Volume 9 Number 1 Winter 2011

University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey

What message would you like to share aboutNew Jersey Medical School? The NJMS community commemorated the50th anniversary of the inaugural class lastyear. This May, I look forward to greetinggraduates during our alumni weekend (May13 – 15) when the classes of ’61 and ’86 cele-brate their 50th and 25th anniversariesrespectively. Reunions are a wonderful oppor-tunity for alumni to celebrate past and cur-rent achievements at their alma mater.

In addition to my role as interim dean, I enjoy my clinical work as a pediatrician. Ihave always been an extremely proud graduateof the NJMS class of ’72. Although medicaleducation has evolved, being able to pay for it has always been on the minds of medicalstudents. I know how important scholarshipsare to each recipient. As the economy slowlyrebounds, we are determined to expand scholarship support for NJMS as well as theGraduate School of Biomedical Sciences(GSBS) at NJMS students. We extend ourheartfelt appreciation to the alumni andfriends for their generous contributions.

How do donations for scholarships make a difference? Every gift is essential. When one scholarshiprecipient visited our Alumni Associationoffice to express appreciation, he explainedthat the award was worth much more thanthe monetary value of the gift. It helpedreduce his financial debt and also providedrelief from incurring additional interest.Scholarships for books, supplies, and, ofcourse, tuition make such a difference for our students.

What is the first step towards making a donation? Establishing a scholarship is one way to sup-port a key mission of the school—education.Financial support is also critically needed forsummer research programs, which provideopportunities for high school and college students to participate in rigorous scientificresearch.

Anyone interested in making a donation toNJMS should contact Dianne Mink, directorof the Alumni Association (973-972-6864) or

Inya Chehade at the Foundation of UMDNJ(973-679-4686). Ms. Mink can highlight thebenefits of Alumni Association membership,describe volunteer opportunities, arrangecampus tours and offer other ways to help.Alumni from GSBS at NJMS who are inter-ested in donating are encouraged to contactElizabeth Ketterlinus at the Foundation ofUMDNJ (973-679-4684).

Contributions can be designated to depart-ments, programs or students entering a par-ticular specialty. A donor who establishes ascholarship can also choose to participate inselecting a recipient. Gifts from Pulse maga-zine readers can be a source of encouragementto the next generation of physician-cliniciansand scientists.

Interim DeanUMDNJ–New Jersey Medical SchoolRobert L. Johnson, MD

DirectorUniversity Marketing CommunicationsBarbara Hurley

Executive Director for AdministrationWalter L. Douglas, Jr.

Acting DirectorNJMS Marketing CommunicationsKaylyn Kendall Dines

Senior Editor, NJMS PulseMaryann Brinley

Contributing WritersTryon BaldwinChristina BrownJen DoktorskiEve JacobsLisa JacobsMary Ann LittellGenene MorrisMary Kate SheridanJill Spotz

PresidentNJMS Alumni AssociationJames M. Oleske, MD’71, MPH

AlumniFocus DirectorDianne Mink

Business CoordinatorsNoreen GomezDonna Perry

Photo EditorDoris Cortes-Delgado

DesignSherer Graphic Design

Q & A with the Dean

pulse VOLUME 9 NUMBER 1 WINTER 2011 UNIVERSITY OF MEDICINE & DENTISTRY OF NEW JERSEY

Keep In Touch…NJMS Pulse is published twice each year by the UMDNJ– Department of University Advancement andCommunications for New Jersey Medical School (NJMS).We welcome letters to the editor and suggestions for future articles.

Send all correspondence to:Pulse EditorUniversity Advancement and CommunicationsUniversity Heights –P.O. Box 1709, Room 132865 Bergen StreetNewark, NJ 07101–1709or via email to njmsmarketing@umdnj.edu

JOHN EMERSON

Robert L. Johnson, MD, FAAPThe Sharon and Joseph L. Muscarelle Endowed Dean (Interim)

Welcome to the winter 2011 edition of Pulse magazine, which showcases the

tremendous ways students, faculty, investigators, and staff shine academically,

scientifically and clinically. Their remarkable accomplishments and diverse inter-

ests make NJMS everything a medical school should be and more. The pages that

follow offer recent success stories, including an internationally endorsed diagnos-

tic test for tuberculosis, a life-saving technology for heart patients and an array

of published research. This Q&A focuses in particular on scholarships.

pulse

COVER PHOTO BY JOHN EMERSON

14

INSIDE INFORMATION

2 When Students Interview StudentsKudos

3 Tough MudderNJMS News by the Numbers

4 Learning to Be OldMemory Boxes

A CLOSER LOOK…

5 Top Discoveries of the Decade7 The Healing Power of Creative Arts9 The Language of Love

10 Road Trip Circa 1959

NJMS PEOPLE: DO YOU KNOW?

11 Elena Miriam Welt: A med student walks into a bar12 The Eloy Dynasty, Via Haiti14 Ana Natale-Pereira: Champion for the Community16 Kenneth Maiese: Brain Scientist, Builder, Bold Leader18 Patricia Fitzgerald-Bocarsly: 10 Questions

FEATURES

20 Lives We Have Changed: Life & Death Matters of the HeartIn the midst of a life-threatening heart attack, Anthony Bridges ended up in a very special medical trial.

23 Making Headlines, Saving Lives

24 Why Do People Get Sick?Exploring links between inflammation, infection and immunity

27 In Pursuit of the Wily Lyme SpirocheteStephen Schutzer has been hunting for secrets behind this critter, responsible for Lyme disease, for decades and he just took a giant step closer.

28 In The Lab with Padmini SalgameThis gifted TB researcher learned to burn the midnight oil long ago and got hooked on studying “bugs” back in India.

29 To Give Students a Competitive Edge

30 Postcards from the Pozen ScholarsFor eight students, off-campus adventures were anything but ordinary.

ALUMNI FOCUS

31 A Conversation with the New UMDNJ Chair33 Alumni-Powered Scholarships

Calendar, Save the Date34 In the DaCosta Family, Medicine Matters36 Marjorie Jones: Fifty Years Later, Plenty of Stamina37 James Netterwald: Bringing Dead Science Writing to Life38 In Memoriam: Remembering Rosemary Gellene39 Class Notes

FOCUS ON PHILANTHROPY

40 Paul Bonitz’s Excellent Surprise

5

20

28

36

4

When StudentsInterview Students

Christina Gutowski and Nikhil Thaker,fourth-year students and founding

directors of the NJMS Student AdmissionsInterview Program, were very aware of thechallenges prospective students face whenapplying to medical school. They establisheda program in 2007, with the support of theOffice of Admissions, to enhance the inter-viewing experience for prospective students,to bring a personalized approach to theprocess, and to provide additional informa-tion to the Admissions Committee.

With the guidance of Barbara Fadem,PhD, professor, psychiatry, and GeorgeHeinrich, MD, associate dean, admissions,Gutowski and Thaker conducted a study toevaluate what current medical student inter-viewers can add to the admissions process.Their findings, which included the work of22 student interviewers, were published inMedical Education Online.

For the research, 36 medical school appli-cants were randomly selected. Both studentand faculty interviewers evaluated the candi-dates based on seven criteria: motivation,medical experiences, personality, communi-cation skills, outside interests, overall evalua-tion, and overall numerical score. “Medicalstudent and faculty interviewers gave appli-cants equal overall scores but the students

provided two to three times more writteninformation about applicants’ personalities,communication skills, extra-curricular inter-ests and motivation,” Fadem says. “In addi-tion, when it came to each applicant’s com-munication skills and motivation, medicalstudent interviewers provided 60 percentmore specific examples.” These outcomesmay be due to a student interviewer’s abilityto relate to an applicant’s academic andinterpersonal experiences.

The program now has 119 second- tofourth-year student interviewers for this aca-demic year and is being led by coordinatorLeila Mady, a fourth-year MD/PhD/MPHstudent. Mady, in collaboration with theAdmissions Office, is developing a team ofstudent interviewers with the kind of insightto pick the next generation of medical inno-vators and leaders.

2 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

I N S I D E I N F O R M AT I O N

ANN CHUANG and ALOPI PATEL participat-

ed in the Foundation for Anesthesia

Education Research (FAER) Medical Students

Anesthesia Research Fellowship program,

working with MARCELINO POTIAN, MD, and

MELISSA DAVIDSON, MD.

DENARD COLEMAN, director, The Waiting

Room Parents /Adolescent Youth

Development Program, was selected for a

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation “Ladder to

Leadership” fellowship.

JOEL DELISA, MD, MS, professor and

founding director of the Kessler Foundation

Research Center, is being honored for his 20

years of leadership with a $50,000 annual

award in his name to be given to a physician

or scientist making an impact on physical

medicine and rehabilitation. The first winner

will be announced in May.

Fourth-year med student ANDREW ELDENco-authored a study on amyotrophic lateral

sclerosis which was published in Nature.

JOHN GREMBOWIEC, associate director,

EMS, got a certificate of appreciation from

the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security.

NIKHAT PARVEEN, PHD, assistant professor,

microbiology and molecular genetics,

received a one-year, $367,000 award from

the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to

study syphilis.

CHUNXIANG ZHANG, MD, PHD, associate

professor, and YUNHUI CHENG, PHD,research associate, anesthesiology, won a

Best Manuscript Award from the American

Heart Association.

XILIN ZHAO, PHD, Public Health Research

Institute, received the NIH Director’s New

Innovator Award.

KUDOS

“I think there are a lot of clues… we just need the right SherlockHolmes.”

Eric Altschuler, MD, PhD, on the phenomenon and

study of why one in every 300 HIV patients can

control the virus without medication, never getting

AIDS

Tough Mudder

Picture an obstacle course of 12 mileswhich includes jumping into 40 degree

water, crawling through mud under barbedwire, running through fire, and sprintingthrough live electrical wire. Known as“Tough Mudder,” this contest proclaimsitself as “probably the toughest event on theplanet,” and is held across the country ondifferent dates. In November, NJMS medstudents on two different teams participatedin the longest and largest contest ever heldin Englishtown, NJ. According to StephenDunay, a second-year student, “It’s a test ofall-around strength, stamina, mental tough-ness, but most importantly, camaraderie.

The goal is not to finishin a certain time but

rather to completethe event whilehelping your fel-low participants.This challenge ismore mental than

physical but every-one on the course is

willing to lend a hand toother ‘mudders.’ Those hills of

mud seemed endless,” he says. “Most of usprobably had moments when we wanted toquit but pushed through because othersmotivated us to keep going.” Participatingstudents included: Erica Pimenta, AndrewNguyen, Richard Schmidt, Zain Boghani,Matthew Hanlon, Zeeshan Nayeemuddin,Collin Creange, Michael Doctor, RayMalapero, Jared Emelo and Avi Ruderman.For information about the next event, checkout: www.toughmudder.com.

LEFT: MANNY PIMENTA; CENTER PORTRAITS: ANDREW HANENBERG; BOTTOM RIGHT: DEBRA SPINA DIXON 3

N E W S A B O U T N J M S E V E N T S , F A C U LT Y, G R A N T S , R E S E A R C H A N D M O R E

600+Alumni, students, faculty, and supporters are now fans of the NJMSFacebook page. For the latest news, join this community.

47Physicians named Top Docs by New York Magazine through a vote by their peers

2New Master Educators recognized on University Day inSeptember: Neil Kothari, MD (left), NJMS assistant pro-fessor, medicine, and Stephen Garrett, PhD, assistantdean, UMDNJ-GSBS and an NJMS associate professor

$1 millionFive-year grant awarded to NJMS–UH Cancer Center by the National CancerInstitute for its innovative interdisciplinary training which provides hands-on clinical experience and lab research

$6 million To be shared by six researchers around the world, including NJMSProfessor of Neuroscience Steven W. Levison, PhD, to study newbornstroke. This Transatlantic Network of Excellence grant was funded byFondation Leducq, which forges scientific alliances that transcendnational borders.

200One-pound mirrors that cost $16 each distributed to survivors of the Haitian earth-quake who lost limbs. Mirror therapy can relieve phantom limb pain (itching, tingling and cramping), which is why NJMS neuroscientist Eric Altschuler, MD,PhD, and the group Unified for Global Healing towed them there to give away.

$225 millionFunds from a five-year grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to be shared by The Global Tuberculosis Institute and other groups

40Second-graders learn bike helmet safety at the Eric Munoz Trauma Center at UH.

NJMS News by the Numbers

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L

Learning to Be Old

Among the 514 elderly patients at theJewish Life Care Nursing Home in

New York City last summer was Soo ChongKim. “I had never been on a stretcherbefore,” admits this fourth-year med student.With a “diagnosis” of stroke on the rightside, Kim spent a week and a half in thefacility learning just what it’s like to be anelderly, frustrated, lonely, uncomfortablepatient. She even struggled to knit with onehand because she was pretending to be para-lyzed on one side. The intense, real-lifecourse, “Learning by Living ©,” was startedfive years ago by Marilyn Gugliucci, PhD, ageriatrician at the University of NewEngland, who believes that it’s important toput med students “in the shoes, in the wheel-chair and living the life” of geriatric patientsover an extended period of time. “That’s thekey,” Gugliucci says. It sure worked for Kim,who hopes to go into geriatrics.

“As a medical student, I had focusedstrictly on disease and its treatment. As apatient, I was faced with more humanly rawemotions. My dignity was shattered when Iwas stripped completely naked. I felt help-less needing assistance to the bathroom,incompetent when I struggled with mywheelchair and shame when I was changedinto a diaper. I came to understand the

impatience and uncertainty of waiting to seea doctor or a nurse or having to be wheeledto yet another therapy session. As I listenedto the stories of the elders, I began to seethem for more than their age and disease.George, age 86, was a comic book artist whoshowed me his sketches of Superman andIron Man. Bob, age 98, was a history buffwho sang songs from his youth in a lovelytenor voice. Larry, one of the youngest atage 78, was a war veteran who regularlygreeted me in Korean and would vividlyrecall all the Korean cities he had been sta-tioned in as a soldier. The residents and I

quickly formed a bond of trust as I couldrelate to their current situation. I, too, wasunnerved by the piercing quiet, the loneli-ness from being away from family, and con-stant worry. As a physician, I want to gobeyond establishing the correct diagnosisand treatment; I want to provide a patient-centered approach encompassing the emo-tional and physical aspects of care.”

Kim recorded her experience there eachevening for CBS News including her tearyfarewell to fellow residents.

Section compiled by Maryann Brinley and Christina Brown

Memory Boxes

For mothers who have experienced a miscarriage or stillbirth,the grief process can take months, even years. Angelie

Mascarinas, a fourth-year student and scholar at the HealthcareFoundation Center for Humanism and Medicine, has been usingher passions for art and community service to help these families cope.

During her rotation through UMDNJ–University Hospital’s labor and deliveryunit, Mascarinas noticed that memory boxes, designed by local artists like KimberlyTaylor, were presented to mothers who had lost babies during childbirth. Deeplymoved by the cause, she started her own memory box project to give parents keep-sakes. With the support of the Humanism Center and Diane Kaufman, MD, assistantprofessor, psychiatry and pediatrics, Mascarinas created 12 memory boxes with localchildren and adults during the Healthy Kids Fair at the “Y.”

According to Mascarinas, “The children understood that the boxes were for parentsof stillborn babies.” The boxes contained baby pictures, decorative paper for babies’footprints, height and weight, and poems with the theme of losing a loved one thatwere selected by Mascarinas and Kaufman, a poet and child psychiatrist. Arrangementsfor boxes to be available in labor and delivery were made by Lisa Pompeo, MD, associ-

ate professor, OB-GYN, and CathyBoyd, RN, MSN, nurse manager.

Mascarinas, Michelle Chi, a first-yearstudent and humanism scholar, andGarrell Middleton (left, with RebeccaPinnelas), an Arts High School studentand Hispanic Center of Excellence sum-mer youth scholar, are now recruitingothers to help design boxes.

UMDNJ’s Circle of Life Children’sCenter (COLCC) also gives out memory

boxes. Naimah Campbell-Jenkins, RN, BSN, a nurse clinician and Sheila Walsh, RN,APN, both in pediatrics, meet with parents, provide bereavement support, and offermemory boxes. Jenkins says, “It makes me realize that life is really precious.”

4 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

I N S I D E I N F O R M AT I O N

A Transformational TB Test

David Alland, MD, chief, Division ofInfectious Disease, designed and devel-

oped a revolutionary, diagnostic tuberculosis(TB) test that is fast, cheap and clinicallyeffective anywhere. This can be used in adoctor’s office, a clinic or just about every-where in the world of public healthcare med-icine. Alland, who has been working onrapid tests for TB since 1988, led theresearch, which has performed well in large-scale field trials. The work was done in col-laboration with Cepheid, a molecular diag-nostic company based in California, and theFoundation for Innovative New Diagnostics(FIND), which designed and supervised thestudy. Grants from the National Institutes ofHealth and FIND supported the work whichtook years for Alland to complete.

In less than two hours, what might looklike a harmless cold or cough can be diag-

nosed as a clear-cut caseof TB with the XpertMTB/RIF test. TheWorld HealthOrganization (WHO)formally endorsed thetest in December, rec-ommending that it beused to replace smear

microscopy in HIV-positive patients andthose suspected of having multi-drug resist-ant tuberculosis. The Xpert MTB/RIF is thefirst test in more than a century to replacethe microscope as the primary means fordetecting tuberculosis.

Active TB is easy to misdiagnose. Oldertests relied on skin, blood cultures or spu-tum smears. A culture could take from sevendays to several months to complete and acorrect diagnosis of active TB might also

require a completephysical exam,chest X-ray, andlooking at thelung using abronchoscope.Meanwhile, TBspreads easilythrough the airin dropletsexpelled through coughing.This 4,000-year-old germ, Mycobacteriumtuberculosis, is responsible for killing nearlytwo million people a year. So in this era ofregular global travel, multi-drug resistant(MDR) TB strains, and epidemic numbersof HIV immune-compromised individualswho are more susceptible to TB, this fast,inexpensive, portable test had been anurgent public health need. Individuals fromLima, Peru; Baku, Azerbaijan; Cape Townand Durban, South Africa; and Mumbai,India participated in the study, titled “RapidMolecular Detection of Tuberculosis andRifampin Resistance,” which was publishedin the September 1, 2010 issue of the NewEngland Journal of Medicine. Alland, who isthe interim director of the UMDNJ Centerfor Emerging Pathogens, says, “The test alsoindicates rapidly whether difficult-to-treat,drug-resistant forms are present.”

