DAVID BODIAN, who held both MD and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago, can be counted as one of the unsung heroes of our era. Supported by a grant honoring President Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a polio victim, Dr. Bodian entered the Hopkins Department of Anatomy in 1939 as a research fellow. In 1942 he joined the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health as an assistant professor and began working in the poliomyelitis laboratory. With colleagues Howard Howe and Isabel Morgan, he helped lay the groundwork for the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines through research into the neuropathology of poliomyelitis. In addition, Dr. Bodian developed a technique to stain nerve fibers and nerve endings (named the Bodian stain) and made major contributions to the knowledge of the basic structure of nerve cells.
David Bodian Professorship
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Established in 2004 by the Bodian family in honor of David Bodian
Held by J. Marie Hardwick
J. MARIE HARDWICK, the inaugural David Bodian Professor, joined the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine faculty in 1986. In 1996 she moved to the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the School Public Health to continue her work in the field of apoptosis, the study of how and why cells die (or fail to die) in the human body. She currently retains appointments in the School of Medicine’s departments of Pharmacology and Molecular Sciences and Neurology, as well as in the Oncology Center and in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. She is recognized internationally, serving as member/chair of advisory committees for the American Cancer Society, the National Institutes of Health, several editorial boards, and was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.