of 1962, the dedication of Ruth
A. Seeler, M.D.’62 to the College and its mission has never
waned. She has been a longtime class agent, and Alumni
Executive Committee member, and is currently its newlyelected President. She has been a generous philanthropic
supporter of the College and its students. Dr. Seeler is
Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Illinois College of
Medicine at Chicago, and a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at the University of Illinois Medical Center.
Mark A. Popovsky, M.D.’77 has long shown his support of
his alma mater as a class agent. Dr. Popovsky is a pathologist in the Boston area who has focused his career on
improving transfusion medicine and blood banking. He is
vice president and chief medical officer of Haemonetics
Corporation, and is a leading expert on the transfusion reaction known as TRALI (transfusion-associated acute lung
injury), the most common life-threatening complication of
Four donors have been recognized with Student Assessment
Center rooms like this one, where Kenneth Sartorelli, M.D. (at
left) and a standardized patient work with a group of students.
transfusion therapy. He has served as chief executive officer
of the American Red Cross Blood Services –New England
region, as director of Transfusion & Intravenous Services of
the Mayo Clinic, and is an associate clinical professor of
pathology at Harvard Medical School and an adjunct clinical
professor of pathology at Boston University School of
Medicine. Dr. Popovsky’s room was named in honor of Drs.
Stark and Korson, his former teachers.
GIFT IS CATALYST FOR
END - OF - LIFE WORK
An anonymous $250,000 gift has allowed the College to
bring together community partners interested in supporting end-of-life education, research and care. Dr. J. Fogarty
— who was Interim Dean at the time of the gift in late summer, 2007 — has held meetings with a group that has
adopted the name “Vermont Palliative Care Collaborative”
and consisting of representatives of UVM’s College of
Nursing and Health Sciences, Fletcher Allen Health Care and
the Visiting Nurse Association of Chittenden and Grand Isle
Counties, as well as individual community members. The
group has overseen distribution of funds to support medical
student events, a physician fellowship program at
UVM/Fletcher Allen, to enhance UVM’s nursing programs in
end-of-life care, and to support VNA’s community outreach
through its Madison-Deane Initiative. “We’ve made a really
great start at pulling together and enhancing the resources
in this community,” said Fogarty. “We’re fortunate to have
passionate people who are deeply interested in making this
a place where those who are near the end of their lives
encounter compassion, clinical skill and empathy.” Dr. Allan
Ramsay, associate professor of medicine and professor of
family medicine, will be taking leadership of the Palliative
Care Collaborative when Dr. Fogarty assumes the deanship
of Florida State University College of Medicine this summer.
M.D. CLASS NOTES
H A L L A
reunion. I will be curious
to see what years of practice has brought to the
members of the Class of
1968.” Email address:
[email protected].
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1969
Susan Pitman Lowenthal
200 Kennedy Drive
Torrington, CT 06790
(860) 597-8996
susan_w_pitmanlowen
[email protected]
1970
Raymond Joseph Anton
1521 General Knox Road
Russell, MA 01071
(413) 568-8659
[email protected]
John F. Beamis Jr.
24 Lorena Road
Winchester, MA 01890
(781) 729-7568
[email protected]
1971
Wayne E. Pasanen
117 Osgood Street
North Andover, MA 01845
(978) 681-9393
wpasanen@lowell
general.org
1972
F. Farrell Collins Jr.
205 Page Road
Pinehurst, NC 28374
(910) 295-2429
1973
James M. Betts
715 Harbor Road
Alameda, CA 94502
(510) 523-1920
32
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
[email protected]
rology department of the
UNC School of Medicine.
Philip L. Cohen
483 Lakewood Drive
Winter Park, FL 32789
(407) 628-0221
[email protected]
1975
Cressey Brazier writes:
“My eldest daughter,
Cressica, is finally completing her schooling after
undergrad at Princeton.
She finished a master’s in
civil engineering at Berkeley and in May graduates
from Columbia with her
master’s in Architecture.
Our second daughter,
Shireen, graduated from
law school at the University of Oregon in May of
2007. Our third daughter,
Cristin, finished her stint
in the Marines and is married to a Marine stationed
in Hawaii. They have
given me two granddaughters and my wife’s daughter has added to the
grandchildren also.”
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1974
Douglas M. Eddy
5 Tanbark Road
Windham, NH 03087
(603) 434-2164
[email protected]
Cajsa Schumacher
78 Euclid Avenue
Albany, NY 12203
[email protected]
James F. Howard Jr., has
been appointed to the
Board of Directors of the
American Board of Electrodiagnostic Medicine
(ABEM). He is a distinguished professor of neuromuscular disease and chief
of the neuromuscular disorders section in the neu-
Ellen Andrews
195 Midland Road
Pinehurst, NC 28374
(910) 295-6464
[email protected]
Bruce Roberts writes: “I
have been living in
Chicagoland area and have
been happily married for
30 years with two sons. I
am presently working
hard as chief of mental
health services at Hines
VA Medical Center/
Loyola Stritch School of
Medicine. One son starts
medical school at Loyola
this summer.”
