Five Alumni Honored with Penn State's Outstanding Science Alumni Award
Top row, from left: Eliav Barr, Gary Fleisher, Howard Gordon. Bottom row: Joellen Schildkraut (left), and Robert Shaler
In its tradition of honoring high-achieving science alumni, the Penn State University Eberly College of Science will honor five alumni with the Outstanding Science Alumni Award for the year 2012. Receiving this award are:
The Board of Directors of the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society established this award to recognize alumni who have a record of significant professional achievements in their field and who are outstanding role models for students in the college.
Elaiv Barr
Eliav Barr, vice president of the Infectious Disease Project at Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, Pennsylvania, will be honored with the Outstanding Science Alumni Award for the year 2012. The Board of Directors of the Penn State Eberly College of Science Alumni Society bestows this award to recognize alumni who have a record of significant professional achievements in their field and who are outstanding role models for the current students in the college.
Barr joined Merck in 1995 and, in 1998, became the head of a clinical program investigating a vaccine to combat the human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes genital warts and which has been shown lead to certain types of cancer. He developed the clinical and regulatory strategies for the program, designed and managed 17 clinical studies involving over 30,000 subjects worldwide, developed a program to evaluate the economic impact and long-term efficacy of the HPV vaccine, and oversaw analyses of key clinical studies. The program resulted in the first demonstration that prophylactic administration of a vaccine targeting HPV types 6, 11, 16, and 18 is effective in helping to reduce the risk of genital warts, as well as cervical, vulvar, and vaginal cancer. The vaccine that was evaluated in these studies (GARDASIL®, Merck & Co., Inc.) has been licensed in over 100 countries. Currently, Barr is responsible for the leadership of all projects related to infectious diseases and he is the leader for Merck's research-and-development efforts aimed at the hepatitis-C field.
After graduating with a bachelor's degree from Penn State in 1984, Barr earned a medical degree, summa cum laude, at the Jefferson Medical College in 1986 and completed a residency in internal medicine with a cardiology fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in 1990. He subsequently pursued postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan, and was a faculty member at the University of Chicago prior to joining Merck Research Laboratories.
Gary R. Fleisher
Gary Fleisher, Physician-in-Chief, Pediatrician-in-Chief, and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Children's Hospital in Boston and Egan Family Foundation Professor at Harvard Medical School, will be honored with the Outstanding Science Alumni Award for the year 2012. The Board of Directors of the Penn State Eberly College of Science Alumni Society bestows this award to recognize alumni who have a record of significant professional achievements in their field and who are outstanding role models for the current students in the college.
Fleisher is a founder of the field of pediatric emergency medicine. He was among the first of eight physicians in the world to obtain certification in this specialty. He co-developed the first academic program in this field in 1979 and initiated the first fellowship program in 1981. In addition, Fleisher is the senior editor of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, which is the first textbook in the field, and which has been translated into multiple languages. He co-edits Pediatric Emergency Care, the first journal in the field. He also is the editor-in-chief of the section called "Adult and Pediatric Emergency Medicine" at UpToDate, an evidence based, peer-reviewed information resource. He was one of eight members of the first certification committee for the American Board of Pediatrics and has been an examiner for the American Board of Emergency Medicine. From 2010 to 2011, Fleisher served as the president of the American Pediatric Society.
Fleisher's research has focused on basic and clinical aspects of common infectious diseases encountered in children. His investigations have led to a better understanding of a number of diseases, particularly bacterial infections of the bloodstream and the meninges. Fleisher is the author of over 150 publications appearing in high-impact journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Pediatrics, and the Journal of Pediatrics. He has been recognized widely for his contributions with his election in 1996 to the presidency of the Society for Pediatric Research, one of the oldest and largest pediatric research organizations in the United States; by his selection as a member of study sections at the National Institutes of Health; by his election to the Institute of Medicine; and by invited lectureships and visiting professorships throughout the world.