Gwen Mahon, PhD, director, Office ofResearch and Sponsored Programs (ORSP),says, “For the first time, this test makes itpossible to detect tuberculosis at its point ofcare, directly from a clinical sputum sample.Dr. Alland’s work sets the bar that all futurepoint of care tests for infectious disease willbe compared to.” Not completely surprisedby his success, he admits that there weretimes along the way that he “didn’t think it

was going to happen at all.”Credit for this new TB test must also go to along list of collaborators but especially:Danica Helb and Elizabeth Story atUMDNJ; Fred Kramer, Sanjay Tyagi, andHiyam El-Hajj at the NJMS–Public HealthResearch Institute (PHRI); Bill McMillan,Martin Jones, David Persing, Emily Win-dean at Cepheid; Amy Piatek and MichaelLevy at Montefiore Medical Center; andMark Perkins at FIND.

Glucose Sensors in the Brain

Diabetes and obesity are taking a hugetoll on health in the developed world.

For more than a decade, Vanessa Routh,PhD, Barry Levin, MD, and JosephMcArdle, PhD, have studied the mystery ofhow the brain senses and responds to thebody’s metabolism. Routh, professor, phar-macology and physiology, and Levin, profes-sor, neurology and neurosciences, published“The role of the brain in energy balance,” inthe American Journal of Physiology in 1996.In citing this ground-breaking research,ORSP Director Mahon also pointed to a

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O LBOTTOM LEFT: PETER BYRON; TOP RIGHT: STEPHANIE CARTER 5

Continued on page 6

Pulse magazine asked University administrators to look

back over the last 10 years and tell us which NJMS

discoveries stand out. Here are three huge breakthroughs.

BY MARYANN BRINLEY

A CLOSER LOOKTOP DISCOVERIES OF THE DECADE

David Alland, MD

study published by Levin, Routh, andMcArdle, professor, pharmacology and phys-iology, in the journal, Diabetes, in 2001,that described how specific neurons in a partof the hypothalamus are activated by glucoseand another subset of neurons is inhibitedby glucose.

“We have only to read the news or lookaround us to know that obesity and Type 2diabetes mellitus are serious health issues,”says Routh. “In fact, obesity and its co-morbidities (heart disease, hypertension,stroke and cancer) are the second leadingcause of death in the U.S.” It would be easyto blame lifestyle choices and poor dietaryhabits alone for this epidemic but Routhand her colleagues have found other factorsin the brain. “Most people probably do notsuspect that their brain is at fault for theirincreasing waistline or diabetes, but there isno doubt that the brain plays a major role inregulating energy homeostasis. Moreover,growing evidence indicates thatdysfunction in the way thatthe brain senses nutrientscontributes strongly tothe development ofperipheral insulinresistance.” Glucose,a sugar energy sourceand the most versa-tile of fuels, is highlypreferred by the brain.

Routh’s overallhypothesis is that main-taining energy balance is acritical function of the brain.“We are particularly interested in spe-cialized glucose-sensing neurons that respondto nutrients (glucose, lactate and fatty acids)and hormonal changes. And, we’ve shownthat the glucose sensitivity of these neuronsfollows changes in peripheral energy status inboth health and diabetes. Dr. Zentau Song, amember of our team, and I were the first tocharacterize glucose-sensing neurons in thepresence of glucose concentrations whichwould be seen in the living brain during nor-mal daily fluctuations, as well as during dia-betes,” Routh explains.

“My lab studies the neuromuscular junc-tion,” explains McArdle. “This synapse isaltered in diabetes. Understanding themolecular basis of how diabetes alters thisjunction will provide insight into the waythis disease affects the brain and otheraspects of human behavior including eating.Common sense and logic suggest that dia-betes alters the supply of energy to snyaps-es.” Yet, McArdle says that it’s remarkablethat no one has yet determined the energyrequired to operate or to change a chemicalsynapse (what is actually happening in learn-ing, for example). He also points out thatthere is a great deal of other important workbeing done at NJMS on understanding andpreventing diabetes.

Their long-term goal is to understand thecellular mechanisms underlying these sen-sors and to learn how they become dysfunc-tional during obesity and diabetes. “For thepast 25 years,” adds Levin, “we have

searched for the biological factorsthat predispose individuals to

become obese and for theunderlying reasons why

so few can maintainweight loss after theybecome obese…Ourstudies have shownthat there are genetic,neurological and

metabolic causes forthis resistance to per-

manent weight loss.” Hiswork has shown that the

best time to prevent or amelio-rate the development of obesity may

be very early in life. “One finding in rodentsis that early onset exercise might help pre-vent the onset of diabetes,” Levin says.

New Approach to Heart Failure

Recognized as a world leader in the fieldof cardiac growth and survival signal-

ing, Junichi Sadoshima, MD, PhD, discov-ered a novel approach to medical treatmentfor heart failure. “Heart failure is the num-ber one cause of death in this country and is

usually accompanied by enlargement of theheart, which is mediated by a mechanisminvolving what are called histone deacety-lases (HDACs). Our work was the first toshow regulation of the function of thisHDAC by protein oxidation.”

In life, your body constantly interactswith oxygen as you breathe and as cells pro-duce energy. Unfortunately, research hasshown that these very natural processes pro-duce highly reactive molecules known as freeradicals, which can cause oxidative damage.To counteract this damage, the body manu-factures anti-oxidants to defend itself.However, that ability to create anti-oxidantsnaturally is controlled by genetic makeupand influenced by environmental factors.Sadoshima’s research focused on cardiachypertrophy (heart enlargement) but oxida-tive damage is implicated in cancer,Alzheimer’s, and symptoms of aging.

Collaborating with postdoctoral fellowTetsuro Ago and assisted by Hong Li, PhD,and Tong Liu, in the proteomic core facility,Sadoshima, who is a professor and executivedirector, Cardiovascular Institute, explainsthat the team found a small molecule,thioredoxin 1 (Trx1), that acts like an anti-oxidant and inhibits cardiac enlargementunder stressful conditions. This break-through research was published in Cell andsupported by a grant from the NIH and theFondation Leducq Trans Atlantic Network.Sadoshima started his career in Japan atKyushu University where he earned both hisMD and PhD. After spending time atHarvard Medical School, the University ofMichigan and Allegheny University of theHealth Sciences in Pittsburgh, he arrived atNJMS in 2000.

ANDREW HANENBERG6 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

A CLOSER LOOKTOP DISCOVERIES

“Most people would

not suspect that their brain

is at fault for their increasing

waistline or diabetes but there

is no doubt that the brain

plays a major role…”

Junichi Sadoshima, MD, PhD

It’s almost noon on a Tuesday morning inOctober and Bruno Lee has just finished

playing inspirational melodies on his trum-pet. He is smiling with good reason.

Thanks, in part, to Lee’s efforts, his audi-ence, an intimate group of UMDNJ–University Hospital (UH) patients, is on themend. At least once a week, the payrolltechnician for UH’s Nursing Departmentvisits the Planned Activity, Less Medication(PALM) Room on D-Level to serenade itsoccupants. Lee knows that with the rise andfall of each note, his trumpet possesses mag-ical powers that transport patients to a hiplounge somewhere. There, they escape theirtroubles and bask in the soothing sounds ofthe jazz, reggae, R&B, gospel and classicalmusic emanating from Lee’s instrument.

“I really believe in the healing powerof music,” Lee says as he returns hisbrass companion of more than 20 yearsto its case. Though he is not a healthcareprofessional, he relishes the supportingrole he plays in the recovery of thePALM Room patients.

This PALM Room is the latest exam-ple of administrators at NJMS and UHusing creative arts to empower and healpatients. Created in 2008 with a$35,000 grant from the Van AmeringenFoundation to provide monitored activi-ties like music therapy and yoga forbrain-injured and cognitively-impairedpatients, the PALM Room is the brain-child of Theresa Rejrat, RN, vice presi-dent of patient care services and chiefnursing officer at UH. Open 16 hours aday, seven days a week, it accommodates10 patients at a time. Since its inception,notes Rejrat, the program has evolved tocater to patients battling depression, anx-iety and loneliness.

A unique aspect is that it’s managedsolely by nurses, Rejrat says. Judy

Colorado, RN, executive director for patientcare services, oversees day-to-day functionsand employs five nursing assistants: TheresaHamilton, Carol Henry, Patricia Austin,Martina Nutsukpui and Carolyn Taylor.

Some of the biggest challenges healthcareproviders grapple with are behavioral issuesthat brain-injured patients display, Rejratnotes. “If they are confused or disoriented inany way, they are more prone to injurethemselves or leave the unit.” Typically, thisresults in a patient needing to be restrainedor assigned to an aide, Rejrat says. “This isreally contrary to nursing philosophy inhelping people to regain their independence,to restore their ability to take care of them-selves and to become productive members oftheir community.”

Recognizing the value creative arts playsin treatment, Rejrat and Colorado, musi-cians in their own right, worked with DianeKaufman, MD, director of creative arts inhealthcare, assistant professor, psychiatry,and a child psychiatrist at UMDNJ–University Behavioral Healthcare, to expandthe PALM Room programs. For example, inApril 2010 during the second annual Poetryin Medicine Day at NJMS, patients wereencouraged to write and discuss poems relat-ing to their illnesses. PALM Room partici-pants are also treated to two-hour sessionson Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdayswith a storyteller, a painter and a writerfrom the Wellness Arts and Enrichment(WAE) Center of the Jewish Service for theDevelopmentally Disabled in West Orange.

Since its opening, Rejrat says that notonly have patients found a place to go to getaway from their hospital beds, but there hasalso been a reduction in the use of restraintsand medications, decreased patient injuries,and improved sleep habits.

Colorado and Rejrat plan to bring aceramacist to teach pottery and toexpand music therapy through a partner-ship with Montclair State University’sSchool of Music. They are also develop-ing a “CD Pharmacy” for patients, notjust those who frequent the PALMRoom. Patients will pick from more than250 compact discs that were donated bythe nonprofit Musicians On Call,Colorado says.

This is gratifying for Kaufman, alongtime champion of creative arts inhealthcare including music, art, poetry,dance, drama, and psychodrama thera-pies. These initiatives are “life enriching,”she says. They are also growing in popu-larity. According to a 2009 report by theSociety for the Arts in Healthcare, 45percent of healthcare institutions sur-veyed in 2007 (hospitals, long-term carefacilities, hospice and palliative careorganizations) offered arts programs.That’s up from 43 percent in 2004.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O LANDREW HANENBERG 7

A CLOSER LOOKTHE HEALING POWER OF CREATIVE ARTSDo art, music, poetry, writing, photography, dance, drama and pottery belong

in a hospital? Yes, of course, says this team of healthcare experts. Such life-

enriching activities actually help patients get well. BY GENENE MORRIS

Continued on page 8

Bruno Lee

“You’re in a hospital because your life hasbeen compromised. Your body is not work-ing the way that it should…I know what thearts do. They bring things back into bal-ance,” says Kaufman, who took part in aHospital Artists-In-Residence Program atThe Creative Center in New York last fall.“This is life enhancing. Self-expression isabout pain and loss but self-expression canalso be about growth and thankfulness for anew day.”

Under Kaufman’s guidance, the CreativeArts in Healthcare Initiative sprouted legs in2009 with the inaugural Poetry in MedicineDay. And in January 2010, the Creative Artsin Healthcare Grand Rounds made itsdebut. Held each month, these GrandRounds have tackled topics like “TheEffective Use of Music with Patients in theHospital Setting,” and “A Journey TowardHealing: Using Photography to ExploreRelationships, Illness and Death.” Specialguests have included renowned poetry thera-pist John Fox; WAE Center Founder andDirector Marilynn Schneider; and AcademyAward winning director Roger RossWilliams, who won the Oscar for Music byPrudence. Upcoming Grand Rounds presen-tations include one on the Museum ofModern Art’s Alzheimer’s Project.

Healing, Kaufman notes, is not just forpatients. Two other programs—Lifelinesand AIM-HI (Arts in Medicine HealthInitiative)—are geared toward preserving

the well-being of healthcareworkers and students.Lifelines, a bi-monthly,confidential creative writ-ing and support group,allows nurses to expressthemselves and be heard.“If you’re in healthcare tohelp the hurt in you some-how, doing more and morecan be excellent for yourpatients, but your ownpain must be heard andcared about, too.”

AIM-HI is run by students, says CynthiaHung, an officer of the group. “I never reallythought doing art was that important butthen I heard about Dr. Kaufman’s proposal. Irealized creative expression is an importantpart of life. Not only does it relieve stress; itbuilds confidence.” The organization meetsevery month when students take part inhands-on as well as lecture-based creative artsworkshops, including poetry sessions. SaysHung, “We also try to bring more artisticactivities for patients” in the PALM Room.

Kaufman, a poet herself and poetry thera-pist-in-training, developed a full agenda ofevents last November to celebrate theSociety for Arts in Healthcare’s Arts andHealth Month. She brought acclaimed poetAnnie Freud, great granddaughter ofreknowned psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, aswell as Dominic Chianese, a multi-talentedperformer who played “Uncle Junior” onHBO’s The Sopranos and is the founder ofJoy Through Art Foundation, to serve ascreative artists in residence. At the firstNational Symposium for Arts in End of LifeCare in London and the Film and HistoryConference in Wisconsin, Kaufman alsodelivered presentations with clinical ethicist

Helen Blank, PhD, on their NJMS elective,“Creative Arts in End of Life Care —From Diagnosis to Death: EssentialCommunication Skills for Seriously IllPatients.” This course integrates the filmWit starring Emma Thompson with instruc-tive materials and art-inspired reflectiveexercises. Kaufman looks forward to havinga Creative Arts in Healthcare Departmentand more programs focusing on end-of-lifecare and bereavement support.

Back in the PALM Room, the reggaesong, “Night Nurse,” by Gregory Isaacs isquietly playing. The room displays patients’artwork. Heart-shaped cut-outs adorn thewalls and plants in decorated flower pots siton the window sill. A man prances aroundunder the watchful eye of TheresaHamilton, the nursing assistant. He is wear-ing a tee-shirt, shorts and hospital-issuedsocks. On this day, he is not a patient but aprize fighter, however, courtesy of Wii™

Boxing. He faces his opponent and readieshimself for the bout. He bobs and weavesand then unleashes a barrage of left andright jabs that dazes his opponent. After sev-eral minutes of sustaining crushing bodyshots, the opposing fighter sways hard to theright before falling to the mat. The refereecounts to 10. The words “Knock Out” flashacross the screen. The imaginary crowdcheers. More than an electronic game, thisplay and the patient’s involvement are allHamilton needs to keep going. “He’s beenin the hospital awhile,” she says nodding inthe man’s direction. After suffering a seriousbrain injury, she says, “He wasn’t able tomove.” His recovery “encourages us to comehere every day.”

Perhaps just as striking as what Wii cando for healing is a journal that’s kept in theroom for patients to document their feel-ings: “It was destiny that brought me to thePALM Room,” one wrote. “The meaning ofthe PALM is the same yet different for all ofus but one thing is for certain—we are allone family and we share the good and thebad. From enjoying the times…to just lis-tening to the trumpet, the PALM Roombrings peace of mind and happiness.”

ANDREW HANENBERG8 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

Bruno Lee, Theresa Rejrat, and Judy Colorado

A CLOSER LOOKHEALING POWER

“I know what the arts do.

They bring things back into

balance,” says Kaufman.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O LANDREW HANENBERG

“People act like you’re heaven sent,”admits Maryam Chebli Boukili.

“You’re not the doctor, you’re not the nurse,but you make a huge difference to themwhile they are here.” Chebli, who is a pro-gram development specialist at UniversityHospital (UH), helps patients make sense of their world in her role as a medical interpreter.

Take a scene that is so familiar to her:two frightened parents bring their little girlto UH because they don’t know what’swrong with her. Due to developmental dis-abilities, the child cannot walk or speak. Herparents speak only Arabic. Thankfully, sodoes Chebli. When she walked into thatroom, these parents were relieved and thank-ful because she spoke their language.

Chebli, of Lebanese descent and fluent inArabic, is just one of more than 100 UHemployee volunteers who, together, speak 34dialects including sign language. They helpnon-English-speaking patients and familiesnavigate the UH system. “The medicalinterpreter training is an essential programto the hospital because we have an extremelydiverse patient population,” explains Chebli.She supervises the program which is over-seen by the UH Department of CareCoordination.

According to census figures, more thantwo million New Jerseyans (25.5 percent)

speak a language other than English in theirhomes. And in Newark, that number is evenhigher with 42.6 percent of the populationrelying on another language at home. That’sroughly 120,000 city residents. Chebli saysthe volunteers are often called upon totranslate Spanish, Creole, French, Arabic,Portuguese and Tagalog. “The medical inter-preter program allows the hospital to deliverthe same high level of quality care topatients who speak all these different lan-guages,” Chebli says.

One of her duties includes updating anddistributing the roster, “The VolunteerMedical Interpreter Program,” which listsvolunteers, the languages they can speak,and contact information. Distributed to allnursing units and clinics, this roster is alsoavailable upon request by phoning Chebli at(973)972 -1707 or the Care Coordinationoffice. Additionally, Chebli coordinates doc-ument translation, provides training forinterpreters, and facilitates services for deafand hard-of-hearing patients.

The roster is arranged by languages. Forexample, Savita Chauhan, who works inGeneral Store, can translate Hindi andGujarati, while Catherine Marcial in theDepartment of Medicine’s SAVE Program,speaks French, Portuguese, and Spanish.Marcial has interpreted for French-speakingnatives of West Africa.

Chauhan, born and raised in India, hasbeen at UH since 1997 and began volun-teering in 2004 at the suggestion of co-workers. “Whenever I am called to help, Isee patients who are very worried, confused,and nervous,” Chauhan says. “They see meand they feel comfortable. I try to explaintheir concerns for treatment. I make themfeel hopeful.”