1976
Don P. Chan
Cardiac Associates of
New Hampshire
Suite 103
246 Pleasant Street
Concord, NH 03301
(603) 224-6070
[email protected]
Bill Patterson writes: “We
have been acquired by
Concentra, a national
company whose mission is
to ‘improve the health care
of America, one patient at
a time.’ I have led a revision of the code of ethics
for the American College
of Occupational and
Environmental Medicine
— a satisfying project.”
1977
Mark A. Popovsky
22 Nauset Road
Sharon, MA 02067
(781) 784-8824
mpopovsky@
haemonetics.com
1981
Mary Maloney is living in
Worcester, Mass., where
she is chief of dermatology
at the University of
Massachusetts.
Craig Wendell Gage
2415 Victoria Gardens
Tampa, FL 33609
craiggage@
tampabay.rr.com
1978
1982
Paul McLane Costello
Essex Pediatrics, Ltd.
89 Main Street
Essex Junction, VT 05452
(802) 879-6556
David and Sally Murdock
[email protected]
Linda Schroth writes: “We
now have two more doctors in the family; our
daughter, Alison, graduated from Penn State
College of Medicine in
2007 and is now at the
Emergency Medicine residency program at UMass;
and she got married to a
classmate who will be
doing his anesthesia residency at Deaconess. Our
older son, Jon, is a computer animator (his name
is in the credits for Horton
Hears a Who) and our
younger son is graduating
from RIT in 2008. Whew!
We’re finally done!”
Diane M. Georgeson
2 Ravine Parkway
Oneonta, NY 13820
(607) 433-1620
[email protected]
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1979
Sarah Ann McCarty
1018 Big Bend Road
Barboursville, WV 25504
(304) 691-1094
[email protected]
1980
Richard Nicholas Hubbell
80 Summit Street
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 862-5551
rich.hubbell@
vtmednet.org
1983
Anne Marie Massucco
15 Cedar Ledge Road
West Hartford, CT 06107
(860) 521-6120
[email protected]
Mario Testani writies:
“Here’s to hoping that all
are well, have enjoyed the
last 25 years and will have
a blast in the next 25. We
can talk about it at the 50year reunion. Anne and
Diane, your enthusiasm is
great...you must have put
in a lot of hard work as
our class agents. I hope
more people will decide to
attend the reunion. The
25th is special and I hate
having to miss it. It would
be great to celebrate, catch
up on folks and maybe feel
25 years younger (why
not?). I live in Rochester,
N.Y., with my wife,
Elisabeth, and 13-year-old
daughter, Ariel. Son
Galen, 24, is a starving
(well, sort of — we make
sure he is fed) artist in
NYC. Ariel is artistic too
and we shudder at the
thought of having two
artists. Ariel seems to like
a lot of other things too.
Elisabeth (Lise) is an
M.D., but instead of practicing is trying to launch a
biotech company. I practice adult and child psychiatry and am involved in
teaching at the U of R. I.,
find it all to be very interesting each day.” Email
address: mtestani
@rochester.rr.com.
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1984
Richard C. Shumway
34 Coventry Lane
Avon, CT 06001
(860) 673-6629
rshumway@
stfranciscare.org
Jeffrey Darrow writes:
“Twins are 16, learning to
drive and starting to think
about college. Our 13year-old son and 6-yearold girl are not yet straining to break the parental
grip. My wife and I continue to keep the Boston
area supplied with plastic
surgery and radiologic
coverage. See you at the
25th!”
1985
Vito D. Imbasciani
1915 North Crescent
Heights Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90069
(323) 656-1316
[email protected]
1986
Darrell Edward White
29123 Lincoln Road
Bay Village, OH 44140
(440) 892-4681
[email protected]
Thomas Curchin writes: “I
am in a family practice at
Central Vermont Medical
center with great partners.
My son, Will, is a freshman at UVM, living in the
shadow of the medical
school. Alice (15) is a
sophomore here and
Emma (9) is in the third
grade. My wife, Sarah is
here at home with the
children and our many
animals.” Steve Meyers is
a professor of radiology
and neurosurgery at the
University of Rochester
and is the author of a new
book titled: MRI of Bone
and Soft Tissue Tumors and
Tumor-like Lesions:
Differential Diagnosis and
Atlas, published by
Thieme Publishers.
1987
Robert Glassberg writes:
“Over 15 years now living
and practicing radiology in
Linwood, N.J., with Lisa
and our two daughters:
Shayna (12) and Lily (11).
Working hard, part clinically and part as president/CEO of Atlantic
Medical Imaging, which
has over 30 doctors and
over 350 employees. The
population, economy and
practice here in South
Jersey have all grown
more than we ever expected. We’ve grown into the
community more than we
expected too! Will never
forget the great days in
Vermont. Would love to
hear from any of the old
classmates! Email Address:
[email protected]. Cate
McKegney writes from
Minnesota: “I continue to
teach (but casually) at
HCMC Family Medicine
and I am moving more
into geriatrics, though I’m
still at Planned Parenthood twice-a-month. And
I still miss the mountains.”
