Seven professors from the Perelman School of Medicine have been elected members of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), one of the nation's highest honors in biomedicine. In addition to their appointments in the School of Medicine, the new inductees also hold positions within the School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Nursing, the Scheie Eye Institute, and the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The new members bring Penn Medicine’s total to 68. The newly elected members raise IOM's total active membership to 1,753 and the number of foreign associates to 120. With an additional 93 members holding emeritus status, IOM's total membership is 1,966.

Established in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences, IOM has become recognized as a national resource for independent, scientifically informed analysis and recommendations on health issues. With their election, members make a commitment to volunteer their service on IOM committees, boards, and other activities.

The new Penn IOM members:

Charles L. Bosk, Ph.D., is professor of Sociology, School of Arts and Sciences; professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care, Perelman School of Medicine; and senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His first book, Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure, published in 1979, is a seminal work within not only sociology but also medicine and is often required reading for surgical residents. He is the author of numerous publications including All God's Mistakes: Genetics Counseling in a Pediatric Hospital and What Would You Do? Juggling Bioethics and Ethnography. His research areas are medical sociology and the professionalization, deviance and social control and field methods of research. His current projects focus on the ethics of research and on medical mistakes in the guise of patient safety. After receiving a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award for his project “Restarting a Stalled Policy Revolution: Patient Safety, Systems Error and Professional Responsibility,” Dr. Bosk has become an authoritative voice in academic and policy debates about professionalism and patient safety. Bosk’s wide-ranging influence has been acknowledged in his appointments to the Hastings Center Panel on the Ethics of Patient Safety, the Hastings Center Task Force on Ethics and Effectiveness in Total Quality Improvement, the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Taskforce on Guidelines and Standards in Clinical Ethics, the AHRQ Task Force on Patient Safety, the Committee on Patient Safety at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and as a visiting professor at various medical schools.  

Phyllis A. Dennery, M.D., F.A.A.P., is professor of Pediatrics; director, Newborn Services, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania; and chief of the Division of Neonatology and Newborn Services at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She holds the Werner and Gertrude Henle Endowed Chair in Pediatrics. She is also president of the International Pediatric Research Foundation. Her research is focused on oxidative stress-mediated neonatal lung gene regulation and on the biology of lung injury and repair. She runs a National Institutes of Health-funded laboratory and has published her findings in numerous highly respected, peer-reviewed journals. Her clinical interests are in neonatal jaundice, bronchopulmonary dysplasia and the long-term consequences of prematurity. She is a member of the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals, and is associate editor for the journal Free Radicals in Biology and Medicine, as well as for Pediatrics, where she oversees the State of the Art series. Dr. Dennery has received many awards, including the Andrew Mellon Fellowship, the Alfred Stengel Health System Champion Award from the Perelman School of Medicine, and the Mentor of the Year Award from the Eastern Society of Pediatrics. In 2010, she was appointed to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Infant Mortality. She received her medical degree from Howard University College of Medicine; completed her residency at Children’s National Medical Center and a fellowship in Neonatology at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital.

Jeffrey A. Drebin, M.D., Ph.D., is chair of the Department of Surgery at Penn Medicine, and the John Rhea Barton Professor of Surgery. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Drebin continued his surgical training at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Drebin’s research has contributed significantly to the understanding of the genetic origins of cancer. His classic work with monoclonal antibodies directed against the HER2/neu protein provided the scientific foundation for the evolution of targeted therapeutics for cancer and the led to the development of the first generation of targeted monoclonal antibody drugs for the treatment of breast cancer.  His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund. He is currently the co-Principal Investigator on a $22 million dollar clinical and translational “dream team” award from the Stand Up to Cancer Foundation for innovative studies in pancreas cancer. His many clinical interests include pancreatic cancer, acute and chronic pancreatitis, the use of new technologies to manage liver tumors, disorders of the bile ducts, and management of gallbladder disease. Dr. Drebin has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research papers, book chapters and reviews and is co-inventor on two patents related to the treatment of cancer with monoclonal antibodies. He currently serves on the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute, is Vice-President of the Society of Surgical Oncology, President-Elect of the Philadelphia Academy of Surgery, and Past-President of the Society for Clinical Surgery.