When a patient speaks no English, thestaff has the option of calling for an in-per-son interpreter or using the Translation PlusInterpretation Phone Service, which con-nects patients by phone to an operator whocan speak their language and translate forthe healthcare team. In cases involving deafor hard-of-hearing patients, the staff mayuse one of four Deaf Talk Machines, whichprovide Video Sign Language InterpretingServices via a mobile video conferencingunit on a rolling cart. For special medicalcases involving non-English speaking, deafor hard-of-hearing patients, using a liveinterpreter is encouraged.

9

A CLOSER LOOKTHE LANGUAGE OF LOVEThe simple but colorfully striking booklet, titled “The Volunteer Medical

Interpreter Program,” is only 10 pages long but speaks volumes. With

fluencies in languages as diverse as Bangla, Chinese, Farsi, Kiswahili,

Malayalam, Marathi, Russian, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Tigringya to Ukranian,

Urdu, Yoruba and Zulu, UH employees volunteer every working day to come

to confused patients’ rescues. After all, if you can’t speak the language,

you are lost. These volunteers are doctors, nurses, technicians, patient

transporters, therapists working in the finance department, the mailroom,

the pathology lab, the newborn nursery, and they race from all over the

hospital and medical school when they get that call. They do it for lots of

very good reasons, but one in particular. BY JENNIFER SALVATO DOKTORSKI

Continued on page 10

Maryam Chebli Boukili

For med students now, taking a virtualroad trip to look at medical centers or

hospitals across the country is easy. Pull outa laptop or cell phone and click through theoptions to get initial impressions of whereyou might want to go in your future. Youcan even follow major healthcare institutionson Facebook or Twitter. But, back in thesummer of 1959, Roger Cracco, MD’60,and Leo Pisculli, MD’60, had no such luck.“Roger and I drove across the country tocheck out all the great medical centers

before we made decisions regarding intern-ships,” Pisculli, a neuro-psychiatrist, recalls.In Cracco’s 1956 Buick, “We started out inJune, the same day I got my driver’s licenseand our first stop was the American MedicalAssociation convention in Atlantic City.”The cost of gas, food, and motels was so lowthat they could eat breakfast, have dinner ata restaurant and sleep for about $300 for theentire time. “Of course we stayed in placesthat charged $2 to $4 a night,” Pisculli says.

“It was a real Lewis and Clark expedi-tion,” remembers Cracco, vice-dean of theCollege of Medicine at SUNY DownstateMedical Center and Distinguished ServiceProfessor, Department of Neurology. Thenext stop on their westward journey wasPhiladelphia and its hospitals. Then, inChicago, they visited Cook County Hospitaland from there, went on to Los Angeles tosee the University of Southern California(USC) and the UCLA Medical Center.

“In Los Angeles,” Pisculli says, “we spentsix weeks as externs along with a classmate,Phyllis Bagdi, at Good Samaritan Hospital

and we were paid a total of $60 plus freeroom and board.” While in California,Pisculli went off on his own up toVancouver, British Columbia. “I was mostimpressed with Los Angeles CountyHospital, a 3,000 bed facility at the time.”

On the return trip, the two checked outDenver as well as New Orleans where theytoured Charity Hospital. They recall beingin Little Rock where President Eisenhowerhad called in National Guard troops toenforce school integration. “Roger and Iwere both affected by how overt segregationwas in the south. In Jackson, MS, we wentinto a bar which we discovered was forblacks only. They were shocked to see us butserved us nevertheless. For me,” Pisculli says,“that trip was a great transition from studentto doctor and it opened my eyes to theworld beyond the shores of the HudsonRiver. I went west to that Los AngelesCounty Hospital and never came back.”Cracco stayed true to the east coast, choos-ing a hospital in Philadelphia and eventuallyBrooklyn, NY.

Some interpreters on the roster have amedical interpreter certificate, whichrequires 18 to 60 hours of training. “Werecently offered two days of training for allvolunteers to refresh their skills and intro-duce new topics.” Included were: basic skillsand the essential role of a medical inter-preter, professionalism, and how to facilitateeffective communication. They alsoreviewed the National Standards of Practice,focusing on accuracy, confidentiality, impar-tiality, respect, cultural awareness, roleboundaries, and the National Code of Ethicsfor healthcare interpreters. Interpreters, forexample, do not interject opinions or advice.They are there to provide the most accurateword-for-word translation possible usingformal language, not slang, Chebli explains.

UH interpreters come to the rescue ofpatients in all care settings, from regularlyscheduled OB-GYN appointments to emer-gency room encounters. Their tasks can beas simple as giving someone directions to

the cafeteria to as heart-wrenching as beingthe messenger of bad news. VolunteerMariaSol Arroyo will never forget the timeshe had to tell a daughter that her motherwas terminally ill. “It’s difficult to set asidepersonal feelings and watch people cry,”Arroyo says. “But you must be both sympa-thetic and professional.”

Some volunteers get the call occasionally.Others are in constant demand. Arroyo, forinstance, translates for Spanish-speakingpatients an average of four times daily with-in her own Department of NuclearMedicine but her language skills are also in

demand on other hospital floors about twicea week. A nuclear ECG technician, she grewup in a Spanish-speaking household and wasaccustomed to translating for her parents.“Sometimes I felt they were being treateddifferently or were uncomfortable because ofthe language barrier,” she remembers. Herparents were born and raised in Cuba butshe was born in Madrid and came to theU.S. when she was a baby.

As a volunteer for six years, Arroyo can’thelp but recall all the thankful patients whoare so relieved she’s there to help themunderstand and be understood. With Arroyothere, “They feel at ease communicatinghow they are feeling. Sometimes I’ll getcompliments like, ‘I wish the hospital hadmore people like you,’” she says. “So this isvery rewarding.”

Chebli agrees. Patients “always show theirappreciation so you get that sense of accom-plishment from helping someone. That’swhy we all do it.”

10 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

“It’s difficult to set aside personal

feelings when you watch people cry.

But you must be both sympathetic

and professional.”

— MariaSol Arroyo

A CLOSER LOOKTHE LANGUAGE OF LOVE

A CLOSER LOOKROAD TRIP CIRCA 1959To check out residency programs 50years ago, there was no internet option.

posted by Elena Miriam Welt

At least a million times a day I wonder how people got through medical school before the age of per-sonal computers. When I sit on my bed re-listening to the biochemistry lectures on iTunes whilesimultaneously looking up the concepts I don’t understand online and taking what must be 100Facebook and Twitter breaks an hour, I imagine how different my studying would be without the inter-net. One thing, though, is for sure: I am much more productive when I turn off my wireless signal.

Besides the endless medical resources and distraction possibilities the internet provides, it is alsoan incredible tool for keeping in touch with family and friends. In the months between getting accept-ed at NJMS and actually starting school here last fall, there was plenty of time for nerves to build. My biggest fear was not that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the work, or that I would be living in a new city with a somewhat ambiguous (at best) reputation, but rather that once school started Iwouldn’t have time to maintain my relationships outside medical school.

I came up with the idea of a blog so that people wouldn’t forget about me as I became busier andmore involved with classes and electives here. But, it’s quickly become both enjoyable and stress-relieving while keeping me grounded in the real world.

One example of how the blog connects me to the outside world is the way it forces me to see myvocabulary now. In just a few months, medical school has drastically changed that vocabulary, and Idon’t just mean the countless new names of enzymes or nerves that I have laboriously committed tomemory. MGM, ACE, and the OSCE are not things that exist in the real world, but right now my lifecompletely revolves around these three pneumonics. The first two are names of first-year courses, andthe last is a type of exam. Defining all those abbreviations and terms is not only informative for peoplewho read the blog, but the process reminds me that I am living in a bubble.

While it seems like the impossibly distant future, I am told that one day my life really will revolvearound patients, not just pneumonics and abbreviations. Spending my days memorizing lists andstructures, it is so easy to lose sight of the big picture. Though elective course offerings do get stu-dents outside this bubble by connecting us with the community, something as simple as updating myblog also helps. In the blog, as I describe the tests I take, my studying, or how I spend free time, Iforce myself to think about why I’m doing what I’m doing. And, as my class crosses milestones(Finishing biochem! Taking our first OSCE!), the blog helps me keep track of how far we’ve come onthe path to becoming physicians.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O LTOP: ANDREW HANENBERG 11

NJMS PEOPLEDO YOU KNOW?

When we stumbled upon

a blog by this name,

we couldn’t resist asking

the author, who is in

her first year at NJMS,

“Why do it?”

continue reading on page 15…

T ake a family of five children thriving inHaiti, with its sapphire-blue sea and

warm breezes, and transport them to NewJersey, where it’s…New Jersey. The childrenspeak little or no English and have neverhad to wear coats. Now sit back and wait forculture shock. It never happens. The chil-dren acclimate. They go to school(Bloomfield College, not the Ivy League)and grow up to become high-achievers—physicians, nurses, laboratory technologistsand teachers—all the while remaining aclose-knit, loving family.

It may sound like a TV sitcom—aHaitian variation of the Brady Bunch—butit’s the true story of the Eloy family: JeanDaniel, Suzie, Jean Anderson, Gina andNahomie. Four of the siblings are UMDNJgraduates. Daniel and Anderson are physi-cians, NJMS alums, and faculty members.(They are referred to by their middle names,since so many men in Haiti are named

Jean.) Suzie is a medical technologist withher master’s in health science fromUMDNJ’s School of Health RelatedProfessions (SHRP). Nahomie, the baby ofthe family, is a nurse currently studying forher master’s in nursing at UMDNJ’s Schoolof Nursing (SN). Gina teaches fifth grade inMaryland. “I’m proud of my family, but Iwanted something different,” she says.

When the children were young, their par-ents, Bertin and Roselle Eloy, hatched a planto relocate the family to the U.S. Theysought a top-quality education for their chil-dren, something not readily available intheir homeland. Also, sensing an undertoneof political unrest in Haiti, the time seemedright to relocate. So the parents moved toEast Orange in the early 1980s, leaving thechildren in Haiti with their grandmother,Anacilia Desulme, in their home village ofCroix-des-Bouquets, eight miles northeast ofthe capital city, Port-au-Prince.

Their childhood in Haiti was for themost part idyllic. They went to school andplayed outside under the eagle eye of theirgrandmother. “She was very strict andwatched us carefully,” says Suzie. “We wouldnot even think of disobeying her.”

“Our brothers also watched over us,”says Gina. “They were protective—maybe abit overprotective. They never wanted us todate, just do our schoolwork.” As much asGina loves her grandmother, she remembersfeeling sad that her parents were so far away.“I was the clingy one,” she says. “When ourparents came to Haiti to visit, I couldn’tunderstand why they wouldn’t stay. All myfriends had their parents with them, whycouldn’t I? My siblings seemed to cope wellwith this situation, but it really affectedme.”

“I missed my parents, but didn’t dwell onit,” says Daniel. “Our focus was always ondoing well in school. We never had to betold to study. Our parents said, ‘You get thegrades. We’ll do the rest.’” The parentsworked in a variety of job situations, from achemical plant to a dry cleaner, to supporttheir family, always with the goal of bringingthem to New Jersey. It took much longerthan they expected.

Reality intruded as the political situationin Haiti grew worse. “Our town was safe,but we sometimes heard gunshots off in thedistance,” says Nahomie. “We’d hide underour beds.” Some classmates at the privateschool Daniel and Anderson attended werebeaten and one was shot. The tight-knitfamily structure and their grandmother’slove and vigilance kept them on track.

The parents were finally able to send forthe three youngest children in May 1993.The older ones followed in August 1995.“My grandmother would tell us we weregoing to the U.S., but it didn’t really sink inuntil we were on that plane,” remembersGina.

“I was glad to be with my parents, butthe transition to a new country was diffi-

12 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

NJMS PEOPLEDO YOU KNOW?The Eloy Dynasty, Via HaitiSay Haiti and there is an instant image of the earthquake-ravaged country in

the Caribbean. This story, however, is about a family’s success, a real-life

Haitian version of the Brady Bunch. BY MARY ANN LITTELL

The Eloy family, left to right: Jean Anderson, Suzie,Nahomie, Gina and Jean Daniel.

cult,” she continues. “The language andenvironment were so different. There weretimes I cried myself to sleep.” The childrenspoke Creole and French, so learningEnglish was their first priority.

The younger children attended school inEast Orange, while the older ones went toBloomfield College, enrolling in the ESL(English as a second language) program. “Iconsidered Rutgers, but their ESL programwould have taken too long,” says Daniel. “AtBloomfield, I could take ESL and sciencecourses at the same time. By the end of myfirst year, I was pretty fluent.” ThoughAnderson was younger than Daniel, he hadarrived in New Jersey first and was nowahead of Daniel in school. “It was helpful tohave my brother guiding me,” says Daniel.

“Daniel was my role model and all mylife I’ve followed everything he did,”explains Anderson. “When he said he wasgoing to be a doctor, I decided to follow inhis footsteps. Now I was able to help him.”

The family later relocated to Bloomfield,where the parents still live. All five of theEloys graduated from Bloomfield Collegewith honors. “It would have been unthink-able for us to separate or to go away to col-lege,” says Suzie. “We were raised to stayclose to home.” She continues to do so. Theonly one of the five who is not married, sheworks as a medical technologist at RefuahJewish Health Center in Spring Valley, NY,and lives in Bloomfield with her parents,now retired.

Anderson graduated from NJMS in 2002,Daniel in 2004. Anderson completed a resi-dency in otolaryngology/head and neck sur-gery at Mount Sinai School of Medicine ofNew York University in June 2007, and pro-ceeded to complete a fellowship in rhinolo-gy, sinus, and endoscopic skull-based surgeryat the University of Miami before joiningthe NJMS faculty in 2008. He is director ofrhinology and sinus surgery at UH. Daniel,an assistant professor of anesthesiology atNJMS, is doing a fellowship in anesthesia atthe University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.The program’s focus is on acute pain man-agement, regional and orthopedic anesthe-sia—all specialties he will put to good usewhen he returns to NJMS in July 2011.

Nahomie works full-time as a psychiatricnurse at the Veterans AdministrationHospital in East Orange and part-time as amedical technologist at St. Michael’sMedical Center in Newark. She attendsschool at night and says she will eventuallyget a PhD in nursing. Her husband,Anthony Gotay, MD, an NJMS alum, is aresident in psychiatry at Harvard SouthShore Medical Center in Boston. “It has notbeen easy keeping up with our brothers,”admits Nahomie with a smile. “Theythought we should all be doctors. But Ithink we’re pretty happy with the directionour lives have taken.”

“We actually thought we should all besurgeons,” jokes Daniel. “It didn’t turn outthat way.”

The family maintains its close ties witheach other and with Haiti. Fortunately, theirgrandmother and other family members living in Croix-des-Bouquets were safe fol-lowing the devastating earthquake in Haiti,which hit close to Port-au-Prince earlier lastyear. “There was damage in our town, butfortunately, no homes were destroyed,” saysDaniel. He traveled to Haiti on a medicalmission in January, just a few weeks follow-ing the earthquake, working with surgeonsfrom the NJMS Department of Surgery,including Ziad Sifri, MD, who shared hisphotos from the mission in the last issue of Pulse.

In March, Anderson traveled to Haiti ona mission with Project Medishare, a reliefeffort launched by the University of Miami.Through Medishare, teams of medical vol-unteers from throughout the U.S. went toHaiti immediately after the earthquake.Anderson went with Widny Pierre, a fellowHaitian and friend from BloomfieldCollege, who is an OR nurse. “We spenttime at a makeshift hospital right next to theairport,” says Anderson. “It was just a hugeopen room with cots. I treated many peoplewith facial fractures from the earthquake.We also helped people with medical issuesunrelated to the earthquake. One patient Isaw had a huge tumor in his mouth that Iresected.” He says he hopes to return toHaiti soon. “There is so much need there. Iwould encourage all physicians to bringtheir skills to Haiti. It’s a very rewardingexperience.”

The Eloys get together a few times amonth at the parents’ Bloomfield home,with their grandmother, now 82, visitingonce or twice a year. They say they nevercould have accomplished as much as theyhave without the support of their parents.“Our grandmother raised us, but our par-ents worked so hard for us,” says Susie. “Allthose years we spent apart were for us. Andnow we’re together.”

“I hope I can be as good a parent some-day as my parents were to me,” addsAnderson.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 13

Jean Anderson Eloy operating on a patient during his mission to Haiti.

“People get interested in the ‘sexy’ diseases. It’s very hard to advocate for TB but wehave less TB now becausewe are doing our job.”Lee Reichman, MD, in an interview for The Star-

Ledger about the Directly Observed Therapy (DOT)

ANDREW HANENBERG

Ana Natale-Pereira was just a little girlwhen she became enamored with med-

icine. At 8 years old, she loved roaming thevast wards and visiting patients at a publichospital in Uruguay where her aunt anduncle worked. “I was just fascinated by it,”says Natale. “I felt at home.”

Natale is now a doctor of internal medi-cine, but she’s “not your average doctor,”says Aida Martin-Rivera, program coordina-tor for the Centers for Medicare andMedicaid Services (CMS) Grant. “She givesevery patient the care they deserve, and she’s

very culturally competent. That is very hardto find.”

Her journey toward becoming a commu-nity champion began when her family immi-grated to Orange from Uruguay when shewas 13 years old. Life as an immigrant wasnot easy, and the “cultural differences werehuge.” It was this “culture shock” thatsparked Natale’s strong desire to help thecommunity. “I came as an immigrant. Myparents never had health insurance,” she says.

After high school, Natale enrolled inFairleigh Dickinson University and graduat-

ed with a BS in biology in 1988. (She wasthe first person in her family to graduatefrom college.) From there, she accepted a jobat UMDNJ’s Center for Molecular Medicineand Immunology (CMMI) and also began aPhD program in biology at Rutgers.

But Natale had her eye on medical school,and there was only one on her radar: NJMS,“a school that embraced diversity.” Whileworking at CMMI, Natale met James Foster,MD, NJMS assistant dean of admissionsthen and Maria Soto-Greene, MD, vice-dean, who introduced her to the HispanicCenter for Excellence, a model program towhich Natale is still very committed. “Thatsummer, I put my heart and soul into thatprogram….I wanted to prove that I was verycapable and willing to do this.”