1988
H. James Wallace III
416 Martel Lane
St. George, VT 05495
(802) 872-8533
james.wallace@
vtmednet.org
Lawrence I. Wolk
5724 South Nome Street
Greenwood Village, CO 80111
(303) 771-1289
[email protected]
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1989
Peter M. Nalin
13216 Griffin Run
Carmel, IN 46033
(317) 962-6656
[email protected]
Catherine Cantwell writes:
“My oldest son, Nicholas,
graduates from high
school this year and will
head to Spain for a year.
He will then go to Cornell
in 2009. I can’t believe I
am old enough to have a
college student (I can’t
believe I am still sane with
five teenagers!)” Janine
Dawson Taylor writes:
“After UVM I completed
pediatric residence at
MMC then joined the
USAF for eleven years. I
‘cross-trained’ to child
psychiatry and now work
in a community mental
health center in Waterville, Maine. Married 21
years, with six children,
S U M M E R
2008
33
M.D. CLASS NOTES
H A L L A
1993
CONTINUING MEDICAL EDUCATION
2008 CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Advanced Dermatology for the Primary Care Physician
September 4-7, 2008, The Inn at Essex, Essex Junction, Vt.
6th Annual Northern New England Critical Care
Conference
September 18-20, 2008, Stoweflake Conference Center,
Stowe, Vt.
Dementia & Neuropsychiatry Conference: An Update
for Neurologists, Psychiatrists, Geriatricians,
and Primary Care Providers
September 19-21, 2008, Hilton Hotel, Burlington, Vt.
22nd Annual Imaging Seminar
October 17-19, 2008, Stoweflake Conference Center,
Stowe, Vt.
College of Medicine alumni receive a special 10% discount
on all UVM Continuing Medical Education conferences.
For information contact:
University of Vermont
Continuing Medical Education
128 Lakeside Avenue Suite 100
Burlington, VT 05405
(802) 656-2292
http://cme.uvm.edu
ages 19, 15, 14, 11, 9, 6.
No fence, white picket or
otherwise!”
1990
Barbara Angelika Dill
120 Hazel Court
Norwood, NJ 07648
(201) 767-7778
[email protected]
1991
John Dewey
15 Eagle Street
Cooperstown, NY 13326
34
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
Joanne Taplin Romeyn
22 Patterson Lane
Durham, CT 06422
(860) 349-6941
Brad Watson
[email protected]
Barbara Ariue writes: “We
are expecting our first
child, a girl, to be born in
May 2008. I am still with
Loma Linda University
School of Medicine faculty
in the Department of
Pediatrics division of allergy/pulmonology.”
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1994
Holliday Kane Rayfield
P.O. Box 819
Waitsfield, VT 05673
(802) 496-5667
[email protected]
1995
Allyson Miller Bolduc
252 Autumn Hill Road
South Burlington, VT 05403
(802) 863-4902
allyson.bolduc@
vtmednet.org
[email protected]
Gip Welch writes: “Taking
a year off to travel—it’s
been great! Email Address:
[email protected]”
1992
Mark Eliot Pasanen
1234 Spear Street
South Burlington, VT 05403
(802) 865-3281
mark.pasanen@
vtmednet.org
Laurie Yntema writes: “In
my tenth year of practice
of internal medicine in
Downeast Maine. I continue to love the work and
the place. I introduced
massive chaos into my
middle age last year by
adopting twin 3-year-old
boys from Russia. We all
are doing much adapting
and learning.”
anne.valente@cardio.
chboston.org
Patricia Ann King, M.D., Ph.D.
832 South Prospect Street
Burlington, VT 05401
(802) 862-7705
patricia.king@
vtmednet.org
1997
Julie Clifford Smail
10 Proctor Street
Manchester-by-the-Sea,
MA 01944
(360) 240-8693
jsmail@
fidalgomedical.com
Amy and Jonathan Martin
write: “Jonathan and I will
be moving back to the
East coast this summer
and plan to settle in
Connecticut. We are excited to start playing in snow
instead of sand! Aloha!”
Daniel Roke writes: “I am
in the Air Force serving as
the chief of the Department of Anesthesia at
Landstuhl Regional
Medical Center in
Germany. I am looking
forward to becoming a
civilian again this October
when my wife, daughter,
and I will move to
Nashville and I will begin
my new job at Vanderbilt
University’s children’s hospital as a pediatric anesthesiologist.”
1998
1996
Halleh Akbarnia
2011 Prairie Street
Glenview, IL 60025
(847) 998-0507
[email protected]
Anne Marie Valente
66 Winchester St., Apt. 503
Brookline, MA 02446
John Blakey writes: “ Just
want to say it is incredible
that ten years have gone
A Lasting Tribute to Interdependence
Vermont was where writer W. C. “Bill” Heinz and his late
wife, Betty, belonged. It was Betty’s birthplace and residence for most of her life. It was where Bill, a New
Yorker, met Betty while attending Middlebury College.
