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 70 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 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 2008-2009 academic year was an eventful one for the Division on a variety of fronts.
First, we created a Clinician-Scholar Mentorship Program. Led by Dr. Joe Cofrancesco, the mission of the CSMP is to help GIM Clinician-Scholars to develop an area of scholarship, achieve academic success and build national reputations while enhancing recognition and job satisfaction. CSMP staff includes a Senior Research Coordinator, Ms. Amanda Bertram who assists with literature searchers, IRB approval, data collection and management, and manuscript preparation.
Second, we created a GIM Methods Core, led by Dr. H.C. (Jessica) Yeh—GIM’s newest faculty member. The Methods Core was established in July 2008 to provide integrated research services to GIM faculty and fellows, as well as to the Osler Housestaff. The Core is staffed by methodologically oriented PhD faculty in the GIM Division and doctoral students from the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Third, we re-opened the Center for Pharmacoepidemiology, founded in the 1980s by Dr. Richard Moore. After Dr. Moore turned his attention fully on HIV in early 1990s, the Center lay dormant for over a decade; in July 2008 Dr. Jodi Segal stepped forward to lead it. The Center will be a home for coursework, seminars, and research in pharmacoepidemiology, with an emphasis on comparative effectiveness. And it has already struck up a collaboration with the FDA that will allow joint training of fellows and access to FDA databases.
Fourth, we recruited three outstanding clinical researchers who have already made a mark at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Joe Finkelstein is an expert on medical informatics—both hardware and software—as applied to chronic disease management. He is already applying his expertise in leading the Division’s new initiative on the Patient Centered Medical Home. Dr. Anika Alvanzo is an expert on substance abuse who is now Medical Director of the 911 Broadway Clinic. She is forging research ties with the Department of Psychiatry and the Division of Endocrinology around the physiology and treatment of addictive behaviors. And Dr. Mimi Huizinga was jointly recruited by GIM and GI to work on the clinical epidemiology of obesity, with a particular emphasis on bariatric surgery. This year, she is working on a PhD in Epidemiology with support of a K12 Award. Finally, GIM is also proud to host Dr. Brian Gibbs, an expert in community-based participatory research at Harvard, who was recruited by the School of Medicine to serve as Hopkins' first Associate Dean for Diversity and Cultural Competence.
Fifth, we brought a new NIH center grant to the Division: a Diabetes Prevention & Control Core. Part of a larger Diabetes Research & Training Center led by laboratory researchers at Hopkins and U of Maryland, the P&C Core’s mission is to support diabetes research that focuses on the health of communities and populations; second, provide a trusted source of information about diabetes and diabetes research for the people of Maryland and neighboring states.
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.
The 2009-2010 academic year holds even more promise. Despite a down economy and a university-wide hold on hiring, the GIM Division continues to grow. Five former GIM fellows joined the full-time faculty in July 2009: Dr. Kelly Stein joined the Hospitalist Program where she will continue her research on cancer survivorship; after completing the Johns Hopkins Clinical Scholars Program, Dr. Madhav Goyal will continue his research on alternative medicine, with a focus on meditation and pain control; Dr. Nisa Maruthur and Dr. Wendy Bennett won KL2 support from the Clinical Scholars Program to support their programs on patient-oriented research--Dr. Maruthur on diabetes prevention and individualized medicine, Dr. Bennett on gestational diabetes and womens health. Supported by NIDDK, Dr. Raquel Charles will continue her investigation of chronic kidney disease with a focus on health disparities and prevention.
We were also fortunate to recruit two experienced internists from outside. Dr. Chuck Angell left a prestigious practice with our colleagues at Park Medical Associates to join the full-time faculty where he will attend to executive and international patients and help anchor our outpatient teaching program. Dr. Sonal Singh left a faculty post at Wake Forest (where he published several high impact meta-analyses and won a teaching award from the housestaff) to join our program in comparative effectiveness research, also supported by a KL2.
Finally, the Division was delighted to recruit Dr. Rasika Mathias, an expert in genetic epidemiology. After earning her PhD at the Bloomberg School, Dr. Mathias joined the NIH and began a close collaboration with Dr. Diane Becker around the genetics of cardiovascular disease. Her new post at Hopkins will allow her to deepen that collaboration, and work more closely with researchers in the Division of Asthma & Allergy as well.
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 Welch and Osler.
Frederick L. Brancati, M.D., M.H.S.
Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology
Director, Division of General Internal Medicine
