Faculty and Resident Awards
The following honors were awarded to Medical School faculty members in conjunction with Commencement 2009 activities and events.
The American Medical Women’s Association Gender Equity Award
Elizabeth Crosby Award
Kaiser-Permanente Awards for Excellence in Teaching
Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award
Thomas G. Varbedian Award for Excellence in Service to Students
Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize
Gold/Bronze Beeper Awards
Silver Shovel Award
Commencement Awards
The American Medical Women’s Association Gender Equity Award
This award honors faculty members who promote equality in the education and training of physicians by assuring equal opportunities for women and men to study and practice medicine. Recipients are selected by a vote of the Medical School student body.
J. Matthew Velkey (Ph.D. 2005)
Lecturer, Cell and Developmental Biology
Elizabeth Crosby Award
This award honors Elizabeth Crosby, Ph.D., the Medical School’s pioneering and much-beloved teacher of neuroanatomy. The Crosby award is presented to a Medical School faculty member for outstanding teaching in the basic sciences. The Galens Medical Society is responsible for selecting the award recipient.
Andrew Flint, M.D.
Professor, Department of Pathology
Kaiser-Permanente Awards for Excellence in Teaching
Two awards are given each year; one for pre-clinical teaching and one for clinical teaching. Recipients are honored for their dedication to quality teaching, enthusiasm for their students, and for their continuing efforts to improve the knowledge and experience of each medical student.
Thomas H. Sisson (M.D. 1992)
Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine
Robert W. Lash, M.D.
Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine
Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award
Presented by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation
This award is presented to the senior student and faculty member who best demonstrate the ideals of outstanding compassion in the delivery of care and respect for patients, their families and health care colleagues, and who best demonstrate clinical excellence.
Brent C. Williams, M.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Internal Medicine
Thomas G. Varbedian Award for Excellence in Service to Students
This award established by the Student Council in 2005 honors Thomas Varbedian (M.D. 1956) for his longstanding dedication to the medical student body. It is awarded by the Student Council to the alumnus/a, faculty or staff member most dedicated to serving medical students.
J. Matthew Velkey (Ph.D. 2005)
Lecturer, Cell and Developmental Biology
Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize
Four Medical School faculty members recently were honored with the U-M’s first Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize for the most original approaches to teaching and creativity in the classroom.
Arno Kumagai, M.D., clinical associate professor of internal medicine and of medical education
Rachel Perlman, M.D. (Residency 2000, Fellowship 2003), clinical assistant professor of internal medicine
Teaching Innovation: The Family Centered Experience
The Family Centered Experience (FCE) is a two-year program that is part of the required curriculum and uses the power of patients’ stories to foster empathy and patient-centered care. Pairs of medical students make scheduled visits over two years to the homes of volunteer patients and their families in order to listen to the volunteers’ stories about chronic illness and its care. These home visits, as well as readings, assignments, and small group discussions, serve as a foundation for the students to explore the experience of chronic illness from the patient's perspective. One of a few pioneering programs at U.S. medical schools, the FCE is the most comprehensive — with an extensive conceptual framework, an active research component, and considerable faculty development. The FCE is built on a framework grounded in theories of empathy and moral development, adult learning and transformative education.
Lloyd Stoolman, M.D., professor of pathology
Matthew Velkey (Ph.D. 2005), lecturer in cell and developmental biology
Teaching Innovation: Virtual Microscopy for Life Sciences Education
Revolutionary as light microscopes were for medicine, this means of studying diseased organs and tissues does not scale easily. Assembling, maintaining and updating sets of glass slides for instructing and testing large cohorts of medical students devoured faculty time, without guaranteeing that students and instructors would actually see the same features, given variation in tissue slices and students’ microscope skills. The project’s overriding goal was to preserve the highly interactive laboratory experience by generating high-resolution digital replicas of the best tissue sections, compiling online image repositories, and deploying user-friendly, computer-based “viewers” that recapitulated the operation of a microscope. This combination of technologies retains the cognitively engaging aspects of light microscopy while overcoming the limitations imposed by traditional laboratories.
The Galens Medical Society presented Bronze Beeper awards to 15 resident physicians this year for exemplifying high standards in education, leadership and patient care. The top female and male vote-getters were also selected for Gold Beepers for their outstanding teaching practices. Psychiatry resident Justin Coffey and obstetrics and gynecology resident Courtney Barr were awarded Gold Beepers.
Bronze Beeper awards were given to:
Courtney Barr, M.D., obstetrics and gynecology
Sarah Berini, M.D., neurology
Justin Coffey, M.D., psychiatry
Eric Dziuban, M.D., pediatrics
Matthew Harting, M.D., surgery
Matthew Hastings, M.D., neurology
Loay Kabanni, M.D., critical care surgery
David Morris, M.D., urology
Dan O’Connell, M.D., medicine and pediatrics
Paul Park, M.D., surgery
Aaron Perdue, M.D., orthopedic surgery
Terry Platchek (M.D. 2005), medicine and pediatrics
Shane Quinonez (M.D. 2008), pediatrics
Peter Sassalos, M.D., surgery
Divya Shah, M.D., obstetrics and gynecology
Anthony Wang, M.D., neurosurgery
Galens also presents a Silver Shovel Award to the faculty member voted to be the most outstanding clinical teacher. This year’s recipient was Paul Christensen, M.D. (Residency 1991), associate professor of internal medicine.