Her dreams finally fell into place—Natalewas accepted into NJMS, leaving her PhDprogram and her job to become a full-timemedical student in August 1992. Three yearslater, as she searched for residency programs,she once again realized that NJMS was theonly place for her. “I loved what I was doinghere…I was very committed to the popula-tion here and to the people,” she says. Aftergraduating in 1996, she worked as a residentin internal medicine at NJMS until 1999,when she became chief resident.

Since medical school, Natale has been anattending physician at UH and has reachedthe rank of associate professor at NJMS. In2005, she received her MPH in UrbanHealth Administration from UMDNJ–School of Public Health. Natale’s roles haveincluded teaching, research, and clinicalpractice. She also mentors students and resi-dents and encourages them to share in herpassion for community health.

Working with the neighboring communi-ty has been a driving force in Natale’s careerand something that was initially fueled byone of her early mentors, Waldemar(“Buzz”) Johanson, MD. Johanson was com-mitted to developing “a relationship betweenthe medical system and the community. Heenvisioned the type of patient-centered carethat we are promoting now,” says Natale.

Johanson’s vision materialized in the form

14 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

NJMS PEOPLEDO YOU KNOW?

A N A N ATA L E - P E R E I R A

Champion for the CommunityInspired by her family who emigrated from Uruguay when she was 13, this

doctor, who is also the mother of three-year-old triplets and a seven-year-old

son, rarely stops moving from patients to projects.

BY MARY KATE SHERIDAN

of the FOCUS Community Health Center.Located on Broad Street in Newark, FOCUSprovides medical services to the Latino com-munity. From 2001 through 2005, Nataleserved as the associate medical director andthen as the medical director, where shedeveloped strong relationships with thecommunity and her patients. Her responsi-bilities also included teaching and mentor-ing students and internal medicine residents,who had the unique experience of workingin a culturally and linguistically competentenvironment where the patient was the cen-ter of care.

After FOCUS, Natale became the medicaldirector of Community Based Networks inthe Division of Academic Medicine,Geriatrics, and Community Programs until2007. And in 2006, with the support andmentorship of Debbie Salas-Lopez, MD,Natale became principal investigator on theCancer Prevention and Treatment Demon-stration Project for Ethnic Minorities, afour-year, $2.8 million grant through theCenters for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Based on what they had learned atFOCUS, Natale’s team developed a proposalto facilitate cancer screening and care for elderly Latinos through patient navigation.Now in their fourth and final year of theCMS grant, the team operates a patient navigation program with more than 1200participants across multiple counties. A“community-based approach” to patientnavigation, they help the Latino communityovercome barriers to cancer screening. “It isabout their selfless personalities, their abilityto problem-solve, their advocacy, and theirpassion for people,” Natale says describingthe patient navigators.

The CMS grant has been particularlyimportant to Natale because it is communi-ty-based. She is “very positive with herefforts in helping the community,” saysConnie Muñoz, a CMS patient navigator.

“Understanding people helps get them toa better position in their health. I trulybelieve that. If you just look at the healthissue or the illness you can’t help them getbetter. You need to focus on everything

about them —their social determinants ofhealth are just as important,” she says.

But Natale’s passion isn’t solely rooted incommunity—she has been fiercely dedicatedto cancer research and prevention since herfather died of lung cancer in 2000. Sincethen, she completed a junior faculty sabbati-cal with the National Cancer Institute’sRedes en Acción Program and served as aprincipal investigator and co-investigator onvarious cancer-related grants. She also partic-ipated in the Cancer, Culture, and Literacyfellowship through the Moffitt CancerCenter and a Leadership Fellowship with theNational Hispanic Medical Association.

It is no surprise that the inspiration forher work has been her father—Natale’s mostimportant community is her family. Hereyes sparkle as she talks about her grand-mother, who worked two jobs after immi-grating to America and taught Natale theimportance of having a work ethic. Shesmiles as she describes her busy household,

which includes her 3-year-old triplets (girls),her 7-year-old son, and her husband,Gustavo, her high school sweetheart. Herfree time is dedicated to her extended fami-ly, who share some of Natale’s passions: theyparticipate together in the Making StridesAgainst Breast Cancer walk in the fall andthe Relay for Life walk in the spring.

Despite all that Natale has accomplished,she maintains strong ambitions. Among hergoals are to make patient navigation a stan-dard of care in “the healthcare experience”and “to deliver comprehensive, patient-cen-tered care for the community, reducinghealth inequalities, and in the process allowstudents to be part of that experience.”

Our interview ends, and I reach out toshake this doctor’s hand. I am met insteadwith a warm hug. As I walk away, she flashesa bright smile, and in that moment, I seethe 8-year-old girl, completely in her ele-ment and filled with determination anddreams—still.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 15

A med student walks into a bar… Continued from page 11

The blog also keeps me grounded in another way. When I start getting concernedemails from friends and family feeling sorry for me, I know that I am wallowing toomuch. Yes, med school is hard. But not only is it a choice I made; it’s also anincredible privilege to be here.

Sometimes it’s easier to write about the negatives. But there are many positiveshere too. Before each test, many of my classmates send out helpful study guidesand PDFs of practice questions to the entire class. And there are those who planawesome social events and nights out for everyone.

Although being a doctor is something I’ve wanted to do since high school, readingand writing have always been an enormous part of my life. Starting a blog was aselfish excuse to write whatever I wanted in a forum people might actually read (asopposed to journals I’ve kept which are secret, hidden files in my computer). I’vealways felt the need to document life, and medical school is no different.

Right now is an incredible time to be entering medicine. My class will be graduat-ing in 2014, just as most of the provisions in the healthcare reform bill are enacted.No one knows for sure what the future will be like for doctors or for healthcare ingeneral, but I am excited to be part of the changes and will keep track of them asthey unfold. If nothing else, years from now I will be able to look back in the blog,and laugh at myself for how wrong I was about predicting my own future.

Check out http://amedstudentwalksintoabar.blogspot.com.

TOP: ANDREW HANENBERG

B rain science may be the final medicalfrontier, and, if so, Kenneth Maiese,

MD, has chosen, and been chosen, to beamong its notable frontiersmen. The newchair of the Department of Neurosciences atNJMS is that rare combination of basic lab-oratory scientist, hands-on clinician andbold leader, displaying a ying-yang of talentsand skills that defies categorization. Pioneersof the Wild West, and leaders who in 2011take giant steps through the sometimes nar-row hallways of academia, share definingtraits: high energy and focus, commitmentand creativity, a cool head under hot pres-sure, the courage to take risks, and the intu-itive know-how to build working-teams.

Maiese—a New Jersey native—fits thebill. He grew up in Pennsauken, graduated

as valedictorian from his high school andcrossed the Delaware to earn an undergradu-ate degree in advanced math and physicssumma cum laude with distinction from theUniversity of Pennsylvania. “I enjoyed thescience,” he says. “You have to be rational,focused.” But as graduation time neared hewas faced with an unscientific dilemma—law school, medical school, business school,engineering, other. Multi-talented withwidely divergent and equally compellinginterests and options, he was perplexed.

Medicine won out. “It’s a privilege to be aphysician,” he says simply. “People come toyou with their utmost secrets and you canhelp them.” Medicine would be a professionhe knew he could love.

This time he crossed the Hudson to earn

his medical degree from Cornell. There wasa big emphasis on psychiatry at Cornell,Maiese says, and he enjoyed psychiatry. Butsometimes you choose and other times youare chosen. He tells the story of Fred Plum,MD, a pioneer and influential researcher,and chair of neurology at Cornell for manyyears.

Plum chose Maiese for neurology duringhis medical school years. “Fred Plum had areputation as a no-nonsense teacher. Hisprogram was very tough, but he most likelytrained more leaders than anyone in neurol-ogy,” says the new NJMS chair.

But Maiese, who was ready to leave theEast coast after finishing medical school, ini-tially matched into one of only two highlycompetitive slots in medicine/neurology atthe University of California, San Francisco(UCSF). But fate—and Plum—had theirway. Sadly, Maiese’s father developed an eyecondition leading to blindness, and the Westcoast was suddenly way too far from home.Just months before graduation, the fourth-year medical student went back to Plum toask for that spot in his program, so he couldremain within a train-ride’s proximity to hisfamily.

Research was magnetic for Maiese, whojumped in head first during his third andfourth years of medical school, doing onco-logical research at Sloan-Kettering withphysician-scientists, whose multiple talentsand dual roles he admired and saw as hisown future. During his residency years, hehad a “particularly fertile” period ofresearch, writing, and publishing, concen-trating on stroke, coma, and ICU manage-ment and earning an independent trainingaward from the NIH and then a K Award(Mentored Research Scientist Develop-ment). This was followed by a fellowship atthe NIH Institute on Aging where he stud-ied blood flow and metabolism in aging rats,“running” back to New York on weekendsto do a simultaneous clinical fellowship onstroke. In 1992, he joined the NeurologyDepartment at Cornell as an assistant pro-fessor. While there, his novel research onhippocampal neurons—the first brain cells

16 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

NJMS PEOPLEDO YOU KNOW?

K E N N E T H M A I E S E

Brain Scientist, Builder, Bold Leader The new chair in neurosciences defies categorization and is taking giant

steps to build a top 10 department in a top 10 medical school.

BY EVE JACOBS

to die in stroke and Alzheimer’s disease—and oxidative stress received early notorietyand he was awarded two patents as well asNIH and foundation awards.

In 1994, Maiese made a decision to moveon to Wayne State University School ofMedicine after turning down multiple otheropportunities along the way. He was excitedby the promise of an architect who would behired to build the young neuroscientist’sown uniquely designed lab and the go-aheadto develop a large research division thatcould partner with pharmaceutical compa-nies. He held the positions of tenured pro-fessor in the Departments of Neurology, andAnatomy & Cell Biology, and Director ofthe Laboratory of Cellular and MolecularCerebral Ischemia, the Maiese LaboratoryStroke Program, and the Maiese LaboratoryNeuroscience Program.

While there, he made great strides, build-ing a large laboratory and leading a team toform partnerships with outside companies,taking risks and earning trust. He also builtan international reputation with a long list

of published scientific work and served onthe editorial boards and as editor-in-chieffor numerous journals. Quoting his officialWayne State profile, “his investigations aredesigned to translate basic science into suc-cessful therapeutic treatments for conditionssuch as cancer, metabolic disorders, cardio-vascular disease, diabetes, stroke, andAlzheimer’s disease. His work has receivedthe distinction of ‘High Impact Researchand Potential Public Health Benefit’ by theNIH with continuous funding from sourcesthat include the American DiabetesAssociation, the American HeartAssociation, the Bugher Foundation, aJohnson and Johnson Focused GivingAward, and the NIH.”

Fourteen years later, he accepted the offer

made by NJMS to come back to the Eastcoast and assume a new set of challenges.“I’m not interested in titles,” he asserts. “I’minterested in the opportunity to build. Ihave a vision. It’s very exciting to be here.”

His “architectural” plans are optimisticand complex. His end-goal is to build a“Top 10 department in a top 10 medicalschool.” His master list of projects wouldscare-off even the most dedicated academic.Priority is not the issue: they are all impor-tant and all require significant input. Hewants to be a great mentor who trains spe-cialists and allows them to develop their talents and interests. He plans to shape atraining program that will be a magnet forthe best students.

He will build strong clinical programs instroke, Alzheimer’s disease, electrophysiology,and epilepsy that will also continue to be cus-tomer-friendly. He has taken on the co-chair-manship of the UMDNJ–UniversityHospital committee for customer serv-ice excellence and is determined toimprove hospital care efficiency,

patient discharge times, and addressother critical client-service issues. He isset on collaborating with the Department ofNeurosurgery on an intensive care unit witha very high level of expertise, particularly incoma. He will bring together basic scientistsand clinical scientists in neurology. He hasalready instituted quarterly breakfast meet-ings where staff, students, post-docs, scien-tists, and clinicians share what they aredoing. He will encourage faculty to conductmore clinical trials; and will pave the way forbasic science to grow. Oxidative stress, whichhe says is a basis for many disorders and ill-nesses, and cellular longevity are of particularinterest to him. “We will be able to do per-sonalized medicine,” he says, “enhancing thegood for our patients.”

As if this is not challenging enough,Maiese is on the Advisory Board ofDirectors for The Cancer Institute of NewJersey, Robert Wood Johnson MedicalSchool, and is heading up a University-widecommittee to work on UMDNJ’s applica-tion to join the NIH-funded Clinical andTranslational Science Awards (CTSA) con-sortium, which currently includes 55 med-ical research institutions nationwide, “linkedtogether to energize the discipline of clinicaland translational science.

“It’s a long shot,” Maiese admits, “maybea one in a million chance, but worth tryingfor.” Not only will he need to build consen-sus among UMDNJ’s geographically wide-spread schools and institutes, but he willhave to inspire a sense of teamwork andshared goals before the roll-up-your-sleeveshard work begins.

“To be part of this elite club would bewonderful,” he says. When

fully implemented by2011, the consortium

will include 60institutions.Membershipwould bringneeded fundingto UMDNJ. In

2006, the CTSAhad a budget of $20

to $30 million, saysMaiese, although their

resources are far less now. As Maiese moves virtual bricks and dis-

mantles silos, reconstructs bases and assem-bles supports, you can see the outlines of hisvision take shape. He wants the “best stu-dents, the best residents and the best facul-ty,” and he’s building a home for them ontwo conjoined platforms—the basic scienceand the clinical.

“We can give them something unique—clinical and research exposures that are bothstrong,” he concludes. Despite the back-breaking labor ahead, it’s hard to doubt theeventual success of this architect whosebuilding will house a pivotal portion of themedical school’s future.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 17

“We will be able to do personalized medicine,” he says,

“enhancing the good for our patients.”

ANDREW HANENBERG

Q: How did you become interested in science?

A: My dad was an engineer and I’ve alwaysloved math and science. As an undergraduateat UCLA, I took an immunology courseduring my junior year and was hooked. I’dbeen pre-med up until then. I did a seniorresearch project with a professor and lovedbeing in the lab, learning something newevery day. I got my PhD in microbiology atBoston University, under the guidance of agreat mentor, Michael Bennett, MD. At thetime, he was describing early work on theinteractions of the immune system with can-cer cells and in bone marrow transplantation.

Q: Why did you come to New Jersey?

A: My husband and I met as undergraduatesin organic chemistry lab. He got his doctor-ate at MIT and was offered a job atPrinceton, where he’s now a professor ofchemistry. So we came here. After gettingmy PhD I worked at Sloan-Kettering in thelab of one of Dr. Bennett’s collaborators, Dr.Carlos Lopez. I commuted to New Yorkfrom the Princeton area for five years.

Q: Please talk about this first job.

A: At Sloan-Kettering we studied theimmune response of human natural killercells to herpes virus-infected cells. In the fallof 1980, one of our collaborators referredfour male patients to our research group, allsuffering from the same unusual immunode-ficiency: severe herpes virus infections. Itlater turned out they were infected withHIV. We did some of the earliest characteri-zations of immunological responses in theseindividuals and many others like them whosoon appeared and defined defects in naturalkiller cells and interferon-alpha productionin these patients.

18 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

NJMS PEOPLEDO YOU KNOW?

PAT R I C I A F I T Z G E R A L D - B O C A R S LY

Some mothers bake cookies to take to their children’s schools. Patricia

Fitzgerald-Bocarsly brought a human heart and kidney to her fifth-grader’s

class. “It made a great show and tell,” she quips. “The kids were fascinat-

ed.” This scientist has spent a lifetime devoted to research at NJMS, where

she’s a professor of pathology. She’s also raised three children and was

elected to the school board in her hometown of Plainsboro, NJ. Here, she

tells how she made it all happen.

BY MARY ANN LITTELL

10Questions

Q: What brought you to NJMS?

A: After being on the ground floor of HIVresearch from the very beginning, it was onlyfitting that my first contact at NJMS wasJames Oleske, MD, a leading AIDS expert.My advisor from Sloan-Kettering knew himand his pioneering work in pediatric AIDS. Icame here in 1985, joining the pathologydepartment at NJMS, where I’ve been for 25years. I had a 15-month old baby, so I wasglad I didn’t have to commute to New York.At the time, and even more pronouncedtoday, NJMS had more immunologists thanany other school in New Jersey. The schoolwas supportive and family-friendly.

Q: How did you handle your responsibili-ties as scientist, mother and wife?

A: I managed quite well with au pairs andthe support of my husband. Because heworked much closer to home than I did, hewas the point person for emergencies andoften drove the children back and forth totheir activities. I never could have donewhat I did without his help. I’ve encouragedmy children to be sure and choose their lifepartners carefully. You want someone who’llshare family responsibilities. My husbandand I both place a very high priority on ourfamily, and the five of us are very close.

Q: What is a typical day like at NJMS?

A: I’m a professor of pathology at NJMSand teach both graduate students and med-ical students. I still do basic research and amcurrently mentoring eight PhD students andone Master’s student. We were among thefirst labs to identify plasmacytoid dendriticcells, which are important in the earliestinteractions with viruses. I’m also director ofthe Flow Cytometry and Immunology CareLaboratory, which provides flow cytometricservices to research laboratories at NJMS,surrounding universities and industry. Wecurrently support the research of more than

80 investigators. I also work with other clin-ical collaborators here on HIV research.Effective drug regimens have increased thelife expectancy of HIV patients. We’re cur-rently looking at premature aging in thesepatients. They are coping with chronic ill-nesses, including cardiovascular disease anddementia, at a much younger age than thosewho are not infected with HIV and are alsoshowing signs of early senescence of theimmune system, including plasmacytoiddendritic cells.

Q: Any other interesting activities?

A: I was just elected president of the NJMSfaculty. I’m on the editorial board of somemajor journals and also serve on the Ameri-can Association of Immunology Committeefor the Status of Women. We are seeking toprovide information and support to women,particularly young scientists. It’s importantfor women to learn how to navigate throughthe world of science, be assertive and receivecredit for the things we do.

Q: What’s the talk at the dinner table inyour household?