Gideon Dreyfuss, M.Sc., Ph.D. is the Isaac Norris Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received his B.Sc. in chemistry and physics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem; his M.Sc. in biochemistry, summa cum laude from Tel-Aviv University, Israel; and his Ph.D. in biological chemistry from Harvard University. He was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow at MIT. Prior to his present position he was a professor at Northwestern University and an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association. Dreyfuss’ laboratory is interested in post-transcriptional gene regulation and its central mediators, RNA-binding proteins and non-coding RNAs. His research defined the principal nuclear RNA-binding proteins (hnRNP proteins) and their roles in mRNA biogenesis, transport, translation, and disease. The laboratory also discovered the SMN (survival of motor neurons) complex and its unexpected function in assembly of snRNPs (non-coding small nuclear RNAs-protein particles), the subunits of the cell’s mRNA splicing machine. Insights from this work advanced understanding of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a neurodegenerative disease caused by SMN deficiency, and prospects of its therapy. The Dreyfuss laboratory is also pursuing its recent surprising discovery of a fundamental new step in gene expression – protection of nascent gene transcripts from pre-mature termination, a U1 snRNP function (named telescripting), and its potential role in cancer, cell proliferation, and activation of immune cells and neurons. Dr. Dreyfuss is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the European Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Karen Glanz, Ph.D., M.P.H. is a Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor, professor of Epidemiology and Nursing in the Perelman School of Medicine and in the School of Nursing, and director of the Center for Health Behavior Research. She is also a Senior Fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute. Previously the Charles Howard Candler Chair at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, she earned her undergraduate, public health, and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan. Dr. Glanz's research bridges public health and social science disciplines and focuses on nutrition and obesity, skin cancer prevention, tobacco control,  and cancer screening.  Her pathbreaking work integrates theory and research methods from social and behavioral sciences into public health and medicine. Her research on nutrition environments began before the current obesity epidemic emerged, and almost a decade ago, she developed internationally used tools to measure nutrition environments.  She has tested and disseminated effective multi-level cancer prevention strategies and refined measurement and methods, including validating self-report measures of sun exposure and protection. Glanz was named a Highly Cited Author by ISIHighlyCited.com, in the top 0.5% of authors in her field over a 20-year period and has influenced generations of scholars and students through her edited textbook, Health Behavior and Health Education: Theory, Research and Practice (in its 4th edition), which is widely used to teach applied theory in the U.S. and internationally. She is a member of the federally appointed U.S. Task Force on Community Preventive Services and a senior editor of Social Science and Medicine. 

Joan M. O’Brien, M.D., is the George E. de Schweinitz and William F. Norris Professor of Ophthalmology, chair of the Department of Ophthalmology and director of the Scheie Eye Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine. She previously served as professor and vice chair of Ophthalmology and director of the Ocular Oncology Division at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. O’Brien received her medical degree from Dartmouth Medical School and completed her residency training in ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School and a fellowship in oculoplastic surgery and oncology at UCSF. Her research fellowships were in immunology at the Harvard Medical School and in molecular ophthalmic pathology at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and the Whitehead Institute of MIT. She specializes in the treatment of ocular tumors, including retinoblastoma, ocular melanoma, conjunctival malignancies, ocular metastases, and ocular and CNS lymphoma. Her research focuses on the genetics of eye disease, including retinoblastoma, melanoma and glaucoma. With nearly 200 publications, Dr. O’Brien’s work has recently appeared in Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Journal of Clinical Investigation. She has received numerous honors, including a UCSF resident teaching award, the Champion of Diversity award, a Physician-Scientist Award from Research to Prevent Blindness, a Career Development Award from the American Association for Cancer Research, and an Honor Award and a Senior Achievement Award from the American Academy of Ophthalmology. Dr. O'Brien also has a long history of research support from the National Cancer Institute for clinical trials and the National Eye Institute for basic science investigations.

George M. Shaw, M.D., Ph.D., is professor of Medicine and Microbiology. His investigative work focuses on the transmission and immunopathogenesis of HIV-1 and hepatitis C virus (HCV), human pathogens that infect more than 200 million individuals worldwide. Shaw is recognized for having developed the first molecular clones of HIV-1, which led to the development of antibody and nucleic acid tests to protect the blood supply and diagnose and monitor HIV-1 infections. He also discovered the rapid dynamics of HIV-1 replication in chronically infected humans, thus providing a scientific rationale for long-term suppressive antiretroviral therapy as a fundamental treatment strategy. Recently, he developed a novel experimental approach for identifying virus genomes that are actually responsible for HIV-1 and HCV transmission, a finding that has been instrumental in refocusing current HIV/AIDS vaccine discovery efforts. Dr. Shaw received his undergraduate training at Dartmouth College, M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the Ohio State University College of Medicine, and post-graduate training at the University of Michigan and the National Institutes of Health. He is a former Pew Scholar and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians.

Katrina Armstrong, MD, MSCE, Penn Medicine’s former chief of Internal Medicine, who is now the physician-in-chief of the department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was also elected to the IOM.

The IOM site can be found here.