It was where they returned to live out their lives — and
where their ashes rest today.
On February 27, 1964, Betty and Bill Heinz lost their
sixteen-year-old daughter, Barbara, to a virulent infection. Bill had left their Connecticut home to cover the
Clay-Liston World Heavyweight Championship fight in
Miami, Florida. Family friend Howard Cosell passed
along an urgent message, and Bill made it to the
Stamford, Connecticut, hospital just before Barbara died.
“My dad never got over that… no one ever does,” says
Heinz’s younger daughter, Gayl, who earned her bachelor’s degree from UVM in 1973 and now lives in
Massachusetts. “He was deeply tortured by her death.”
The family scattered Barbara’s ashes on the Vermont
mountainside near where Barbara had gone to summer
camp and soon moved to a house nearby on 220 acres.
Before Bill returned to Vermont, his writing career
kept him close to New York. After graduating from
Middlebury he started as a copy boy for the New York Sun.
He earned his way to a feature writer and, with the outbreak of World War II, became their war correspondent
in the European theater. He fired off dispatches, from the
Normandy invasion and the liberation of Paris, to the
battle of the Huertgen Forest, alongside Ernest
Hemingway and Star & Stripes correspondent Andy
Rooney. He returned to New York and was awarded his
own sports column, and when the Sun folded in 1950, he
freelanced for magazines and ventured into novels. His
first novel, The Professional, was praised by Hemingway as
“the only good novel I have ever read about a fighter and
an excellent first novel in its own right.” He authored the
classic Run to Daylight! with Vince Lombardi. He expanded his cover story for Life magazine about a thoracic surgeon into the acclaimed novel, The Surgeon. This book
caught the eye and admiration of a surgeon in Maine, Dr.
H. Richard Hornberger. Having been rejected by seventeen publishers, he contacted Heinz for help with his
book about his experiences as a Korean War surgeon.
Heinz re-wrote it, contracted with a publisher, and the
book went to print under the penname, Richard Hooker.
It was titled M*A*S*H. The novel, film, and television
series, along with Heinz’s novels, The Surgeon, and
Emergency, helped reshape how many view both war and
medicine. The result, as told in Bill’s 2002 UVM honorary doctorate citation, was “an inspiration to uncounted numbers of physicians who were called to the practice
and the principles of professionalism they found therein.”
Bill typed those words — the practice and the principles of professionalism — on his 1932 Remington
portable typewriter on January 15, 2002 in his Dorset
home. He was too fragile to attend UVM’s
Commencement, and he had invited me to sit with him as
he wrote words to be read at the ceremony. I sat next to
Bill as he typed, stretching for just the right word whenever he paused and looked my way with his one good eye
— impatient, expectant, ready with either a sharp “No!”
or an approving “Yes, that will do.” I learned more about
writing in those hours than I did in my graduate writing
program.
Bill held the world to high standards. The thing he
seemed to find heroic about soldiers, athletes, writers and
physicians was not the opportunity for an individual to
stand out, but rather the moments of interdependence: a
football team finding its common purpose; infantrymen
driven by the desire to keep each other alive in the cold
mud of France (as detailed in his collection of war correspondence, When We Were One), physicians and ambulance drivers caring for a scared child; two men huddled
over a typewriter working to find just the right word.
Bill’s standards required a final selfless act. He found it
in his belief in redistributing each generation’s wealth and
leaving the world better than one found it, perhaps
spurred on by the haunting memory of his daughter’s
death. After Bill’s death in February, the Heinz family
generously established the Barbara Bailey Heinz and the
Gayl Bailey Heinz Endowment to support the work of
UVM’s Department of Pediatrics. On June 21, Dr. Lewis
First, Chair of Pediatrics and Senior Associate Dean for
Medical Education, joined a roster of dignitaries at Bill’s
memorial service who read passages from Bill’s work and
enumerated the ways Bill and Betty left the world better
than they found it.
— Rick Blount
M.D. CLASS NOTES
OBITUARIES
H A L L A
H A L L A
by. Angelie and I have two
kids, Chloe (5) and
Nathan (3) and a third on
the way. I've been a partner now for over a year
and love the practice. We
also love where we live. I
miss Vermont and many
of my classmates, and I
hope to make it to a
reunion some time.
Cheers.”
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
1999
Everett Jonathan Lamm
11 Autumn Lane
Stratham, NH 03885
(603) 929-7555
[email protected]
Deanne Dixon Haag
4215 Pond Road
Sheldon, VT 05483
(802) 524-7528
Ladan Farhoomand
1481 Regatta Road
Carlsbad, CA 92009
(626) 201-1998
[email protected]
Joel W. Keenan
Greenwich Hospital
Five Perryridge Road
Greenwich, CT 06830
[email protected]
JoAn Louise Monaco
Suite 6-F, 5E
4618 Warwick Blvd.
Kansas City, MO 64112
(816) 753-2410
[email protected]
Kerry Lee Landry
(919) 732-9876
[email protected]
Jay Edmond Allard
USNH Yokosuka
PSC 475 Box 1757
FPO, AP 96350
[email protected]
Maureen C. Sarle
[email protected]
Amy Doolan Roy writes:
“Just about one more year
left in fellowship and then
who knows where we’ll
be? We’re expecting our
third baby, another boy, in
September. Anyone have
any extra names that
would go with Benjamin
and Samuel?”