A: We are told by our kids’ friends that ourdinner conversations are different from others. We talk a lot about math, scienceand education, topics of great interest to allof us. Our daughters are both grown andmaking careers in science. One daughter ispursuing a PhD in neuroscience atPrinceton; the other works for a neuropsy-chologist, conducting clinical tests for atten-tion deficit hyperactivity disorder and con-cussions, among other things. She wants toget her doctorate and be a clinical psycholo-gist. Our son, still in high school, has donehis own research, started a political maga-zine and recently applied to the Siemens andIntel competitions for outstanding achieve-ment. Oh, and he’s also co-captain of thefencing team. They’re a well-rounded bunch.

Q: How did you become involved withyour local school board?

A: I served two terms on the board of edu-cation in my hometown, including one asvice president, and also served as a vice president and currently am a trustee of theWest Windsor/Plainsboro EducationalFoundation. Math, science and writing areso important. I felt that with my back-ground, I could make a difference in ourschool district, and I think I have. I wantedto be totally involved with my children’sschool activities, and wouldn’t let my workkeep me away.

Q: How have you served as a role modelfor your kids?

A: Here’s a funny example. When my sec-ond daughter was 5 years old, I came intoher room, where she was sitting on her bed,writing something. When I talked to her,she held up her hand and said, “Shh! I’mworking on my grant. Don’t bother me.” Iguess I showed her how to focus and be sin-gle-minded about work.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 19

Anthony Bridges vividly remembers the experience thatchanged his life on October 8, 2009. After his regular 90-minute drive from Pennsylvania to Newark, NJ, he arrivedat his desk at 6:15 am and had a cup of coffee. Physically, hefelt fine.

Every workday morning, this maintenance manager atAnheuser Busch across from Newark Liberty InternationalAirport meets with his staff to divvy up assignments beforedelving into paperwork.

“Around 11 am, I started feeling woozy. I thought I washungry,” recalls Bridges, age 63. He almost made it to thecafeteria. Suddenly, heading back to the maintenance shopseemed more logical to him. Something was terribly wrong.“The pain in my chest started. It felt like my chest was cav-ing in and my heart was trying to jump out.” Bridges hadno idea he was having a heart attack.

20 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

Portraits of Patients

Life & DeathMatters

of the

HeartIn the midst of a serious heart attack,

Anthony Bridges ended up in a very special medical

trial and breakthrough technology saved his life.

BY KAYLYN KENDALL DINES

PHOTOGRAPHS by ANDREW HANENBERG

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 21

s: Lives We Have Changed

ANDREW HANENBERG

When the Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) fromUMDNJ–University Hospital responded, they carried an innovativetechnology, STAT MI (Segment Analysis Using Wireless Technologyin Acute Myocardial Infarction).

Heart attacks demand swift action. Every second is critical.According to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, approxi-mately 1.1 million heart attacks occur in the U.S. each year. About460,000 are fatal.

Cardiologist Marc Klapholz, MD, explains, “Having a heart attackcould feel like you have an elephant standing on your chest.” When aheart attack occurs, muscle is lost. As time passes, more muscle is lost.Klapholz, an NJMS professor of medicine and director of cardiologyat UH, says, “Time is muscle. There is a window of time in which theblood supply can be reestablished and the heart muscle protected fromdamage. That window closes rapidly after about one hour. After fourhours, the heart muscle is often irreversibly damaged and dies.”

The American College of Cardiology and the American HeartAssociation recommend that blood flow be reestablished within 90minutes of arrival at the hospital.

“This remains the Holy Grail,” Klapholz says. “The mortality ofpatients who have their arteries opened within 90 minutes of presen-tation is about 3 percent. When the procedure occurs three hours aftersymptoms begin, mortality rises to 12 percent.”

STAT MI uses wireless technology and software. The time fromadministering the initial ECG in the field to availability for view bythe physician on the smart phone is approximately 90 seconds. A clin-ically-focused conversation between the EMT and the doctor verifiesthat the patient is having a heart attack. On arrival at the hospital,these patients bypass the ER and go straight to the cardiac catheteri-zation laboratory for angioplasty.

Traditionally, heart attack victims must be evaluated in the ER;ECGs are obtained; assessments are done; cardiologists are notified;the cath lab is opened; patients are transported there; and only thendo procedures begin. With STAT MI, in Bridges’ case, almost all thistook place en route to UH. His ECGs were transmitted from theambulance directly to the cardiologist at the hospital.

Bridges, who has been married for 43 years, never had heart prob-lems before that morning. “When I talked to the physician later, hetold me I was in the right place at the right time. If I had been driv-ing my car or anywhere else, I wouldn’t have made it.” It was STATMI that helped save his life, he believes. During Bridges’ angioplasty,the cardiologist located and removed blockages before inserting astent.

Bridges is alive because three years earlier UH leaders had asked twoimportant questions. How do you reduce the time it takes to treat aheart attack patient? And, wouldn’t it be more efficient to communi-cate directly with EMTs to assess patients in the field?

To address those issues, the cardiology team worked with theEmergency Department, UH Admissions, the NJ Department ofHealth and Human Services, the Verizon Foundation and Medtronic.

With funding provided by Verizonand Medtronic through theFoundation of UMDNJ, they cre-ated STAT MI.

Another more recent grant of$20,000 brings Verizon’s financialsupport of the program to$100,000. “As a leading broadbandcompany, Verizon knows that tech-nology can make a tremendous dif-ference in the communities wherewe work and live,” says Douglas W.Schoenberger, vice president ofcorporate responsibility for VerizonNew Jersey. “This multi-year part-nership with the Foundation ofUMDNJ has been a worthwhileinvestment for the VerizonFoundation because it clearlydemonstrates how a technology-based application can createtremendous, life-saving benefits forpatients experiencing potential

22 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

Patient Anthony Bridges describes his UH cardiac team as “a well-oiled machine.” Leftto right: Arthur Rusovici, MD, Alma Salazar, RN, Marc Klapholz, MD, Preet Randhawa,MD, Jim Maher, MD and Jim Riley, RN

heart attacks.” Currently, 12 UH ambulances are outfitted with STATMI technology.

In 2007, STAT MI won the top prize for innovative approachesand management of patients with heart attacks from the Society forCardiovascular Angiography and Interventions (SCAI). That year,STAT MI was also one of 26 medical innovations recognized by Timemagazine in the article, “The Year in Medicine from A to Z.”

Since his heart attack, Bridges, a father of two sons and grandfatherof six, has changed his eating habits and dropped 18 pounds. Whenhe does try to snack on junk food, his family has no problem cau-tioning him, especially his wife. “I look at a bag of chips and she stopsme. I look at a Twinkie and she gives me ‘her look.’” Even his grand-children chime in, “You can’t eat that Grandpa. That’s garbage.”

Today, he has a new lease on life and remains thankful for the carehe received at UH. ”Based on the treatment I got and the people Icame in contact with, I don’t think there is a better place to go. Icouldn’t have asked for a better staff. I couldn’t have asked for bettercare. As soon as I hit the door, they knew what to do. They were likea well-oiled machine,” he recalls. And he should know. Bridges wasconscious from the time of the attack and throughout the surgery.“This technology saves precious minutes and was a lifesaver for me.That’s for sure. I just wish all hospitals would have STAT MI.”

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 23

Marc Klapholz, MD

MakingHeadlines,

SavingLives

T he NJMS/UH cardiology team’s inspired applicationof cell phone technology to reduce delays in gettingpatients into the cardiac catheterization laboratory

has had an enormous impact since its launch (noted justover two years ago in Time magazine’s review of the year’stop medical triumphs).

Bluetooth technology and dedicated email servers helpedcut “door-to-intervention time” drastically. “This is a paradigm shift,” Klapholz says. And he’s not exaggerating.The Society of Cardiovascular Angioplasty and Interventionsdescribed the work as a “breakthrough.” Their paper waspublished in July 2007 by The Journal of the AmericanCollege of Cardiology, the premier clinical cardiology journalin the world. At the time, the Associated Press also coveredthe story, with Yahoo picking it up and transmitting it worldwide.

Now, this same group has taken another giant step inheart care, demonstrating the value of the STAT MI programway beyond their own wildest imaginations. They’ve proventhat heart attack size is smaller, length of hospital stay isshorter and mortality is reduced for patients treated throughthis early identification wireless network system. “The size ofthe heart attack is the biggest predictor of long-term out-come,” says Marc Klapholz, who heads up the project.

In addition, gender bias, which puts women at a seriousdisadvantage in heart attack treatment, is virtually eliminat-ed. Klapholz explains: “The STAT MI program certainly bene-fits men—their time into treatment is cut by 63 minutes.

“But women benefit even more—their time is cut by 131minutes, which translates into greatly reduced heart attacksize and vastly improved pump function.”

And it doesn’t stop there. Edo Kaluski, MD, director of inter-ventional cardiology, explains that there is a “halo effect,”which means that even heart attack patients who walked intothe emergency room, so were not part of the STAT MI group,benefited since medical response time for all patients wasreduced.

“STAT MI had a good effect for everybody. And refinementsleading to improvements have continued over time—meaningfurther reductions in response time and greater improve-ments for all STAT MI and other heart attack patients,” hesays.

“Curiouser and curiouser”… Like the world of Wonderland,the role of immunity and inflammation in human healthand disease is an area of research that has expanded so dra-matically that even Alice might have used her famousexpression, “curiouser and curiouser,” to describe the

important and inter-related research areas. What keeps an infection latent in one person and not in anoth-

er?…Where is that fine balance between immune protection and thekind of inflammatory response that becomes a killer?…What really isprotective immunity in humans?…Can air pollution tip the scaletowards illness?…Should you be blaming your genes when you getsick?... Forget blood, why not look at what’s in lymph?…Do you real-ize that women truly are the stronger sex (at least when it comes totraumatic injury)?…How does an impaired circadian rhythm (regu-lated by a gene eloquently known as CLOCK) affect your metabolismduring systemic inflammation?…

Last September, a UMDNJ symposium on “Inflammation,Immunity and Infectious Disease,” on the Newark campus, shed lighton findings that had more than 75 scientists in the audience listeningclosely. The two-day conference sponsored by The Office of theUMDNJ Senior Vice President for Research and co-directed by themedical school in conjunction with New Jersey Dental School(NJDS), brought researchers, clinicians, faculty and students togetherto share discoveries, stimulate new ideas, and encourage future collab-orations. To judge from the conversations in the corridor outside theconference room in the NJDS Oral Health Pavilion, the symposiumwas clearly a success. Thirteen UMDNJ speakers presented novel the-

24 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

Why Do

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L

ories, including four from NJMS. In brief, here’s what you missed.Feel free to contact each directly for more information.

XINHUA CHEN, MD, MSCE, assistant professor, OB/GYN,UMDNJ–School of Osteopathic Medicine: Inflammatory activity, gestational hyperglycemia and adverse pregnancy outcomes. In a large epidemiological study, she focused on young minority women inCamden who go untreated for even mild hyperglycemia.

EDWIN A. DEITCH, MD, professor and chair, surgery, NJMS: Gutlymph and lymphatics; a source of factors leading to organ injury and dys-function. Trauma is the leading cause of death in people under age 40and modern medicine has yet to understand the mechanisms whichlead to this high mortality rate. Deitch and his team point to a “gutlymph hypothesis” as critical in causing adult respiratory distress syn-drome and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome. “That the gutdrives organ failure simply makes sense.” In his research, he’s alsofound that women actually are the stronger sex because estrogenmakes females more resistant. “Sex hormones modulate this responsein gut injury.”

SCOTT R. DIEHL, PHD, director, Center for Pharmacogenomics &Complex Disease Research, professor, oral biology, NJDS: The genet-ics of inflammation in susceptibility to pain, periodontitis, and pollution.A large number of apparently unrelated diseases and disorders actual-ly share common underlying pathways controlling inflammation.Why does this happen? Diehl explains, “The inflammatory response

usually serves as a protective mechanism but individuals sometimesdiffer in how they respond to triggers.” Each person’s inherited genet-ic variation influences their inflammatory response to these triggers—some respond too strongly or for too long a period of time and thishyper-inflammation becomes damaging to some of their tissues.Scientists think this occurs in periodontal disease and in pain suscep-tibility. We know that variation inherited in DNA is largely responsi-ble for these differences in inflammatory response. However, it hasproven difficult to specifically identify many of the DNA variants(called “polymorphisms”) that are actually responsible. Diehl is opti-mistic that this goal will be achieved in this decade as whole genomeDNA sequencing of thousands of individuals becomes economicallyfeasible. He emphasizes the important benefits: “An improved under-standing of the genetics of inflammation may lead to better capabili-ty to identify individuals at high risk and to target treatments basedon individuals’ inherited genetic profiles.”

ELI ELIAV, DMD, PHD, professor and interim chair, diagnostic sci-ences, director, Division of Orofacial Pain, NJDS: The role of inflam-mation in neuropathic pain. Inflammation anywhere along the trunkof a sensory nerve can produce pain and aberrant sensations in thatnerve but also in the organ supplied by the nerve. This may be theunderlying mechanism for some of the unexplained pain syndromes.This type of “perineural and neural inflammation may accompanytrauma, infection, malignancy or autoimmune conditions,” accordingto Eliav. If allowed to persist, such inflammation can cause permanentnerve damage.

25

Exploring links between

inflammation, infection &

immunityBY MARYANN BRINLEY

People Get Sick?

DANIEL H. FINE, DMD, director, Dental Research Center, professorand chair, oral biology, NJDS: Lactoferrin, a host modulator of dentalinfections? Fine explains, “The motto of our department has been,‘Listen to your bacteria,’ and thus far, this approach has produced sev-eral patents that we hope can be translated into useful therapies formany conditions and diseases that extend far beyond the oral cavity.”

WILLIAM C. GAUSE, PHD, senior associate dean for research, director,Center for Immunity and Inflammation, University Professor, NJMS:Regulating inflammation: Lessons from helminth infection. Helminths areparasitic worms that can live in humans for long periods sometimescausing chronic disease. Yet, they aren’t all bad. These parasites are alsomaster regulators of the immune response and they can trigger specif-ic immune cell populations that can control a variety of inflammatorydiseases. In fact, the hygiene hypothesis states that increased incidenceof inflammatory disease in developed countries may be partly a conse-quence of the eradicaton of parasitic helminths. As Gause states in hisabstract, “Ongoing clinical trials are testing whether parasite productsor live parasites may effectively impair autoimmune diseases includingCrohn’s disease and multiple sclerosis.”

BEATRICE HAIMOVICH, PHD, associate professor, surgery, RWJMS:Melting clocks and deregulated metabolic pathways during systemic infec-tion. Haimovich studies innate immune responses to endotoxin expo-sure in addition to the human body’s circadian clock. “Our recentwork demonstrates that the circadian clock module which normallysynchronizes metabolic activities among tissues, is profoundly sup-pressed in peripheral blood leukocytes during the acute phase of sys-temic infection.”

AMALE LAOUAR, PHD, assistant professor, surgery, RWJMS: Gut spe-cific antigen presenting cells: Their role in mucosal innate immunity andinfection. According to Laouar, “The gut is an essential immune organ

that contains 40–60 percent of the body’s total lymphocyte popula-tion.” In her presentation, she pointed out that the brain and the gutare uniquely linked and, in fact, there are more neurons in your gutthan your spinal cord. Even Hippocrates once said that all diseasesbegin in the gut.

PADMINI SALGAME, PHD, director, graduate medical research pro-gram, professor, medicine, Division of Infectious Disease, Center forEmerging and Re-emerging Pathogens: TLR2-principal regulator of thetubercle granuloma. (For more about Salgame, see page 28)

STEPHAN SCHWANDER, MD, PHD, associate professor,UMDNJ–School of Public Health (SPH) in Piscataway, Departmentof Environmental and Occupational Health: Human antimycobacter-ial lung immunity—disruptive effects by particulate air pollutants?Schwander talked about collaborative research work with researchersin Mexico City on the human lung immune defense system duringlung tuberculosis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. Lookingfor protective immune responses in the human respiratory tract hasbeen “challenging and complex to study,” he reports. Recent work inhis lab provides evidence that air pollution particles (diesel exhaust)adversely affect human immune defense responses againstMycobacterium tuberculosis. “These findings may have important glob-al public health implications, considering that urban air pollution isincreasing in many low and middle income countries that often alsohave high rates of tuberculosis,” he says.

YUFANG SHI, PHD, professor, molecular genetics, microbiology andimmunology, RWJMS: Immune regulation by tissue stem cells.Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are adult stem cells that exist in var-ious tissues and are believed to supply new cells for the repair andremodeling of damaged or aging tissues. MSCs can “turn off immuneresponses in situations including autoimmune disease and organtransplantation,” according to Shi. His studies could provide impor-tant insight into therapies tailored to “cancer, heart disease, multiplesclerosis, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus, severecombined immunodeficiency syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, andspinal cord injury.”

GEORGE S. YAP, PHD, associate professor, medicine, Center forImmunity and Inflammation, NJMS: Autoregulation of the T helper-1response. There is a fine balance between protective immunity andimmunopathology, according to Yap. “The inflammatory response canbe a killer.” His lab has been focused on how a body responds to infec-tion by Toxoplasma gondii. This clever one-celled parasite, which canhide and is often carried by cats, infects more than half the world’spopulation. Yap was the first researcher to find out how the immunesystem can kill this parasite by using autophagy to break down its pro-tective membrane, eat it up and recycle the cells. “There is a sayingthat ‘nature is thrifty,’ and we see it at work here.”

26 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

The brain and the gut areuniquely linked. In fact,there are more neurons in

your gut than in your spinalcord. Even Hippocrates saidthat all diseases begin in

the gut. —AMALE LAOUAR

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 27

STEVEN E. SCHUTZER HAS BEEN DOGGED in his investiga-tive pursuit of a tiny spirochete named Borrelia burgdorferi fordecades—ever since it was identified as the “critter” residingin the guts of ticks, which sometimes burrow into human skin

after hitching a ride on deer and white-footed mice that live in ourwoods and suburbs. A physician-scientist whose interest lies in theinterface between infectious agents and the immune system, this pro-fessor has persistently chased after the mysteries of the tiny, coiled bac-teria—sometimes deposited by the tick as it gorges on human (andanimal) blood. Recently, his research has provided detailed informa-tion that is much-needed for better Lyme disease diagnosis.

