Newsmakers

Doctoral student accepts Horowitz Foundation grant

The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy has named Jeremy Tobacman, a Harvard doctoral candidate in the Department of Economics, as a 2004 grant co-recipient. Tobacman’s winning study (co-authored by Paige Skiba of the University of California, Berkeley) is titled “After the ‘Last Resort’: Investigating the Effects of Payday Loans.”

AANP presents Hedley-Whyte with merit award

Professor of Pathology E. Tessa Hedley-Whyte received the Award for Meritorious Contributions to Neuropathology at the 81st annual meeting of the American Association of Neuropathologists (AANP) on June 10. This award cites a member who has made “significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge.”

Hedley-Whyte, who also received the Edison H. and Sallie Y. Miyawaki Teaching Award in the Neurobiology Laboratories of Harvard for “years of enlightened instruction and dedication,” is the fifth Harvard professor since 1959 to receive the AANP award.

Rising senior named FDD fellow

Harvard student Elise Stefanik ’06 has been accepted as a 2005-06 undergraduate fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, D.C. As an FDD Fellow, Stefanik will travel to Tel Avi, Israel, this summer, and to Washington, D.C., in January 2006 for a series of educational lectures by academics, diplomats, and military officers on the threat of terrorism to democracy.

Kane named to MedPAC

Nancy M. Kane, professor of health management in the department of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), has been named to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), an independent federal body whose mandate is to analyze access to care, quality of care, and other issues affecting Medicare, and to advise Congress.

Kane directs the masters in health-care management program at HSPH, an executive leadership program created for midcareer physicians leading health-care organizations. She has taught in executive and master’s degree programs in the areas of health-care accounting, payment systems, financial analysis, and competitive strategy.

HSPH professor receives authorship award

Howard Hu, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the Harvard School of Public Heath (HSPH), recently received the 2005 Kammer Merit in Authorship Award for the study “Relationship of Bone and Blood Lead Levels to Psychiatric Symptoms: The Normative Aging Study” from the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM). Hu was part of a team of researchers to author the study, which used blood and bone lead levels to investigate the potential effect of lead on psychiatric symptoms among men in the Veterans Administration’s Normative Aging Study. The study appeared in the November 2003 issue of ACOEM’s peer-reviewed Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The award was presented May 1 during the opening session of the 2005 American Occupational Health Conference (AOHC), the world’s largest meeting of occupational health professionals.

– Compiled by Andrew Brooks