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
NEW CLASS AGENTS
The Medical Alumni Association is pleased to
announce new members of the corps of volunteers
who help keep connections tight between the College
and its alumni all over the globe. Ashley Zucker, Mark
Hunter, and Alyssa Wittenberg were selected by the
Class of 2008. Currently over 70 alumni serve as class
agents, representing the nearly 4,000 alumni from
the classes of 1945 to the present.
Emily A. Hannon
emily.hannon@
hsc.utah.edu
Jonathan Vinh Mai
15 Meadow Lane
Danville, PA 17821
(570) 275-4681
[email protected]
Mary O’Leary Ready
[email protected]
Naomi R. Leeds
52 Garden St. Apt. 48
Cambridge, MA 02138
[email protected]
JAMES E . CRANE , M . D., ’39
2002
2000
Michael Jim Lee
71 Essex Lane
Irvine, CA 92620
michael_j_lee1681@
yahoo.com
36
2001
2003
Omar Khan
33 Clearwater Circle
Shelburne, VT 05482
(802) 985-1131
[email protected]
Scott Goodrich
309 Barben Avenue
Watertown, NY 13601
scott.goodrich1
@us.army.mil
R E U N I O N
’ 0 9
2004
Jillian S. Sullivan
[email protected]
Steven D. Lefebvre
fabulous5lefebvre@
hotmail.com
2005
Julie A. Alosi
[email protected]
Richard J. Parent
[email protected]
Kate Brownlowe is continuing her psychiatry residency at Maine Medical
Center. She and husband,
Chris, welcomed their
son, Parker, on October
21, 2007. Kate recently
co-authored a poster presented at the Academy of
Psychosomatic Medicine
conference entitled,
“Smoke ’Em If You’ve
Got ’Em: ClozarilInduced Myocarditis.”
Email address: dretak@
gmail.com. Aaron Stern
writes: “I am continuing
my hospital-based
nephrology practice in
Jackson Heights, NY.”
2006
William C. Eward
[email protected]
Deborah Rabinowitz
debbie.rabinowitz@
uvm.edu
2007
Allison Collen
[email protected]
Scot Millay
[email protected]
Meredith Mowitz writes:
“We are proud to
announce the birth of our
daughter, Avery Quinn
Mowitz. Born February
11th, she weighed in at a
healthy 8 pounds, 1 ounce
and was 203/4 inches long.
We are truly enjoying
every minute with our
beautiful little girl!”
Dr. Crane died of pneumonia in
Eugene, Oregon on April 7, 2008. He
was 94. Born in Stamford Conn., he
earned his bachelors’ and medical
degrees from UVM in 1936 and 1939
respectively. He interned at Stamford
Hospital in 1939 and 1940 and did his
residency at Bellevue Hospital in New
York City after WWII. His training
also included a fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering in the late 1940’s.
As an intelligence officer in the U.S.
Army Air Corps on the eve of WWII,
Dr. Crane led a mission to determine
the safety of an air transport route
through South America and Africa for
military transport across the Atlantic.
In late December 1941, he accompanied General George Brett to China
for an historic meeting with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Britain’s
Indian Commander, General Sir
Archibald Percival Wavell. The session produced the Allied land and air
war strategy for the Asian Pacific
region. Dr. Crane served throughout
the Pacific theatre during the war. He
later founded the International Order
of Characters, which drew its membership from the aviation and aerospace fields. As an FAA examiner at
the beginning of commercial jet aviation, he was an early advocate for jet
crews and their special medical problems in the new era of high-speed
travel. The longest serving FAA
Examiner in history, Dr. Crane
attracted pilots from around the globe
to his medical practice in Stamford.
Dr. Crane retired from medical practice on his 90th birthday in 2004, and
moved to Oregon in 2005.
JOHN H . BROWE , M . D. ’40
Dr. Browe died April 8, 2008, at his
home in Troy, N.Y. He was 92. He
graduated from Holy Cross College
and from the UVM College of Arts
and Sciences in 1937 and from the
RAJ CHAWLA
College of Medicine in 1940. He
served in the United States Army as a
First Lieutenant, MC. While on
Bataan, he became a Japanese prisoner of war on April 9, 1942. Until his
liberation, on Sept. 7, 1945, he provided medical care to American,
Filipino, and Australian prisoners of
war in various locations including
Camp O’Donnell. Following the
war, he graduated from Columbia
University School of Public Health
and Administrative Medicine with an
MPH in 1950. From 1950 until
1977, Dr. Browe was the director of
the Bureau of Nutrition, Division of
Epidemiology and Preventative
Health Services with the New York
State Department of Health. During
that time, he also participated in
nutrition surveys in Iran, Chile and
Venezuela. His primary interest was
on how nutrition related to children.
