Message from the Division Director
On behalf of the faculty, fellows, and staff of the Johns Hopkins Division of General Internal Medicine, I’m delighted to welcome you to our web site. 
Since I first came to Hopkins as a GIM Fellow in 1989, the Division has grown substantially. Hopkins GIM is now home to over 60 full-time faculty and has an annual budget of over $25 million. Our mission is nothing less than international leadership in teaching, research, and practice in general internal medicine.
Our educators hold leadership positions in medical student education, residency training, and continuing medical education at Hopkins and have won national awards for excellence. Our researchers have built internationally recognized research programs in a wide range of fields: medical ethics; health services and outcomes research; evidence-based medicine; and the epidemiology and prevention of major chronic diseases including heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, HIV, depression and mental illness, and chronic kidney disease. All of this co-exists with the practice of general internal medicine at the highest level of excellence whether in the office, the clinic or the historic wards of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. You can read about our history on our newly published webpage entitled “Hopkins GIM: 30 Years of Medicine Without Limits.”
We are particularly proud of our GIM Fellowship which has trained leaders in academic medicine for over 25 years and has been a major source of new faculty recruits to our own Division. Successfully directed by Dr. Eric Bass for almost 20 years, the program is now led by Drs. Jeanne Clark and Geetanjali Chander. Alumni serve in the US and abroad as Division Directors, Residency Program Directors, Research Professors, and Deans. In future years, we hope that the Fellowship will be a source of new faculty in Hospital Medicine, Behavioral Medicine, Medical Informatics, Women's Health, and Cancer Care and Prevention.
The past academic year was an eventful one for the Division on a variety of fronts.
First, we received the largest philanthropic gift in the Division’s history—a multi-million dollar endowment from Dr. Marjorie Lewisohn to support clinic-based teaching in ambulatory medicine for medical students. Dr. Lewisohn, a 1943 graduate of the Medical School, was the first woman to serve as a Trustee of Johns Hopkins University. Another generous gift, this from Mr. John Rainey and family, supports teaching of houseofficers. Dr. Rosalyn Stewart was named the first Rainey Scholar, in honor of Dr. John F. Rainey, a 1933 graduate of the Medical School and a former Osler House Officer.
Second, we reorganized the Executive Health Program under a new Director—Dr. Bimal Ashar. This program attracts busy executives from across the US for an intensive regimen of screening and prevention.
Third, we reorganized the GIM practice at Greenspring Station under a new Director, Dr. Howard Levy. Alongside Dr. Levy and Dr. Peairs (Barker Firm Faculty Chief), we’ve hired three new clinician scholars: Dr. Anastasia Rowland-Seymour, Dr. April Fitzgerald, and Dr. Paula Kue. We’ve also established a new group practice at Greenspring, designed to accommodate the schedules of clinician-researchers, fellows, and part-time faculty—called the Levine Group in honor of Dr. David Levine, a Professor, admired mentor, and former GIM Division Director.
Fourth, we’ve established new programs for clinical research and evidence-based medicine aimed at medical house officers. Google “Housestaff Research” and at the top of the list you’ll find new pages created by the GIM Division for the Osler Housestaff to support their monthly Journal Club and their new CASE Elective in Clinical Research. We also launched a new annual competition for house officers in GIM-related research. Last year, the contestants from Harvard, USCF, Mt Sinai, and other top programs around the US got a feel for the excitement and camaraderie of academic GIM at Hopkins.
Fifth, we established new multi-disciplinary initiatives in Cancer Health Services Research (led in GIM by Drs. Claire Snyder and Dan Ford) and Women's Health (led in GIM by Drs. Wendy Bennett and Monique Tello—both post-doctoral fellows.)
Sixth, two former GIM Fellows are helping the Department of Medicine and the Hospital reorganize substance abuse care. Dr. J. Hunter Young has taken the helm at First Step—a day hospital program for adults with drug dependence. Dr. Amina Chaudhry is leading the Department’s programs on substance abuse, including consultation and training.
Finally, on behalf of Hopkins GIM, I’ve continued my pursuit of new models of collaboration between academia and industry. The most recent fruit of these efforts is an NIH-funded collaboration with an industry partner to develop novel approaches to promote weight loss in primary care, led by Dr. Lawrence Appel.
Ask Hopkins faculty what makes the place special, however, and you won’t hear about size, or growth, or grants, or programs. You’ll hear about our history—a history of a small band of young scholars who moved to a provincial city to gamble on a fledgling school that was radically oriented toward training and who saw it change the face of American medicine in their lifetimes. You'll also hear about the collegial culture they created—a culture that persists to this day in form of unusually strong relationships across traditional boundaries of Divisions, Departments, and Schools. I like to think of Hopkins GIM as a special heir to those twin birthrights: at the cross-roads of scientific inquiry and at the center of the School’s mission to train the leaders and healers of tomorrow in the tradition of Drs. Welch and Osler.
Frederick L. Brancati, M.D., M.H.S.
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
Director, Division of General Internal Medicine