Fleisher has played in active role in the education of students, residents, fellows, and practicing physicians. He co-founded the first academic Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship in Philadelphia in 1981 and, five years later, he started a training program in Boston that has produced a number of illustrious graduates. In addition to his activities at Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Fleisher has shown a commitment to national and international child health, using his expertise in pediatric emergency medicine. He serves as the commander of Pediatric Specialty Team I, a response team of the National Disaster Medical Service that responds to domestic and foreign disasters. Over the past decade, deployments have included medical missions following the 1995 hurricane Marilyn in the U.S. Virgin Islands; the 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York; the 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran; and the 2010 earthquake in Port au Prince, Haiti.
Fleisher is the recipient of many other awards. He received the Janeway Award for Excellence in Teaching from the residents at Children's Hospital Boston in 1995; the A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award at Harvard Medical School in 2001; and ithe Mentor of the Year Award from the Eastern Society for Pediatric Research in 2011.
Fleisher received a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in 1973. He received postgraduate training at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Currently, Fleisher holds certification from the American Board of Medical Specialties in three disciplines: pediatrics, emergency medicine, and pediatric emergency medicine.
Howard R. Gordon
Howard R. Gordon, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, will be honored with the Outstanding Science Alumni Award for the year 2012. The Board of Directors of the Penn State Eberly College of Science Alumni Society bestows this award to recognize alumni who have a record of significant professional achievements in their field and who are outstanding role models for the current students in the college.
Gordon's expertise is in environmental optics, principally radiative transfer in the ocean-atmosphere system. He began his academic career as an assistant professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia in 1965. In 1967, he became a faculty member at the University of Miami. He has been involved in the global remote sensing of marine phytoplankton, through observation of ocean color from earth-orbiting satellites, from its inception. He developed the atmospheric correction algorithms used by nearly all ocean-color sensors, as well as interpretive algorithms for relating the color observations to the concentration of phytoplankton. His research received nearly continuous funding from both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Office of Naval Research for 35 years.
Gordon is a fellow of the Optical Society of America and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the 1982 NASA Public Service Medal and was presented with the Jerlov Award from The Oceanographic Society in 2004.
Gordon received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1961 from Clarkson University. He received master's and doctoral degrees in physics from Penn State in 1963 and 1965, respectively.
Joellen Schildkraut
Joellen M. Schildkraut, a professor of community and family medicine and an associate professor of medicine at the Duke University School of Medicine, will be honored with the Outstanding Science Alumni Award for the year 2012. The Board of Directors of the Penn State Eberly College of Science Alumni Society bestows this award to recognize alumni who have a record of significant professional achievements in their field and who are outstanding role models for the current students in the college.
Schildkraut's research interests are centered on the genetic epidemiology of breast and ovarian cancers. At the Duke Comprehensive Cancer Center, she serves as the leader of the Cancer Prevention, Detection, and Control Research Program and she also directs a training grant, funded by the National Cancer Institute, focused on the preparation of scientists for the interdisciplinary environment in population science.
Schildkraut has published over 130 scientific papers in journals such as Nature Genetics, the American Journal of Epidemiology, and the Journal of Clinical Oncology. She has contributed book chapters to several textbooks including Principles and Practice of Oncology, Approaches to Gene Mapping in Complex Human Diseases, Cancer Studies in Bayesian Statistics, and Genetics. She has presented her research at scientific symposia and workshops throughout the United States and she is a member of the Phi Sigma Biological Honor Society. She has more than a decade and a half of continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health and related organizations.
Schildkraut earned doctoral and master-of-public health degrees in chronic-disease epidemiology at Yale University in 1987 and 1982, respectively. She earned a bachelor's degree in microbiology at Penn State in 1978.
Robert C. Shaler
Robert C. Shaler, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University, will be honored with the Outstanding Science Alumni Award for the year 2012. The Board of Directors of the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society established this award in 1995 to recognize alumni who have a record of significant professional achievements in their field and who are outstanding role models for the current students in the college.