WILLIAM A . PRATT. M . D. ’43
Dr. Pratt died at his home in
Rutland, Vt., on April 5, 2008. He
received his B.S. in 1941 from UVM,
where he was elected in his senior
year into the Boulder Society.
During the accelerated years of
World War II in 1943 he earned his
M.D. from the College of Medicine.
He interned the next year at the
Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital
in Hanover, N.H., before joining the
U.S. Army Medical Corps. where he
served as a Captain from 1944 to
1946. He completed his residency in
1948 at the Mary Fletcher Hospital,
and obtained a master’s in Basic
Science and Internal Medicine in
1949 from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Medicine.
Opening his private practice in
Internal Medicine in Rutland in
1949, he shared office space with his
older brother, obstetrician Henry
Lewis Pratt. For the next twenty
years, he was the only board certified
internist in Rutland County. From
1950-1971, he was an instructor in
clinical medicine at the College of
Medicine. As a member of the
Rutland Regional Medical Center,
from 1949-1991, he served terms as
chief of medicine and president of
the hospital staff, as well as on various hospital committees. During this
period, he was also co-founder and
president of the Vermont State Heart
Association.
JOHN T. PRIOR , M . D. ’43
Dr. Prior died November 23, 2007,
at his home in Manilus, N.Y. He was
90 years old. Born in St. Albans,
Vermont, he received both his
undergraduate and medical degrees
from UVM. Dr. Prior interned at
City Hospital in New York City. His
pathology training was at Binghamton City Hospital, Syracuse University Medical College Dept. of
Pathology, and Upstate Medical
Center at Syracuse. He retired as
professor of pathology at Upstate
Medical Center in 1971 and became
laboratory director of Community
General Hospital until 1987. Previously he served as laboratory director
of Crouse-Irving and Crouse Hospital. Dr. Prior authored over 80 articles in medical journals, primarily
concerned with cardiovascular and
neoplastic disease. Dr. Prior served
in the U.S. Army during WW II,
with the 10th Armored Division in
the European Theater. Following
WW II he was a member of the
Army Reserve and commanded the
376th Combat Support Reserve
Hospital, from which he retired in
1977 with the rank of colonel.
JAMES E . SIMPSON ,
M . D. ’43
Dr.
Simpson,
of
Williston, Vt., died
March 10, 2008, in
Fletcher Allen Health
Care, He was 89. He
received his bachelor
of science degree from
UVM in 1941, before
earning his medical
S U M M E R
2008
37
M.D. CLASS NOTES
H A L L A
degree and serving in World War II.
He was a Captain in the U.S. Army
Air Corps from 1944-1946, and was
an Air Sea Rescue Flight Surgeon at
Okinawa. His medical internships
and graduate studies in Orthopedic
Surgery and Neurosurgery were at
Fordham Hospital, Johns Hopkins
University, Bellevue Hospital (NYC),
Veterans Administration Hospital/
Kennedy Hospital (Memphis, Tenn.)
and Arkansas Children's Hospital.
Dr. Simpson entered private practice
in 1951 in orthopedic surgery in
Burlington, the third orthopedist in
Vermont. He was a member of the
faculty at the College of Medicine
from 1951 to 1983, retiring as a professor emeritus. He retired from
practice in 1986 after 35 years.
RICHARD E . PEASE , M . D.’ 49
Dr. Richard E. Pease, 85, of Jericho,
Vt., died on Feb. 3, 2008, after a brief
illness. He was born in Proctor, Vt.
After graduating from the College of
Medicine, he set up private practice
in Morrisville for 15 years. He was an
anthesiologist and associate professor
at Fletcher Allen Health Care, retiring in 1986. He served in the U.S.
Army during World War II and the
U.S.A.F., stationed at Fort Ethan
Allen during the Korean Conflict.
WILLIAM J . SOHN , M . D. ’51
Dr. Sohn, a pediatrician who cared
for three generations of children,
died of cancer March 8, 2008, at
Abington Memorial Hospital in
Penn., where he was a member of the
staff for 52 years. He was 82. A native
of Brooklyn, N.Y., Dr. Sohn served in
the Army in Germany during World
War II. After his discharge, he earned
a bachelor's degree from Columbia
University before receiving his medical degree from UVM.
undergraduate studies at UVM,
where he returned to earn his undergraduate and medical degrees. He
served his medical internship at the
U.S. Naval Hospital in Long Island,
New York from 1952-53. In 1955 he
began his private practice in
Swanton, Vermont, retiring in 1998.
TIMOTHY J . DRISCOLL JR ., M . D. ’55
Dr. Driscoll died March 12, 2008, at
his home in Hernando, Fla. He was
79. A native of Portsmouth, N.H.,
Dr. Driscoll also attended the Air
Force School of Sciences and was a
rated flight surgeon. He was the chief
of medicine and chief of pediatrics at
U.S. Air Force Regional Hospital,
Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas. He
retired in 1987 as director of base
medical services at Hanscom Air
Force Base, Mass., and moved to
Florida.