A bull’s-eye rash often serves as a warning bell tothe tick-bitten even if they have not spotted thebarely-visible, freckle-sized tick or experi-enced the early symptoms of Lyme. A shortcourse of antibiotic therapy often wipesout the acute infection in a short time—case closed. But for those who neitherspot the tick nor develop the definitivecircular markings or early symptoms,diagnosis can be delayed and problem-atic. And sometimes severe brain andnervous system symptoms come onweeks or months after the tick bite andpersist for years, even after treatment, adevelopment that has baffled patients andscientists.

Symptoms of Lyme can range from the well-known target-shaped red rash, which may appearearly on, to less frequent symptoms including debilitatingfatigue, headache, muscle and joint pain, stiff neck, peripheral neu-ropathy, and difficulty concentrating or memory impairment becausethe disease can affect the skin, heart, joints and nervous system, vary-ing from patient to patient in intensity, duration and scope. For thosewhose symptoms persist, a longer course of intravenous antibiotictherapy may work. But in some people, symptoms continue.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report thatthe incidence of more serious Lyme illness has grown in the last twodecades; and the spirochetes are appearing far beyond the borders ofLyme, CT, where the disease was first identified. Schutzer, whoseLyme research has been funded over the years by the NIH, and whosework has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine,Science, Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association(JAMA), the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and HealthState,UMDNJ’s magazine from 1982 to 2003, came to NJMS with an MDfrom Cornell, training at The Rockefeller University, and board certi-fication in internal medicine, allergy and immunology, and diagnosticlaboratory immunology. Much of his research has focused on Borreliaburgdorferi.

His most recent findings, made in collaboration with Claire M.

Fraser-Liggett, PhD, of the Institute for Genome Sciences at theUniversity of Maryland School of Medicine and several other scien-tists, made a splash both in the academic press and consumer media.Published online—ahead of print publication—in the October 2010issue of the Journal of Bacteriology, the research marks a giant step for-ward in the battle against Lyme. The team determined the completegenetic structure of 13 strains of the spirochete—including those thatare common in Lyme disease seen in North America.

“A driving force for doing this project was the observation that cer-tain forms of the bacteria can be more invasive than others. We want-

ed to find out why, and how to identify this properly,”explains Schutzer.

Current screening methods miss some earlyLyme cases and can not determine which cases

will become chronic and which will resolveimmediately. “For years, scientists have

known about the existence of multipleLyme bacterial strains but have beenunable to delineate which symptomseach caused,” explains Schutzer. Withthis precise genetic information andthat of other bacteria, tests that aremore targeted to specific Lyme disease

strains can be developed.Their work may help the development

of a vaccine. Although the spirochete wasidentified 27 years ago as the Lyme culprit,

there is still no effective vaccine for humans onthe market.

Just four months earlier, Schutzer and collaborators atPacific Northwest National Laboratory hit the headlines with researchidentifying 2,630 proteins residing in “normal” cerebrospinal fluid(CSF)—the “most comprehensive characterization of true normalCSF to date,” according to the team.

The NJMS professor describes spinal fluid as “akin to a liquid win-dow to the brain.” The number of proteins the team identified isalmost three times the number previously known; and 56 percent ofthe proteins are unique to spinal fluid—and not found in blood.

According to the article, which was published in June by PLoSONE, an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publica-tion, “Knowledge of the entire protein content, the proteome, of nor-mal human cerebrospinal fluid…establishes a comparative standardand basis for investigations into a variety of diseases with neurologicaland psychiatric features.”

In other words, Schutzer’s dogged scientific pursuit of answers tothe puzzle of why infection with the Lyme spirochete means benign,short-term disease for some, and long-term neurological problems forothers, has finally yielded a wealth of information that promises sig-nificant insights into not one disease, but many brain and nervous sys-tem disorders that plague humankind.

He’s been hunting for the secrets behind

this critter, a tiny, coiled bacteria

found in the guts of ticks and responsible

for Lyme disease, for decades.

And he just took a giant step closer.

By Eve Jacobs

As a young microbiology student at the University of Bombay,Padmini Salgame got hooked on “bugs.” Not the creepy,crawly kind, but the pathogens that cause leprosy, often

referred to as “the living death.” Its victims develop debilitating, dis-figuring disease and are socially stigmatized.

The inspiration behind her desire to research leprosy was a plasticsurgeon-turned-researcher who was her graduate school mentor, Dr.Noshir Hormasji Antia. Well-known for his pioneering efforts withleprosy patients, Antia invented surgical procedures to correct defor-mities caused by this disease which can affect skin and nerves. “Dr.Antia inspired me to do something good for society,” she explains.Undeterred even when his colleagues warned that leprosy work woulddrive other patients away, he gave up a flourishing plastic surgery prac-tice to make a difference and focus on a cure for the disease. Aftergoing back to England where he had studied plastic surgery earlier inhis medical training, he returned to India to set up a lab in Bombay,which is where Salgame was lucky enough to land.

Studying under the direction of a busy man fostered a sense ofindependence in the young grad student. Now, she passes on thatsame self-determining work ethic to her students. “He pushed us to

attend meetings, to talk with other researchers, to improve communi-cation skills and to interact with others. That is what science is about,”she says. “We need to be able to discuss ideas.” After earning her mas-ter’s, Salgame completed a PhD in Bombay and then traveled toLondon for a prestigious Wellcome Trust fellowship in immunologyat University College. There, she was mentored by Professor AvrionMitchison. And it was there that she honed her immunological skills.“It was a fantastic two years,” she recalls. “I was able to experience allthe excitement of living in London, as well as focus on science.”

These days, Padmini Salgame, an NJMS professor of medicine anddirector of the Graduate Medical Research Program, is still studying“bugs.” Now, however, it’s M. tuberculosis (TB), which effects one-third of the world’s population. Like leprosy, TB is caused by bacteriaand without treatment, this disease has a 50 percent death rate.Salgame focuses on the immune response to tuberculosis and hasmore than $1 million in funding from the National Institute ofAllergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the American Recoveryand Reinvestment Act, including a shared instrument grant for a flowcytometer to isolate TB-infected cells in their facility.

On any given day, Salgame’s lab in the Center for Emerging

PORTRAITS: ANDREW HANENBERG28 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

In the lab with

PadminiSalgameThis gifted TB researcher learned to burn themidnight oil long ago and got hooked on studying “bugs” back in India. Not the creepy,crawly kind, but the pathogens that cause leprosy and TB.

BY J I L L SPOTZ

Andrew Kim, left, with Salgameand Jill Konowich

Pathogens bustles with seven staff members including an instructor,two MD/PhD students, a PhD student, a postdoctoral fellow andresearch assistants. Their common goal: to unravel the body’s immuneresponse to TB and pave the way for an effective TB vaccine and newtreatments.

Their leader’s calm, approachable demeanor can be sensed in thelaid-back but busy atmosphere. On this day, Salgame is reviewingpapers for scientific journals, problem-solving with staff, and dis-cussing experimental study designs and results. She encourages inde-pendence and believes that collaboration benefits everyone. “If yousucceed, then I succeed,” she says. MD/PhD student AmandaMcBride agrees that this approach sets her mentor apart as simplygreat. “She pushes us to develop our own experiments and to write ourown fellowships and grants,” McBride explains. “She is always therefor us but urges us to think.”

With her cup of coffee, Salgame routinely stays late each night. Inthe middle of a grant application, she has been known to “burn themidnight oil,” go without sleeping, and still work the full next day.Grant writing is a large part of her job; a talent that she has perfectedconsidering her continuous line of funding from the NationalInstitutes of Health (NIH). She is principal investigator for two stud-ies (Helminth modulation of Mtb infection and TLR2 and the tuber-cle granuloma) and co-investigator for a large InternationalCollaborations in Infectious Disease Research (ICIDR) grant. ThisICIDR research involves several labs investigating immunity and bio-markers in family members of patients with active TB who live inBrazil. “This project allows us to take the knowledge that we learnedfrom mouse models and apply it to humans,” she explains.“Hopefully, we will be able to validate our findings back in the mousemodel.”

In this five-year study, Salgame and her co-investigators (JerroldEllner, MD, David Alland, MD, Edward Jones, MD, ReynaldoDietze, MD, Rodrigo Rodrigues,PhD, and Moises Palaci, PhD)are monitoring the blood sam-ples of household contacts ofactive TB patients. Among thesefamilies living with a memberwho has TB, some people donot acquire the disease at all;others do not contract TB evenafter being infected; and a thirdgroup is reputed to be able tocure their own latent infec-tions, which Salgame explains“is all conjecture.” This studywill pinpoint biomarkers sofuture physicians will be ableto identify outcomes and ther-apies for individuals.

This is not the first time that Salgame has been engaged in an inter-national endeavor. While completing her second post-doctoral fellow-ship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine under the mentorship ofProfessor Barry Bloom, she was involved in ground-breaking researchin human disease. “We would receive a weekly supply of blood sam-ples of patients with leprosy from Caracas, Venezuela,” recallsSalgame. “A driver picked up the samples at the airport and droppedthem off at the lab by 6 pm. I would then process the samples until 2am. We would never have been able to have access to these sampleswithout this wonderful collaboration with Venezuela.” In those sixyears at Albert Einstein, not only did Salgame’s interest in host

responses “grow” but she also perfected her ability to workaround-the-clock.

In the lab, Salgame is researching what she refers to as “atale of two cells,” or how dendritic cells and macrophagesrespond to TB infection. The research addresses how thesetwo cell types behave in vivo. The new flow cytometer iso-lates the cells, which can be kept viable for other experi-ments. Though it’s near the end of the work day, Salgameand her staff still have hours to go. In fact, this researcher isgearing up to write yet another grant. Along with colleagueKamlesh Bhatt, PhD, instructor, they are seeking funds toinvestigate a component of the immune response. AmandaMcBride is still there too, editing her thesis and in need of hermentor’s advice. Of course, Salgame’s door is open. There isno doubt that on some future day, these students will recalltheir mentor with as much enthusiasm as Padmini Salgameremembers hers.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 29

To Give Students a Competitive Edge

“An extra year of research experience provides students with a competitive edge and teaches a different way of thinking,”Padmini Salgame believes. And as the director of a new NJMSprogram for third-year students which offers exactly that, sheis pleased. “Critical analysis is important. If an experimentgoes wrong they can return to the ‘bench’ to find a solution.”The program grew from brainstorming sessions with fellow fac-ulty member William C. Gause, PhD, Senior Associate Dean ofResearch and a professor in the Department of Medicine. ThisMedical Research Program will let students conduct basicresearch in the middle of their medical school education andthen graduate with distinction. The school is recruiting three tofour students who have completed their first two years. They’llbe able to choose from a list of mentors and the good news isthat Salgame is one of them.

30 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

Postcards sent from vacation destinations ordinarilyreport: “Having a wonderful time”…Or, “Wish youwere here.” For eight NJMS students, off-campusexperiences were not ordinary at all. All receivedstipends for six weeks of community service from

Richard Pozen, MD’74 and his wife, Ann Silver Pozen, before head-ing off for projects in Sierra Leone, Uganda, New York City, and herein Newark. The Pozens, who gave $1 million to NJMS in 2009,explain, “We hope that our gift inspires future physicians to develop apassion for providing community serviceby working in neighborhood clinics andorganizations so they can provide thepeople of Newark and elsewhere withquality healthcare.” Read the passion inthe accounts of their experiences.

Ahmed Sesay worked with theGerman Leprosy and Tuberculosis ReliefAssociation (GLTRA). “I was born andraised in Freetown, Sierra Leone. I under-stand what it means not to have adequatehealthcare. I left in the midst of civil war,and always dreamed of returning. I trav-eled the hinterlands to make-shift leprosyvillages, community centers, clinics andindividuals’ homes. Our mission was thesocial rehabilitation of leprosy patients. Iwill never forget a 21-year-old womansuffering from TB and AIDS who wasparalyzed, dying, and abandoned by herfamily. Asked if she was aware of her condition, she replied, “Yes, I amsupposed to die any day but I woke up happy, despite the fact that mycell phone was stolen last night.” She forced me to put my life intoperspective and to realize how irrelevant some of my worries are. Thedirector of the GLTRA, Dr. Yvonne Harding, told me: “You are notsuccessful until the person next to you is successful.”

Fatemah Mamdani took part in the New York City Mayor’sLiteracy Fellowship…“I taught health literacy at an adult educationcenter in the Bronx called Highbridge Community Life Center. Onelesson was about reading a nutrition label. I was surprised. People didn’t understand general concepts like ‘Too much sugar is bad foryou.’ Knowledge I take for granted is just not common knowledge forall populations. Later, at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, I workedon a project assessing the impact of religious and spiritual beliefs onLatino parents’ access to mental health services for their children.”

Eric Levy stayed in Newark and went to Barringer High School.“Students Learning About Medicine, or SLAM, is a mentoring/edu-cation program started with the help of the Latino Medical StudentsAssociation (LMSA) to inspire youth to consider healthcare careers. At Barringer, the response was tremendous and 80 signed up the firstday. Students were amazed. Some wished they had known about

healthcare careers earlier. We made long-term relationships,exchanged emails and numbers and we’ll be there for them as theymove on to college and beyond. SLAM is now in year two.”

Jessica Spiegelman, Allison Jeddis, Katherine Lubarsky andJohn Flynn had to evacuate from Uganda after a bombing, but notbefore they experienced the inequities of African healthcare up close.Jessica reports: “Medicine is a universal language. Meet an MD, or inour case, a med student, from anywhere in the world, and you willunderstand each other perfectly. You speak the same language, live in

the same culture. It is extra frustrating,then, to be in a hospital like Mulago.Basic amenities, things that we wouldconsider necessities at home, are impossi-bilities in Uganda. The Ugandan doctorslearn what we learn; they know what weknow. They know that a patient withkidney failure, like one of the patientsKatherine and I treated on our infectiousdisease rotation, needs dialysis, but theycan’t get it for him. They know that lum-bar punctures should be sterile proce-dures performed with anesthetic. But aperfectly sterile environment is laugh-able, and lidocaine is a rarity. Neurolog-ical disorders that could be easily diag-nosed with an MRI are missed, becausethere is only one MRI machine in all ofUganda…It would be easy to get lost indepression at Mulago. Instead, we tried

to focus on the things that were great about Mulago —namely, thatwe were getting clinical training a year in advance, and that the kidsin this country are amazingly resilient.” To read more of “UnderAfrican Skies” go to the online version of Pulse on the NJMS website.

Leila Mady looked at the statistics for obesity and chronic diseasesin the Newark area and decided to address their risk factors, particu-larly among children and adolescents. Her idea for a “HealthyLifestyles Community Fair: Fun Tips on Living a Better Life” evolvedinto a collaborative initiative with the Downtown Newark YMCA,which holds a Healthy Kids Day annually. She explains, “My Pozenproject was the first time UMDNJ and the YMCA worked togetherfor Healthy Kids Day. The concept behind the fair was to allow mem-bers of the Newark community to learn and experience healthylifestyle choices through live demonstrations and workshops on nutri-tion, fitness, and physical and mental well-being. I remember twomiddle school children enthusiastically recounting all the ways tocook food without frying, how they were going to add more greens totheir meals and why they promised to snack on healthy fruits likeapples. Students from all UMDNJ schools took part and it was mem-orable to see some who had never worked together cooperating in aunified goal: to eliminate health disparities in Newark.”

PostcardsFROM THE POZEN SCHOLARS

By Maryann Brinley

A Conversation with theNew UMDNJ ChairBy Kaylyn Kendall Dines

The year was 1987. It marked the pivotal point when

Kevin Barry transitioned from being a student at NJMS

to becoming a graduate of the medical school. (Yes,

that’s him, second from the right above). This is the

man who dreamed of a career in medicine when he was

just a child. Now, he’s ascended from classrooms and

clinics to the boardroom.

Story on page 32

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O LJOHN EMERSON 31

N E W S O F S P E C I A L I N T E R E S T T O N J M S A N D G S B S G R A D U A T E S

CONTENTS

33 Alumni-Powered Scholarships

34 In the DaCosta Family, Medicine Matters

36 Marjorie Jones, Fifty Years Later: Plenty of Stamina

37 James Netterwald, Bringing Dead Science Writing to Life

38 Remembering Rosemary Gellene

39 Class Notes

A L U M N I P R O F I L E

32 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

B e fore our interview began, his presencewas confident yet his demeanor would

put almost anyone at ease. Extending ahand, he says, “Hi, I’m Kevin.” That wouldbe Kevin M. Barry, MD, MBA, wo wasappointed to succeed Robert Del Tufo asChairman of UMDNJ’s Board of Trustees byN.J. Governor Chris Christie in September2010. He was originally appointed to theBoard in 2007 by Governor Jon Corzine. Heis, in fact, the first alumnus of UMDNJ toclaim this top leadership position.

Barry, an attending anesthesiologist atMorristown Memorial Hospital, has alsoserved as a member of the Board ofDirectors at the UMDNJ–UniversityHospital, as president of AnesthesiaAssociates of Morristown since 1994, andon the healthcare transition team for theChristie Administration. He pledges his alle-giance to the entire University-wide systemrather than to a particular unit.

Q: Describe what this means to you to benamed the 13th Chair.A: It is both a privilege and an honor, espe-cially returning to the Stanley S. BergenBuilding, which I still at times reflexivelyrefer to as Martland Hospital. I completed aclinical rotation downstairs and received a

set of vaccines in ’86 there before headingoff to Kenya for a medical mission. This ishome. I’ve come full circle.

Q: What is your vision for the future?A: The past is behind us. As a result of BobDel Tufo’s leadership, the University is posi-tioned to make greater strides towardsbecoming a national leader in health educa-tion and research. We are poised to leverageour tremendous expertise and link withindustry leaders worldwide. We will be part-nering with pharmaceutical, biotech, engi-neering and life sciences industries to createinnovative products, treatment methods andmedications. Great potential exists forimproving quality care, creating jobs andgenerating revenue.

Q: Do you have a message for students, faculty,staff, and administrators statewide? A: Yes, we’ve survived a number of toughyears. Our resilient faculty, staff and stu-dents knew the true value and greatness ofthe University. We were beaten up on a dailybasis by the press. That’s over. The staff, fac-ulty, and students, all loyal members of theUMDNJ community, enabled us to weatherthe storm. Be proud of who you are andyour accomplishments. I can tell you thatthe Board is very proud of you!