In 2010, Shaler retired after having served as the founding director of the Penn State Forensic Science Program since 2005. Shaler is well known for supervising the massive DNA-testing effort to identify thousands of victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, and he is the author of Who They Were: Inside the World Trade Center DNA Story: The Unprecedented Effort to Identify the Missing, published in 2005, and Crime Scene Forensics – A Scientific Method Approach, published in 2012.
Throughout his career, Shaler made many important research contributions to the field of forensic science. In 2010, he and Penn State colleague Ahklesh Lakhtakia created an innovative process to reveal hard-to-detect fingerprints on nonporous surfaces. Early in his career, he conducted a study on bloodstain evidence that led to the development of a bloodstain-analysis system that was used as the standard in forensic laboratories until the early 1990s.
As a Penn State faculty member, Shaler is known for his teaching skills and his commitment to solid scientific principles. Shaler also has been dedicated to public outreach and education. In 2008, he led a TV show, "Crime Scene University" on the Investigation Discovery Channel, in which students from Penn State and other universities investigated simulated crime scenes. The online version of this course is available through Penn State's World Campus.
In addition to teaching and doing research, Shaler has served as a forensic-science consultant for government agencies and professional organizations. He was a member of the American Bar Association Task Force on Biological Evidence and was an author of a 2009 National Research Council (NRC) report, "Strengthening the Forensic Sciences -- A Path Forward," published by the National Academy of Sciences. He also served on the NRC committee studying the FBI's scientific response to the 2001 anthrax mailings published in 2011. His other professional activities have included serving on the editorial review board of the American Journal of Forensic Pathology and Medicine and as an invited reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine. He was a member and the chair of the New York State Crime Laboratory Advisory Committee, and he also has been an expert guest commentator for Court TV. He currently serves on the New York State Justice Taskforce Forensic Science Subcommittee and is a committee member of the Natasha Justice Project.
Prior to joining Penn State, Shaler was an adjunct associate professor of pathology and forensic medicine at the New York University School of Medicine from 1978 to 2005 and an adjunct professor and adjunct associate professor at the City University of New York from 1993 to 1995. From 1990 to 2005, he was director of the Department of Forensic Biology at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City, where he performed and directed forensic biological analyses for all homicide and sexual assault investigations until 2005. From 1987 to 1989, he was director of Forensic-Science Technical Support, Training, and Business Development at Lifecodes Corporation in New York -- the nation's first forensic-DNA laboratory. In addition, Shaler served as director of forensic serology at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York City from 1978 to 1986, and director of forensic science at the Aerospace Corporation in Washington, DC, in 1977 and 1978. He worked as a criminalist at the Pittsburgh and Allegheny County Crime Lab from 1970 to 1975, and was a research director there in 1974 and 1975. Shaler held several positions at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was an instructor of forensic chemistry and a research assistant professor of chemistry from 1974 to 1977, a clinical assistant professor from 1973 to 1975, and an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry in the School of Pharmacy from 1970 to 1973.
Shaler earned master's and doctoral degrees in biochemistry at Penn State in 1966 and 1968, respectively. In 2003, he received an honorary doctoral degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Shaler is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New York Academy of Science, the Northeast Association of Forensic Scientists, and the New Jersey Association of Forensic Scientists.
About the Award:
Since the inception of the award in 1995, the Eberly College of Science has honored 73 alumni with the Outstanding Science Alumni Award. This award is given by the College and its Alumni Society to recognize and reward outstanding Penn State science alumni for their success as leaders in science and for the impact they have had and will continue to have on society and their professions. Any person may be nominated for the award who is an alumnus of the Eberly College of Science. Current members of the University faculty or staff are not eligible, nor are prior recipients of the University's Alumni Fellow Award or the Distinguished Alumnus Award.