MARVIN C . ADAMS
, M.D.’56
Dr. Adams died on January 4, 2008,
at his home in Maine. He was 79.
After medical school he completed
his internship at Maine Medical
Center before serving as First
Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy at
Brunswick Naval Air Station as a base
physician. Following a year of surgical residency at MMC, he completed
an ENT residency at SUNY
Syracuse. He maintained a practice in
ENT in Portland for 30 years, retiring in 1990.
WILLIAM ALBERT LONG , M . D. ’56
Dr. Long, 79, of Westfield, Mass.,
died February 4, 2008. A native of
Malone, N.Y., he was a respected
physician in the Westfield area for
over 40 years. He also served on
numerous boards and committees in
the health-related domain.
ALVAN FISHER , M . D. ’75
WENDELL A . STIMETS , M . D. ’52
Dr. Stimets died March 20, 2008, at
his Swanton, Vt. home. He was 83.
Military service interrupted his
38
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
Dr. Fisher, age 57, of Half Moon Bay,
Calif., died September 28, 2007, from
kidney cancer. He spent 22 years in
clinical practice in Rhode Island
treating and advocating for patients
with HIV/AIDS. As a founding
member of the Board of Directors of
Rhode Island Project AIDS, he was
instrumental in establishing standards for the comprehensive care of
patients with this disease. More
recently he continued his work in the
field of HIV/AIDS treatment as
Senior Director of Medical Affairs
for Gilead Sciences in Forster City,
Calif.
WILLIAM B . PATTERSON , M . D. ’76
Dr. Patterson died suddenly at his
home in Shrewsbury, Mass., on
March 31, 2008. He was 59 years old.
A celebration of his life can be found
online at: www.williambradfordpatterson.com
appointed head of the Infectious
Disease Division from 1985 to 1988
at the Naval Hospital in Oakland,
Calif., where he was named Teacher
of the Year. From 1988 to 1993, he
was a fellow at the University of
California at San Diego School of
Medicine. In 1993, he became the
director of graduate medical education at Scripps Mercy Hospital in
San Diego. In 2000, he developed a
successful palliative care service. In
2004 he moved to Alaska and joined
Providence Alaska Medical Center,
serving as medical director of their
new palliative care department.
DARREN BEAN , M . D. ’99
Dr. Bean died May 10, 2008 in the
crash of a University of Wisconsin
Hospital Med Flight helicopter,
shortly after delivering a patient to
the Gundersen Lutheran Medical
Center in La Crosse, Wisc. The
cause of the accident is under investigation, but the helicopter he was riding in appears to have struck a hill or
surrounding trees. After receiving his
Obituaries of Porter Dale, M.D.’47, Spencer Burney, M.D.’62, and Melvin Golden,
M.D.’64 will appear in the next issue.
FACULTY
JANE M . WOLF, M . D. ’77
Dr. Wolf died on February 9, 2008, of
complications of pancreatic cancer.
She was a graduate cum laude of
Radcliffe College, before earning her
medical degree from the College of
Medicine. She was resident at UVM’s
Department of Psychiatry, 19771981, acting as chief resident during
her fourth year. She served as assistant professor and associate professor
at the same department and was
director of residency training until
1989. From 1990 to 1999 she was
psychiatrist-in-chief at the Mary
Imogene Basset Hospital in Cooperstown, N.Y. In 1999 she became clinical director of the Augusta Mental
Health Institute in Augusta, Maine,
until her retirement for health reasons in 2000. Dr. Wolf recounted her
struggle with a memory disorder in
the Spring 2005 issue of Vermont
Medicine.
EDWIN JAMES HEFFERNAN ,
M . D. ’78
Dr. Heffernan died of cardiac arrhythmia Jan. 23, 2008, at his home in
Anchorage, Alaska. He was 57. After
receiving his medical degree, he
served in the U.S. Navy and was
medical degree, Dr. Bean completed
his residency training at Carolinas
Medical Center in Charlotte, North
Carolina in 2002. He had been an
assistant professor at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison since September 2002. Besides being a medflight physician, he was the emergency department director of ultrasound, a member of the multidisiplinary hospital trauma committee, and
executive board member of the
Regional Trauma Advisory Committee.
FRANK L . BABBOTT JR . M . D.
Dr. Babbott, of Shelburne, died of a stroke on March 6,
2008, in Fletcher Allen Health Care. He first entered
Amherst College in 1938, but college was interrupted by
four years in the United States Army, where he served as
a laboratory technician with the 79th General Hospital in
Great Britain and France. After World War II, he
returned to Amherst and graduated in 1947 before
enrolling in the Syracuse University College of Medicine,
Class of 1951. Post doctoral training included an internship at Rochester General Hospital and a masters degree
program at the Harvard School of Public Health. While
there, he directed a three-year field study in arctic Alaska,
Finland and Greenland. Subsequently, he was an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Community Medicine,
University of Pennsylvania. In 1963, he joined the faculty
of the UVM College of Medicine as an Associate
Professor, after working for a year in London with the
British Ministry of Health. Besides training medical students in Vermont, Dr. Babbott was involved with several
studies of respiratory illness in industrial and argricultural population. In 1971, he volunteered with Project
HOPE and spent several months in Jamaica. His duties
included teaching at the University of the West Indies.
