Steven J. Thompson, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI), has won one of the World Trade Center Institute’s Annual International Business Leadership Awards for 2013. The award, which recognizes Thompson’s accomplishments as an entrepreneurial international business leader during a period of rapid growth and change institutionally and in the marketplace, was presented on May 2, 2013 at The Jim Rouse Visionary Center in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Johns Hopkins Community Physicians (JHCP) will open its newest practice on Monday, May 6, at 8160 Maple Lawn Blvd. in Fulton, Md. It will be located in the heart of the Maple Lawn Business District.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have identified a gene that, when repressed in tumor cells, puts a halt to cell growth and a range of processes needed for tumors to enlarge and spread to distant sites. The researchers hope that this so-called “master regulator” gene may be the key to developing a new treatment for tumors resistant to current drugs.

Johns Hopkins’ Mary Armanios, M.D.; L. Ebony Boulware, M.D., M.P.H.; Andrea Cox, M.D., Ph.D.; Kelly Gebo, M.D., M.P.H.; and Sherita Golden, M.D., M.H.S., have been inducted into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI). The five were among 80 new members inducted at the ASCI’s annual meeting on April 26 in Chicago. Founded in 1908, ASCI is an honor society for physician-researchers.

A small survey of U.S. obstetrics and gynecology residents finds that fewer than one in five receives formal training in menopause medicine, and that seven in 10 would like to receive it.

The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Amsterdam, with the Spinoza Foundation Amsterdam, has awarded the 2013 Spinoza Chair in medicine to Andrew Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H., Gilman Scholar and director of the Center for Epigenetics in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Efforts to lower health care costs in the United States have focused at times on demands to reform the medical malpractice system, with some researchers asserting that large, headline-grabbing and “frivolous” payouts are among the heaviest drains on health care resources. But a new review of malpractice claims by Johns Hopkins researchers suggests such assertions are wrong.

Jef Boeke, Ph.D., a professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences, is one of the 84 new members elected this year to the National Academy of Sciences. Membership in the academy, which advises the government on scientific matters, is a top honor for U.S. scientists. Boeke will be inducted into the academy next April during its 151st annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

In recent years, healthy people have been bombarded by stories in the media and on health websites warning about the dangers of too-low vitamin D levels, and urging high doses of supplements to protect against everything from hypertension to hardening of the arteries to diabetes.

A Johns Hopkins Children’s Center study in mice may help explain why women are more prone than men to a form of liver damage by implicating the female sex hormone estrogen in the development of autoimmune hepatitis.

Time magazine has named Johns Hopkins Children’s Center HIV expert Deborah Persaud, M.D., one of the world’s 100 most influential people for 2013. A virologist and an infectious disease specialist, Persaud is being recognized for her research and clinical work in pediatric HIV and AIDS.

Peter Pronovost, a world-renowned patient safety leader and researcher who’s devoted his career to making hospitals and health care safer for patients by reducing medical errors and preventable patient harm, ranked fifth on this year’s list of the “50 Most Influential Physician Executives in Healthcare.”

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected Johns Hopkins researcher Geraldine Seydoux as part of its class of 2013. Founded in 1780, the AAAS has a long history of bringing together leading scholars from every discipline to study the complex policy problems facing our world. This year’s new members will be announced on April 24 and inducted at a ceremony on Oct. 12 at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.

Paul S. Lietman, M.D., Ph.D., a specialist in bacterial and viral infections who was the longtime chief of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and an influential teacher and mentor  to generations of Hopkins medical students and scientists, died at his Baltimore home on April 20 of congestive heart failure. He was 79.

Medical interns spend just 12 percent of their time examining and talking with patients, and more than 40 percent of their time behind a computer, according to a new Johns Hopkins study that closely followed first-year residents at Baltimore’s two large academic medical centers. Indeed, the study found, interns spent nearly as much time walking (7 percent) as they did caring for patients at the bedside.

The Association of American Physicians (AAP) has elected Johns Hopkins researchers Stephen Desiderio, Hal Dietz, Drew Pardoll, Jeremy Sugarman and David Valle as new members. Founded in 1885, the nonprofit, professional organization works to advance medical research and its application to practice. The names of this year’s new members will be announced April 26 at AAP’s annual joint meeting with the American Society for Clinical Investigation in Chicago.

In reviewing 25 years of U.S. malpractice claim payouts, Johns Hopkins researchers found that diagnostic errors — not surgical mistakes or medication overdoses — accounted for the largest fraction of claims, the most severe patient harm, and the highest total of penalty payouts. Diagnosis-related payments amounted to $38.8 billion between 1986 and 2010, they found.

In a small study of 39 primary care doctors and 208 of their patients, Johns Hopkins researchers have found that physicians built much less of an emotional rapport with their overweight and obese patients than with their patients of normal weight.

The Warburton Family Foundation, based in Hudson, Ohio, has donated $1 million to the James Buchanan Brady Urological Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. The gift will be combined with a donation from urology professor emeritus Hugh Judge Jewett, M.D., to create the Warburton Family Foundation and Dr. Hugh Judge Jewett Fellowship in Urologic Oncology.

Officials at The Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) report a 200,000-pound decrease in the amount of trash produced each month — a 17 percent drop in just the first five months of a campaign begun in October 2012.