Clinical Scholars Program established

The Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, one of seven at universities around the country, will provide two years of post-residency, graduate-level training for physicians in policy-related research skills. The program will be directed by Christine Cassel, the George M. Eisenberg Professor in Medicine and the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and Director of the Center on Aging, Health & Society.

"We believe that the unparalleled intellectual strengths of our faculty in social sciences, medical ethics and public policy studies, and the broad constituency for these programs throughout the departments of the Pritzker School of Medicine, make this institution an ideal setting for training a new generation of Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars," Cassel said.

Cassel will be joined by Co-Directors Ronald Thisted, Professor in Statistics and Anesthesia & Critical Care, and Robert Willis, Professor in Education and the Harris School, as well as a core faculty: Norman Bradburn, Senior Vice President for Research at the National Opinion Research Center and the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology; John Lantos, Associate Professor in Pediatrics; Edward Lawlor, Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration and the Harris School; and Marta Tienda, the Ralph Lewis Professor and Chairman of Sociology.

The two-year program will emphasize the basic tools of biostatistics, epidemiology, survey research, sociology, ethics and economics and will encourage the Scholars to apply these tools innovatively in their own research. In addition to following a core curriculum, the Scholars will be required to develop an individual course of study in one of two priority areas, focusing either on the social, cultural and demographic contexts of health or on the efficient and ethical use of health-care resources.

The first class of Scholars, which will arrive on campus in July, will consist of Peter Bach, who is completing his residency in the department of internal medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore; Elise Becher, who is completing her residency in pediatrics at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y.; Linda Douglas, a graduate of the Family Medicine Program at Charlotte Memorial Hospital in Charlotte, N.C.; and Margaret Moon, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The Clinical Scholars Program was established by the Robert Wood Foundation in 1975. The other Clinical Scholars Program sites are UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Michigan, North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Washington and Yale.