In the past, the alumni tended to identifywith a school, rather than the University.Remain loyal to your school, but please rec-ognize that you’re also connected to a largerentity, which is a relatively young university.Our history dates back to the 60s. In the lifespan of a university, we’re a toddler. Toddlersstumble and fall, but they get up on theirfeet. We’re poised to run.

Universities established a hundred yearsago or more have strengthened their finan-cial bases by building huge endowments.This is not necessarily as enviable a positionas it may seem to be at first glance. Whenyou consider UMDNJ’s faculty, public andallied health professionals, staff, dentists,nurses, physicians, and aspiring students, wehave a huge endowment of talent, potentialand skills. We too will get there with

financial endowments! It takes time.

Q: Please share your experience and perspectiveon medical education.A: Health professionals nationwide are fac-ing an increasingly older and more diversepatient population. We as a nation are fac-ing a shortage of healthcare professionals. Itis incumbent upon us to educate a sufficientnumber of highly-qualified, compassionateprofessionals who stay ahead of the curve byconstantly gaining knowledge and passingthat knowledge on to the next generation.

I’ve noticed a shift in medical education,particularly at UMDNJ, of accepting stu-dents who are genuinely interested in thehumanitarian aspects of medicine. When Iwent to school, my classmates and I pre-dominantly majored in the hardcore sci-ences. I loved being in labs. I loved physiol-ogy, pharmacology, biochemistry. As such,my natural inclination was to move into afield like anesthesiology. Other students mayhave been drawn to specialties that impactthe cultural and societal aspects of health-care because of their natural inclinations andinterests in these areas. How do we keep stu-dents engaged and incentivize them to moveinto a field whether it is clinical practice orbench research? This and other questionsneed to be answered so we can addressshortages in fields like primary care.

Q: In 200 years, what do you want people toknow and remember about you? A: No matter what I build or accomplish, itwill never be as important as my being ableto instill in the younger generation of healthcare professionals the true sense of privilegeand excitement of being in medicine. I tellstudents there will be patients that you willcare for and cure. Sadly, some patients can’tbe cured but all of them can be cared for. I want to be remembered as someone whoinstilled in the younger generation theimportance of developing good technicalskills, but more important, of having thekind of love for medicine that embraces thesacrosanct privilege of treating people withdignity and respect.

Kevin Barry, class of 1987

A L U M N I N O T E S

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 33

Alumni-PoweredScholarships

Alumni Affairs Director Dianne Minkhas seen some of our med students at

their lowest because the burden of payingfor school just becomes too much to con-template. They come to us for help, and forgood reason. According to the AmericanMedical Association, a medical student graduating in 2009 had to start paying off$156,456. Here are other figures that makeme cringe:

• 79 percent have debts of at least$100,000.

• 58 percent have loans amounting to atleast $150,000.

• 87 percent of all graduating medicalstudents carry outstanding loans that willcertainly impact the way they practice medi-cine and their choice of specialties.

We can do something about the kinds

of high debt that create personal crises forour students by donating to the AlumniAssociation scholarship fund. The 119thankful students —the winners wereannounced at the banquet on Oct. 26,2010— can now breathe sighs of relief. Tofind out how you can help another medicalstudent breathe a sigh of relief, call (973)972-6864 or email minkda@umdnj.edu.

JAMES OLESKE, MD’71, MPH PRESIDENT, NJMS ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

Save The DateStart your reunion weekend festivities earlyby attending a day-long symposium fol-lowed by a gala celebration in recognitionof Peter W. Carmel, MD, Chair, NJMSDepartment of Neurosurgery, as he assumesthe office of American Medical Associationpresident in June 2011.

Thursday, May 12, 2011SYMPOSIUM: Innovators and Educators in the Art and Science of Neurosurgery Delta Dental Conference Center, at NJDS (Newark Campus) • 9 am – 4 pm • Free

GALA: Liberty House Restaurant • Jersey City, NJ • 6:30 pm – 11 pmProceeds will benefit NJMS Neurological Institute of New Jersey

INDIVIDUAL GALA TICKETS: $300 per personGala sponsorships available from $1,000 – $25,000

For more information or to reserve your seats, contact LaDawn McClamb at (973) 972-1164 ormcclamls@umdnj.edu.

Left: Dr. and Mrs. Dennis G. O’Neill’79 (left) have hon-ored Dennis P. Quinlan, Sr., MD’69 (right), by establish-ing an endowed scholarship which was presented thisyear to Jill Humphries’11.

Above: Judith Korek Amorosa, MD’70 (left), and Louis F.Amorosa, MD’69 (right), donors of the Loran and KlaraKorek Scholarship and Anna Amorosa Scholarship respec-tively, proudly present their scholarships to RonakShah’11 (left) and Anthony DeCicco’11 (right).2011

NJMS CALENDAR OF EVENTS

March 3 Alumni Association Board ofTrustees Executive Committee MeetingStudent Affairs Conference Room, MSB C654, 6 pm

March 10 Humanism DayMSB – B552, 5 pm, Speaker: Danielle Ofri

May 13/14/15Alumni Reunion WeekendMay 14, Gala Dinner Dance, Sheraton ParsippanyHotel, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Classof 1961; 25th anniversay of the Class of 1986; andall alumni milestones. For information, contactDianne Mink at minkda@umdnj.edu.

May 15 Komen North Jersey Race for the Cure

May 23 ConvocationNew Jersey Performing Arts Center

May 25 CommencementIZOD Center

June 16 Alumni Association Board ofTrustees Annual MeetingRosemary Gellene Room, MSB B515, 6 pm

TOP: AL SUNDSTROM; BOTTOM RIGHT: JOHN EMERSON

M eet the DaCosta family. Their busygastroenterology practice is located in

a typical medical office off Route 280 at 85South Jefferson Street in Orange. The placeteems with patients several days a week. “Inan afternoon,” explains Theodore A.DaCosta, Sr., MD, “we’ll sometimes see 50patients.” But their practice is anything buttypical. This office is full of family, evengrandson Teddy, a pre-med major at SetonHall University. And though Dr. DaCosta,Sr., turned 80 last March and was in thefirst graduating class of the Seton HallCollege of Medicine, which later becameNJMS, he too is still there three days aweek. His wife, Johanne DaCosta, RN (“thelife support of our practice,” says her hus-band), is in the office every working day andhas been his nurse since 1964 when theyopened their practice. In the DaCosta fami-ly, medicine matters very much.

Father, mother, sons, daughters, daugh-ter- and son-in-laws, uncles, cousins andgrandsons all follow in the family footsteps.They don’t choose these tough professionalroads out of duty, however, or because ofany coercion at home. As son TheodoreDaCosta, Jr., MD, NJMS ’89, explains, theyselect medicine because of “the passion forpatients we learned from our parents, com-ing into the office to be with them as chil-dren, sensing how much they love what theydo. There was never any pressure to becomea doctor. We want to be here.”

His dad, seated across the room, has obvi-ously loved practicing medicine. “It all started with my mother,” Ted Sr. explains. “She wanted to become a nurse but had toomany children” and stumbling blocksthrown into her path. Raised in Jamaica,Ted Sr. spent 20 years there after the familymoved to the island when his father’s trans-

portation business in the U.S. went bank-rupt during the depression. His book, Ladyin Blue, is a fictionalized account of the“very tough but fulfilling life we had inJamaica.” Ted Sr. sees his mother’s story as“rags to riches” inspiration.

“We love our patients and we are here forthem.” He recalls a classmate years ago whowondered why they hadn’t moved the prac-tice out to a more affluent suburb. “Did wego into medicine to make money?” hereplied. “Did we take an oath to take care ofonly one kind of patient, not the ones onMedicaid?” Their answer was obviously no.

Second son, John DaCosta, MD,NJMS’91, is currently in Kentucky workingin a poor area where there had been no gas-troenterologist for hundreds of miles. It’s atemporary post where he’s also getting expe-rience in performing ERCP (endoscopic ret-rograde cholangiopancreatography), a testthat can diagnose numerous disorders in thebile ducts, gallbladder and pancreas. John’s

wife, Maryann DaCosta, is an RN who hasalso worked in the family practice. “Kind,compassionate and a fantastic nurse, wehope to get her back,” Ted Sr. admits. TedJr.’s wife, Judith DaCosta, PhD, earned herdoctorate in microbiology from UMDNJand spent years in the office as well.Meanwhile, the DaCosta’s first child, daughter Anna Maria, graduated from theUniversity of Pennsylvania School ofMedicine and is a pediatrician at Children’sHospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). She’smarried to yet another doctor, John Choi,MD, PhD, chief of hematology at CHOP.And their fourth child, Nancy DaCostaGiten, PhD, completed a doctorate in clini-cal psychology at Hahnemann Universityand is in private practice in New Jersey. “Weworked so hard to pay all those bills. Fourkids: four education loans,” Johanne sighs.

Ted Sr. and Johanne met 50 years ago atSt. Michael’s Medical Center in Newarkwhen she called for an intern to assist with a

ANDREW HANENBERG34 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

A L U M N I P R O F I L E

In the DaCosta Family,Medicine MattersBy Maryann Brinley

Ted Sr., Johanne, Ted Jr., Teddy andNancy DaCosta Giten

patient who was unable to breathe. “I need-ed help cranking up the bed. Rememberthose old beds? Ted walked in and I got ashock,” she says laughing.

“Really?”“No…but really, it’s true. It was emotion-

al but just as shocking,” Johanne recalls,laughing. “That’s how we met.” Her hus-band agrees that it was love at first sight. “Iwent home and told my roommate, ‘I fell inlove tonight,’” she says.

After their marriage in 1961, their chil-dren started to arrive in 1962, ’63, ’65, and’68 but that didn’t stop the pair from mak-ing miles of house calls. “The older doctorswould sign out and younger ones would beon call. For $5,” he says, “and we didn’talways get paid.” This meant driving to 40or 50 homes days, nights, or weekends, toLivingston, Paterson, the Oranges, Kearny,Belleville, Harrison, anywhere. “Ted wouldget lost,” Johanne remembers, “so I wouldnavigate. We had no GPS then. NoMapquest. Just me.” Navigating northernNew Jersey, where so many street names arerepeated in various towns, sent them onwild escapades. Imagine being at the rightnumber house, on the right street but in thewrong town. “There we were, ringing thewrong doorbell in the middle of the night.”

Ted Sr. remembers a visit to the Newarkhome of gypsies. The matriarch, or “queen,”was in bed with pneumonia. “The ‘king’accompanied me to her side and gave me acomprehensive history. I checked her andshe had pneumonia. In those days, a shot ofpenicillin took care of this condition so Igave her a shot and then a script for antibi-otic tabs.” When he got ready to leave, thisking didn’t want to pay. “I stared him in theface and explained that the fee was $5.He laughed, said there was no need to paybecause the injection had already beengiven.” Ted Sr. had been warned about gyp-sies, stood his ground and told this power-fully-built guy that he had given the oldwoman water, not penicillin. “You cheat meand your wife won’t make it,” he said. Outcame the $5. After he gave the patient a sec-ond shot, the king called him “wise one,”

hugged him and shook his hand. “He hadmet his match,” Ted Sr. recalls. “That sec-ond shot was the saline, not the first. Thisfamily became my patients and they nevertried to pull the wool over my eyes again.”

Perhaps his experience in that charter classin medical school helped prepare him foralmost anything on the job, even those gyp-sies. “We were the first class and actuallyreceived more training than most. Our thirdyear, in fact, was more like internship. By thetime I graduated, I had already delivered

more than 100 babies,” he says. There hadbeen 5,000 applications for 80 spots.Classmates were “extremely bright.” Somewere off the charts intellectually. Leo Pisculli,MD, for instance, had a photographic mem-ory. “I’d give him a large amount of text tolook at for 3 minutes. I’d take it away, wait 5minutes and he’d be able to recite it word forword. The night before a test, he’d look atthe book and know everything. He became apsychiatrist because he liked listening to peo-ple telling him stories and figuring out whatwas wrong.” (See page 10 for “Road TripCirca 1959.”)

Ted Sr., on the other hand, is a hands-onphysician. He chose gastroenterology whenhe “looked into the future” and could seewhere it would take him. The specialty haschanged over the years, but so much abouthealth still revolves around the gut, hebelieves. “I learned to use those old endo-scopes in very flexible ways. I was prettygood.” His son Ted agrees. “There is nodoctor like my father. He is the gentlest,most wonderful, caring physician.”

The family is currently setting off in anew direction: collaborating on a weight

reduction center that will combine nutritionand exercise interventions with endoscopicand bariatric surgery. “Our plan is to behospital-based at St. Michael’s MedicalCenter,” Ted Jr. explains. In fact, the ideacame from grandson Teddy, who told hisfather, “You know Dad, our patients areoverweight.”

“I told him to come up with an idea tohelp our obese patients lose weight. And wedid,” Ted Jr. says. “Obesity is one of themost serious problems facing healthcaretoday.”

If laughter makes the best medicine, it’seasy to see why the DaCostas are a family ofhealers. They laugh a lot and are unafraid toshow their emotions. Take their account ofthe terrible fire that destroyed their firstoffice in East Orange. The tale is told withhumor, not angst. Johanne remembers, “Itwas 1991 and on Thanksgiving night. Wegot a call from another doctor’s wife whosepractice was in the same building. ‘Johanne,’she said, ‘We don’t have an office anymore.’There was a fire. You don’t have one either.’”

Their office with patient records, equip-ment and 27 years of memories would havebeen completely destroyed if it weren’t forthe fact that one of the firemen was aDaCosta patient. “Luckily, he got there firstand saved us,” Ted Sr. adds. “This examin-ing table came from there,” he points out. It does have an antique look to it. “We hungthe wet paper records up to dry,” Johanneexplains.“We put them on clotheslines, likedamp laundry.” Together, they laugh aboutwhat could have been a terrible disaster butwasn’t in the end. “Look at those burntedges up there,” she says, indicating theframed diplomas, certificates and awards ontheir office wall. All have a slightly charredbut artsy look.

Sitting opposite his dad, across from therescued examining table is Ted Jr.

“Everybody has a hero,” he says. “Butnot everyone can have their best friend betheir father as well as their hero.” There’s along pause in the room all of a sudden. Andwith that note, the laughter stops and a fewtears are shed.

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 35

Making miles of house calls

for $5 each meant driving to

40 or 50 homes days, nights,

and weekends.

36 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1 ANDREW HANENBERG

A L U M N I P R O F I L E

Marjorie Jones received a less thanenthusiastic welcome when she start-

ed medical school in the fall of 1956. “Themen in the class approached us women,” sherecalls—there were nine, out of a class ofeighty—“and told us that they were upsetbecause we were never going to practicemedicine. They said they wouldn’t help usbecause we were taking places that couldhave gone to men who would go into medi-cine, while all we were going to do was getmarried and have children.”

Jones can laugh at the memory now,largely because the whole thing blew over injust a few weeks and, as she’s quick to add,the men and women in her class becamegood friends and helpful colleagues. It’s agood thing, too, because—to be blunt—

those poor guys had no idea just who theywere dealing with.

Born in Harlem, Jones, the child ofimmigrants from Guyana, had learned athing or two about being doubted longbefore medical school. She’d seen her fatherdeal with it. “He worked in the post office,”Jones says, “but he gave up that job to go todental school. His friends ridiculed him forthat. They thought he was crazy to give up asecure government job.”

Her mother took in laundry to supportthe family while her father was in school,and he promised that, once he was in prac-tice, she would never have to work again.“He kept his word,” Jones says. “My motherstayed at home with us children. Then again,that meant we couldn’t come home and

think we could go out and play. Schoolworkand then housework, those came first.”

When Jones was 10, her family moved toMt. Vernon, NY, where the rule in herhome remained the same as it had been inHarlem: settling for less than you were capa-ble of was simply unacceptable. In highschool, for example, when Jones told herfather that she might like to be a nurse, heencouraged her to become a doctor. “Thatway you can give the orders,” he said.

Jones attended St. John’s University inBrooklyn, where she took the pre-med cur-riculum (and where, unsurprisingly, sheencountered the same attitude from hermale fellow students). She enrolled at SetonHall College of Medicine (now NJMS) rightafter college, entering the charter class.

Remembering those days now, she admitsthat she wasn’t always as confident as sheseemed. “In the back of my mind, I didwonder, ‘How am I going to have a familyand practice medicine, too?’” She didn’t dis-cover a solution to her conundrum until herlast year, when she met a female pediatricianwho worked out of a home office. “Ithought, ‘Hey, I can do that,’” she says.

Jones and her fiancé married just beforeher residency, and her daughter, Jeanine, wasborn a year later. She was afraid she’d bekicked out of her program, but an auntmoved in to help with the baby, and shemade it through.

“We were Catholic,” she says. “Birth con-trol wasn’t an option. But that rhythmmethod, it just doesn’t work.” She laughsand adds, “I had three children on therhythm method.” (Jeanine, a dermatologist,has two younger brothers: Michael, anEnglish professor, and Mark, a televisionproducer.)

Jones opened her own pediatric practicein 1966, and still works in that same homeoffice four days a week. On Wednesday—her day “off ”—she runs a clinic at HolyName Hospital in Teaneck for childrenwhose parents can’t afford medical care.She’s also on staff at Englewood Hospitaland serves as physician for the Hackensackschool system. “I cover five elementary

M A R J O R I E J O N E S , M D ’ 6 0

Fifty Years Later: Plenty of StaminaBy Tryon Baldwin

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 37

schools and one middle school,” she says,“doing physicals, testing, immunizations.”As if that weren’t enough, Jones has gone onmedical missions to Peru, and, in April2010, her church sponsored a trip to Haiti.

“There was so much trauma there,” shesays. “Injuries and disease. Skin rashes fromsleeping on mud floors. I went down thereto treat children, but I wound up seeingadults, too.”

Jones still loves medicine. When pressed,she will allow that it might be time to slowdown. Demanding insurance companies andrude parents have taken their toll. “I’ve beenthinking about giving up the home office,”she says. “But I’d like to keep up with theclinic and the schools. I still have plenty ofstamina. Maybe I’ll try semi-retirement.”