For several years, Dr. Babbott was vice chairman of the
American College of Preventive Medicine as well as the
secretary treasurer of the Association of Teachers of
Preventive Medicine. During his career, he authored or
co-authored a number of publications in professional
journals.
GEORGE A . SCHUMACHER , M . D.
Dr. Schumacher, an emeritus professor and
retired chair of neurology at the College of
Medicine, died March 24, 2008, at
Shelburne Bay Senior Living Community
at the age of 95. A native of Trenton, N.J.,
Dr. Schumacher graduated with honors
from Penn State University in 1932 and
Cornell University Medical College in 1936. He had six
years of residency training at the University of
Pennsylvania, N.Y. Hospital, Cornell Medical Center,
and Bellevue Hospital. In 1942, he was commissioned
Captain in the Army Medical Corps and served in
London and Paris. He was promoted to Major and awarded the Bronze Star. From 1946 to 1950 he was professor
of neurology at N.Y. Cornell and Bellevue Hospitals. In
1950 he was appointed chairman of the new Division of
Neurology at the College of Medicine, initiating neurological services there. He established the residency program in Neurology in 1954. His long association with the
National Multiple Sclerosis Society Medical Advisory
Board began with his 1949 review of the world’s literature
concerning MS. In 1962 he helped found the International Federation of National MS Societies in Vienna.
He also established the MS clinic at the Medical Center
Hospital of Vermont. During his career, he published
over 70 papers in neurology. In 1967, he combined his
lifelong love of the outdoors with a year sabbatical at the
University of Alaska, in part to study nervous system
function at high altitude and cold exposure on Mt.
McKinley. Upon return, he resigned the chairmanship,
but continued as professor of neurology until retiring in
1978.
S U M M E R
2008
39
A World of Possibilities
march 21, 2008
12:44 pm
Erin Perko ’11 (at right) leads a group of third-graders in an investigation
of the senses during a SMILE DOCs visit to the Orchard Elementary School in South Burlington.
SMILE DOCs is a program run by first- and second-year students who work
with third- through fifth-grade students throughout northern Vermont.
The summer weeks between the end of exams in June
and the beginning of classes in August could be the last
quiet time in years for a future physician. But, not surprisingly, College of Medicine students often transform
this potential downtime into a busy learning experience.
Through summer research projects and preceptorships, funded by the contributors to the UVM College
of Medicine Fund, medical students are building new
knowledge and sharpening their clinical skills in places
far and wide. Class of 2011 members are conducting
research projects in affiliation with eleven different
departments at the College, just as recent graduate
Amylynne Frankel, M.D.’08 (pictured here gathering
data on youth smoking habits) did in the summer after
her first year. And this summer, dozens of students are
engaged in preceptorships from Cambridge, Mass., to
Hilo, Hawaii, and across the globe in Japan, Ethiopia,
and Turkey.
Your contribution to the UVM College of Medicine
Fund helps keep important projects like summer
research and preceptorships available to all students.
For more information about how you can support the College of Medicine,
please contact the Medical Development and Alumni Relations Office.
photograph by Raj Chawla
40
V E R M O N T
M E D I C I N E
medical development and alumni relations office
(802) 656-4014 [email protected] www.med.uvm.edu/giving
RAJ CHAWLA
A LASTING
TRIBUTE TO
A CHERISHED
MENTOR
John E. Mazuzan, M.D.’54 has a long and rich history of involvement with his medical alma mater.
A member of the College’s faculty since 1959 (he is now a professor emeritus) he has treated thousands of patients and taught and mentored countless medical students and residents over the years.
He also served as chair of the Department of Anesthesiology for many years, and was awarded the
highest honor of the Medical Alumni Association (MAA), the A. Bradley Soule Award, in 1997.
Sometimes the College’s faculty members help shape lives in many ways, and Dr. Mazuzan is a
prime example of that. This was the case with businessman James Andrew (above left), a longtime
friend of Dr. Mazuzan’s. With Dr. Mazuzan’s encouragement and advice, Mr. Andrew built a successful insurance business specializing in working with physicians.
Now, as a testament to the mentoring Dr. Mazuzan provided, Mr. Andrew has generously funded the John E. Mazuzan Jr., M.D.’54 Endowed Medical Scholarship under the College’s MAA
matching challenge program. The Mazuzan Scholarship will provide a constant stream of aid in
perpetuity to students like Jared Blum (at right), student council president from the Class of 2009.
For information about how you can support the College of Medicine by establishing an
MAA Challenge Scholarship, please contact the Medical Development and Alumni Relations Office.
university of vermont college of medicine
medical development and alumni relations office
(802)656-4014 [email protected] www.med.uvm.edu/giving
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