Illinois Medicine

faculty news The latest accomplishments of our distinguished faculty VAN NECK APPOINTED AS ASSOCIATE DEAN OF ADMINISTRATION Todd Van Neck, MPP, has become associate dean for administration at the College of Medicine. Van Neck has served as director of budgeting and program analysis at the University of Illinois at Chicago since 2006, advising the provost and chancellor on budgetary matters, managing the budget process, tracking commitments of campus funds and implementing special projects. In that role, Van Neck has led the development of the multiyear forecasting model, implemented the current tuition distribution model and revised the distribution of graduate tuition remission revenue. Previously he spent seven years as assistant director in the budget office and seven years before that in the Office of the Vice President for Research at Northwestern University. He holds a master of public policy from the University of Michigan. NEW POPULATION HEALTH SCIENCES POST KAY TO HELP LEAD CHICAGO BIOMEDICAL Todd Van Neck FOR KRISHNAN Jerry Krishnan, MD, PhD, has been named associate vice president for population health sciences for the University of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System and professor of medicine at the College of Medicine, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health, division of epidemi- ology and biostatistics. As steering committee chair, Krishnan will bring to University of Illinois the COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary dis- ease) Outcomes-based Network for Clinical Effectiveness and Research Translation, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the first national program designed to stimulate groundbreaking, high-im- pact comparative effectiveness re- search. Krishnan is an internation- ally regarded clinical researcher and translational investigator who focuses on adults with severe Jerry Krishnan asthma, COPD and other complex, obstructive lung disorders. Previ- ously, Krishnan served as associate professor of medicine and epidemiol- ogy, director of the Asthma & COPD Center and director of the department of medicine's data management and statistics core at the University of Chi- cago. He received his MD with honors from Baylor College of Medicine, and completed a residency in internal medicine and fellowship in pulmonary/ critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He also received a PhD in clinical investigation from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. LUSSIER NAMED ASSISTANT VP FOR QUALITY INFORMATICS Yves A. Lussier, MD, FAMCI, has been appointed professor of medicine and both assistant vice president for quality informatics and clinical re- search information officer for the Uni- versity of Illinois Hospital & Health Sciences System. He will have a joint appointment Yves A. Lussier in the department of bioengineering, now housed jointly in the colleges of Engineering and Medicine (see "Reen- gineering Bioengineering," page 30). Lussier will lead efforts to advance biomedical informatics toward the delivery of personalized medicine and the elimination of health care disparities, from leadership roles as academic director for the Research Resources Center's Bioinformatics Analytical Core, associate director for informatics within the Center for Clini- cal Translational Science and associ- ate director for informatics within the University of Illinois Cancer Center. An international expert in bioinformatics and a pioneer in research informat- ics techniques, Lussier arrives from the University of Chicago, where he served as associate director of infor- matics for the NIH-funded Compre- hensive Cancer Center as well as the co-director of biomedical informat- ics for the Clinical and Translational Science Award-funded Institute for Translational Medicine. From 2001- 06, Lussier was an assistant profes- sor in the departments of biomedical informatics and medicine at Columbia University. CONSORTIUM Brian K. Kay, PhD, professor and head of the department of biological sciences, has become the College of Medicine's scientific director for the Chicago Biomedical Consortium. He works in tandem with Shohei Koide of the University of Chicago and Rick Morimoto of Northwestern University to lead and serve as Brian K. Kay liaisons among philanthropists, faculty researchers and administrators at the three CBC universities. Funded by the Chicago Community Trust, the CBC has a mission to generate collaboration among scientists at the three universities. The College of Medicine has received more than $6.3 million in award funding from the CBC since 2004. Kay, whose research focuses on molecular recognition—the science of interactions between two or more molecules—takes over the post from Brenda Russell, PhD, one of the CBC's founders, who has returned to her NIH-funded lab and her role as physiology professor. More information on the CBC is available at its website: http://www. chicagobiomedicalconsortium.org/. PERKINS NAMED DIRECTOR OF ORGAN TRANSPLANT RESEARCH CENTER David Perkins, MD, PhD, became professor in the department of surgery and director of the Center for Organ Transplant Research at the College of Medicine effective Jan. 1. Perkins left a post as professor of medicine and surgery and director of research for transplantation for solid organs (including kidney, liver, lung and pancreas) at University of California, San Diego, where he had worked since 2005. Perkins earlier served on the faculty at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, where he was an attending physician on the Kidney Transplant Service and directed the molecular immunology laboratory. Perkins' research focuses on translational studies of transplantation that use genome-wide "omic" strategies to investigate immune and inflammatory responses, with an eye toward developing therapeutic "personalized medicine" customized to each patient. Perkins serves on the editorial board of Medical Immunology and as editor of Seminars in Immunopathology. A graduate of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he also served as a resident in internal medicine, Perkins completed a fellowship in nephrology at Boston University Medical Center. David Perkins 10 | WINTER 2012

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