J A M E S N E T T E R WA L D , P H DUMDNJ–Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences ’05

Bringing Dead ScienceWriting to Life

T wo roads diverged in his professional worldand James Netterwald, PhD, GSBS ’05,

decided to take the path less traveled by scientistswith PhDs in microbiology and molecular biology. After getting his bachelor’s degreein clinical laboratory science from New Jersey City University in 1998, he spent sixyears earning that doctorate from UMDNJ–GSBS in Newark and working in a researchlaboratory. After graduation, he decided that life in the lab was not exactly his finaldestination. “My new career was born out of a desire to live the life of a college pro-fessor without having to obtain a fulltime faculty position. I wanted to perform life sci-ence research without having to write grants…but I wanted to spend the lion’s shareof my time writing articles and books,” he admits. So, with his new doctorate in hand,Netterwald took his first professional writing job as an associate medical director atMedical Knowledge Group in New York. On year later, he left to pursue an editorialposition in publishing at a small pharmaceutical trade publication called DrugDiscovery & Development magazine, where he was a staff writer and editor for threeyears. In April 2009, he founded BioPharmaComm, LLC, to provide writing, editing,and consulting services to life science industries.

“My clients include science trade publications, medical education, pharma-biotech and public relations companies. As a seasoned writer and editor, I knowwhat it takes to clearly communicate science to the world,” he says. “By bringing myunique style, depth, clarity and polish to a project, I can bring previously dead, inef-fective writing back to life.” Even a quick reading of Netterwald’s sample storiesposted on his website, http:www.nasw.org/users/netterjr/ demonstrates his ability tomake scientific topics soar journalistically. Imagine a story about polymerase chainreaction (PCR), for instance. Interesting for the non-scientist? Probably not. Yet,here’s how Netterwald invites readers into his world: “Was Kerry Mullis insanely bril-liant or brilliantly insane? That is the question. And polymerase chain reaction (PCR)is the answer.” Everything from epigenetics and autism to neuroimaging, peptide-based therapeutics, and drug repositioning receive this expert treatment.

Last October, an essay by Netterwald titled “Back to the Lab” and published inThe Scientist, Magazine of the Life Sciences, caught our attention. Turns out thatthis science-writer missed life in the lab. “I was told it couldn’t be done—a writercould never return to the lab after a five-year hiatus. Part of me wanted to provethem wrong,” he explained in his published piece. And he did. Netterwald has beendoing research in the laboratory of William Ward, PhD, a Rutgers University professorand president of a small biotechnology company, Brighter Ideas, Inc., specializing inthe production of antibodies against green fluorescent protein. “I’m a visiting scien-tist. Returning to the lab is possible; it just takes a little adjusting.” But he’s also awriter and entrepreneur, proving that it is possible to choose more than one profes-sional road. To reach Netterwald, email: james.netterwald@yahoo.com.

a difficult academic schedule is largelybehind him and he’s focusing on clini-cal rotations. “I’m not sure what spe-cialty I’ll choose, but I’m inspired byDr. Deitch and thinking seriouslyabout general surgery,” he says.

The scholarship, which included a$10,000 prize, has been a tremendoushelp. “I don’t come from a wealthyfamily,” he says. “My dad is a contrac-tor and he’s worked hard to help mewith my education. Still, like mostmedical students, I have enormousloans.”

The scholarship also puts him ingood company. The awards are spon-sored by MDAdvantage, a largeprovider of medical professional liabil-ity insurance. Past winners haveincluded some of New Jersey’s mostdistinguished physicians. “I haven’tdone a tenth of what past awardeeshave accomplished, but I hope to fol-low in their footsteps one day,” saysBonitz.

Focus on PhilanthropyContinued from page 40

I N M E M O R I A M

38 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

By Lisa Jacobs

F ifty years after NJMS graduated its first class of physicians,one student’s name has remained part of the Universitycommunity’s daily vocabulary. Rosemary Gellene may be

familiar to anyone who has ever attended an event in the alumnicenter that bears her name and houses her portrait, but her pro-fessional accomplishments and substantial contributions to medi-cine before her untimely death at age 50 may be less commonlyknown. The next time you are in room B-515 in the MedicalScience Building (MSB), take a closer look at the largest pictureon the wall. It stands out prominently, right in the middle of along line of men, just as she did in her life.

Gellene is most famous for her influential research on L-DOPA as a pharmacologic agent in the treatment of Parkinson’sDisease. Swedish scientist Arvid Carlsson initially recognizeddopamine’s importance as a neurotransmitter and its physiologicalrelevance. For his contributions, Carlsson received the 2000Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But, the high dose L-DOPA injections pioneered by Carlsson in the late 1950s provedtoxic and were considered unsafe and impractical.

It was Gellene working with George Cotzias at BrookhavenNational Laboratory from 1966 to 1969 who demonstrated thatoral administration of L- DOPA at sequentially higher dosesresulted in substantial remission of Parkinson’s symptoms. Shetranslated Carlsson’s concept into a practical treatment that is stillconsidered the gold standard today. Gellene was the third authorof the 1969 New England Journal of Medicine article that firstdescribed this treatment, “Modification of Parkinsonism—chronic treatment with L-DOPA.”

Gellene was passionate about education. Before joiningNJMS’s charter class, then Seton Hall College of Medicine, sheearned a bachelor’s degree from the College of St. Elizabeth and amaster’s from Boston College. Medical school classmate AnthonySossi, MD’60, fondly remembers how the “great excitement inthe creation of the college of medicine transmitted to all of usstudents in that charter class.” He describes Gellene as “a seriousstudent and a good one, who worked hard and cooperatively” andwhose interest in academic medicine was readily apparent.

After graduation from med school, Gellene completed aninternship and residency at Jersey Shore Medical Center, an insti-tution to which she maintained close ties throughout her life.

There, she served first as attending physician before being pro-moted to assistant director and later director of medicine. Shewas also the hospital’s teaching coordinator and established anaccredited training program in internal medicine in 1975. It wasat the Jersey Shore Medical Center that Gellene died suddenly in1985 of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was survived by her parentsand three brothers, who requested donations to the institution inlieu of flowers in her funeral announcement.

A lifetime learner, this woman completed post-doctoral fellow-ships at St. Luke’s Hospital and at the National Institute ofHealth focusing on liver diseases. She graduated from HarvardUniversity Graduate School for Health Systems Management in1975 and at the time of her death in 1985, she was completing a fellowship in infectious disease at Memorial Sloan Kettering.

Gellene was a clinical associate professor at UMDNJ andmaintained two private practices in internal medicine, the first ofwhich she opened in Belmar in 1966 and the second in JerseyCity in 1980. She consulted for the Departments of Medicine atboth Point Pleasant Hospital and Freehold Area Hospital.

A leader, she acted as a trustee for both the Foundation ofUMDNJ and the Academy of Medicine of New Jersey, where shelater became that institution’s first female president. She was a fel-low of the American College of Physicians and a diplomat of theAmerican Board of Internal Medicine, the American College ofChest Physicians, and the National Board of Medical Examiners.She also served as a council member for the New Jersey chapterof the American College of Physicians, the American Federationfor Clinical Research, the American Association for theAdvancement of Science, the Academy of Medicine of NewJersey, and the New Jersey Society of Internal Medicine.

From 1975 to 1984, Gellene was on the board of trustees forthe NJMS Alumni Association. Shortly before her death, she wasappointed president. Saddened by the sudden loss and in recogni-tion of her service to the school and outstanding contributions tothe field of medicine as a clinician, instructor, and researcher, theassociation funded the remodeling and dedication of room B-515, MSB, as “The Dr. Rosemary Gellene Alumni Center.” Theassociation also keeps her name alive through the Dr. RosemaryGellene ’60 Memorial Scholarship awarded each year in herhonor.

RememberingRosemary Gellene

N E W J E R S E Y M E D I C A L S C H O O L 39

C L A S S N O T E S

1960’SEugene Cheslock, MD’65, is presi-dent of the Parker Family Health Centerin Red Bank, a free community cliniche founded to care for the uninsured.Cheslock was noted by HealthcareHeroes in July 2010 and received theVolunteer of the Year Award.

Thomas Kiernan, MD’67, retiredfrom the Charlie Norwood VAMedical Center, Augusta, GA, inJanuary 2010.

Maurice Meyers, MD’60, was nameda Knight (Chevalier) in the FrenchLegion of Honour by the French gov-ernment and received the decorationin New York City on November 11,2010. His book, Reflections on My War,was just published by Bluewood.

1970’SThomas Dayspring, MD’72, clinicalassistant professor of medicine atNJMS and an attending physician atSt. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center,has lectured in all 50 states on heartdisease, especially as it affects women.

Richard Blumenfeld, MD’72, joineda 12-person cardiology group inFramingham, MA. He practices car-diac care at Beth Israel Medical Centerin Boston and has also been a clinicalinstructor in medicine at HarvardMedical School since 1993.

Peter Dorsen, MD’72, teachesWestern Medicine and pathology atthe American Academy ofAcupuncture and Oriental Medicine inRoseville, MN.

Richard W. Huss, MD’71, lives inPotomac, MD, and has been enjoyingretirement. He would like to hear fromclassmates.

Paul LoVerme, MD’78, has beenappointed chair of surgery atMountainside Hospital in Montclair.

Carlo Mainardi, MD’72, is the chairof medicine at the Woodhull MedicalCenter in Brooklyn, NY, and clinicalprofessor of medicine at the NYUSchool of Medicine. His son, TimothyMainardi, MD’06, is a fellow inAllergy/Immunology at Columbia, and

daughter-in-law Alison Mainardi,MD’09, is a second-year resident at St.Luke’s Hospital, NY.

1980’SMarla Gold, MD’85, is dean of theSchool of Public Health, DrexelUniversity College of Medicine inPhiladelphia.

Randall F. Holcombe, MD’83, coloncancer expert, joined the Mount SinaiMedical Center, NY, as director ofclinical cancer affairs in The TischCancer Institute and director of gas-trointestinal medical oncology for theDivision of Hematology/Oncology.

Gerard Pregenzer, MD’83,announced that his daughter Laurawas married in August 2010.

Robin S. Schroeder, MD’86, hus-band Donald C. Schroeder, MD’86,and children Megan, 23, and Colin,19, are doing well. Robin is on theNJMS faculty (loves the medical stu-dents) and Don is a radiologist at St.Barnabas Medical Center, Livingston.Come to the gala (May 15, 2011) forthe 25th anniversary of our graduationnext year. Get in touch!schroers@umdnj.edu.

Michele Torchia, MD’86, is medicaldirector and vice president of medicalaffairs for Complete Care, a federallyfunded health network in southernNJ. Torchia will complete an MPH atthe University of North Carolina,Chapel Hill, this spring, has been mar-ried to Richard Feltman for 29 years,and has three daughters.

1990’SOxiris Barbot, MD’91, is the newcommissioner for the Baltimore, MD,Health Department. The former med-ical director of NYC’s Office of SchoolHealth where she created an electronicmedical records system for more thana million students, she was chosen forthe new position because of her experi-ence with underserved populations.

Aimée D. Garcia, MD’94, was one of16 doctors chosen by QuantiaMD toreceive a Community Choice Award

for “innovation and excellence in shar-ing knowledge.” Garcia, an expert inwound care, practices in Houston, TX.

David Kim, MD’98, was happy toreconnect with his medical schoolhousemate, Robert Cooper, MD’98,for the first time in more than 10years. “It was great to reminisce aboutthe good old days at NJMS.”

Carlos Mayer-Costa, MD’94, isworking in a wonderful family practiceoffice and was recently appointeddirector of the BHS Whole MedicalSpa in PA.

Ana Natale-Pereira, MD’96, and hus-band Gustavo Pereira are the parentsof son Daniel and triplets Sofia,Victoria and Lucia. (Read her story onpage 14.)

Stephen Sun, MD’96, joined the U.S.Food and Drug Administration as amedical officer and is presentlyenrolled in the Johns Hopkins Schoolof Public Health MPH program.

2000’SDavid Adinaro, MD’00, was induct-ed this year as a Fellow of the NewYork Academy of Medicine.

Tanya Chadha, MD’08, was marriedto Shailesh Sachdeva last year and haschanged her last name to Sachdeva.

Allison Froehlich, MD’03, has beenworking for two years at EndocrineAssociates, PA, which is affiliated withValley Hospital in Ridgewood.

Lowell E. Gurey, MD’06, and Keren Bakal, MD’07, were marriedMemorial Day weekend, 2010, inLivingston. NJMS alumni attendingthe event included Kapil Paghdal,MD’08; members of the class of 2007:Drs. Danielle Bertoni, Molly Barry,Monique Espinosa, Aisha Phillipson,Andrew Azer; from the class of 2006:Dr. Erick Clinton, and from the classof 2005: Drs. Jay Hauptman andElliot Dehaan as well as NJMSProfessor Kenneth Swan, MD. Kerenrecently completed her training ininternal medicine at Boston MedicalCenter and is working as a hospitalistin Albany, NY, while Lowell finisheshis otolaryngology residency at AlbanyMedical Center. Both will be movingto New York City in July for furthertraining; Lowell as a laryngology fellowat St. Luke’s /Roosevelt and Keren as aPulmonary/Critical Care fellow atNYU.

Sara Lubitz, MD’03, is on the facultyat UMDNJ-RWJMS in NewBrunswick, NJ.

Jason W. Mitchell, MD’04, MPH, avascular and interventional radiologistwith Vascular and EndovascularSpecialists of Ohio, is on theMedCentral /Mansfield Hospital med-ical staff.

Erin Rebele, MD’06, is an assistantprofessor, ob-gyn, at VanderbiltUniversity, TN.

Join the Alumni Association of New Jersey Medical School

General Dues $65.00Resident in Training $15.00Lifetime Membership $1,000.00

Visit http://njms.umdnj.edu/, click on Alumni and Alumni Association and thenOnline Dues Payment to pay your dues online.

The Lifetime Membership is being offered to our alumni as a means to perpetu-ate the goals of the Alumni Association and enable its members to sustain theirsupport in a more meaningful way. All categories of membership will afford youthe opportunity to keep connected with us. You will continue to receive all mem-bership benefits, including NJMS Pulse magazine, information about upcomingevents and reunions, and library privileges.

Alumni Association of NJMS, 185 South Orange Avenue, MSB-B504, Newark,NJ 07101–1709. Photos are welcome. You can also send your news via e-mailto: njmsalum@umdnj.edu or fax us at (973)972-2251.

In high school, Paul Bonitz dreamed ofbecoming a forensic scientist. “I saw

myself solving crimes based on scientific evi-dence,” says this aficionado of CSI, Law &Order and ER. During his first year of col-lege (he’s a University of Miami alum with adegree in biochemistry), he shadowed a localmedical examiner, then volunteered in theER “doing paperwork, answering buzzers,and talking to patients. That was an eye-opener,” he says. “I decided I’d rather takecare of live people than dead ones.”

Bonitz is now a medical student atNJMS, where he has excelled, impressing allthose around him. In May, he was selectedas one of three outstanding students who arethe first recipients of the Edward J. IllExcellence in Medicine Scholarship Fund.This award is given annually to distin-guished physicians and healthcare leaders inNew Jersey. Named for Edward J. Ill, MD, aNJ physician who was a pioneer in promot-ing continuing education, they are among

the highest honors given in the state’s med-ical community. This was the first year thatscholarship awards were also given to stu-dents. All recipients were honored at a ban-quet in May 2010.

“I was practically knocked off my feetwhen I won this award,” says Bonitz. Hewas nominated by James Hill, PhD, interimassociate dean, who wrote a letter describingBonitz’s work ethic, research experience andcontributions as a member of the UMDNJStudent Senate. “Dr. Hill nominated mewithout telling me.”

As an undergraduate, Bonitz consideredcareers in both research and medicine.When his mother was diagnosed with breastcancer, he began leaning towards research. “Ithought I’d go into the lab and discover acure for breast cancer,” he says. At Miami,he worked for a year in the lab of KermitCarraway, PhD, and Coralie A. Carraway,PhD, a husband-and-wife team of bio-chemists researching causes of breast cancer.

“They were my first mentors—very caringand supportive.”

Working in the lab was a great experi-ence, but “there are many wrong turns inresearch,” remarks Bonitz. “I wasn’t sure Iwanted that.”

Once he graduated, he returned home toHamilton, NJ, and applied to medicalschools (including NJMS). To his chagrin,he was not accepted. “That turned out to bethe best thing that could have happened tome,” he notes. His mother had been inremission, but her cancer returned. “Homewas where I needed to be. I was fortunate tobe able to spend this time with her. If I’dbeen away, I would have regretted it.” Hismother died in May 2007.

Bonitz wanted to give medical schoolanother try, but decided to gain additionallab experience first. During the interviewprocess at NJMS, he met Nicholas Ingoglia,PhD, a now-retired professor. He emailedIngoglia asking if there were any researchpositions available. Ingoglia immediately puthim in touch with Edwin Deitch, MD,chair, Department of Surgery. Bonitz says, “I emailed Dr. Deitch saying, ‘I have a bio-chemistry degree and a year’s worth ofresearch experience. Can you use me?’”

To his surprise, Deitch emailed back andinvited him for an interview, complete witha full-day itinerary. Bonitz spent more thantwo years working in Deitch’s lab.

“I’d had my caring, nurturing mentors asan undergraduate in Miami, “says Bonitz.“Working with Dr. Deitch was a differentexperience. He is a brilliant physician, veryprofessional and very tough. He expects alot of you, but gives back a great deal. Heshowed me what a true boss should be. Hehas been so instrumental in my life.”

Bonitz and Deitch developed a close rap-port. While it was mostly work, there wassome play as well. “We played poker a fewtimes at his house,” laughs Bonitz.

In 2008, Bonitz reapplied to NJMS and this time was accepted. He’s now athird-year student. The period of juggling

40 P U L S E W I N T E R 2 0 1 1

FOCUS ON PHILANTHROPY

Paul Bonitz’s Excellent SurpriseBY MARY ANN LITTELL

Paul Bonitz (left) andEdwin Deitch, MD

Continued on page 37

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