FREDERICK L. BRANCATI, SPH 1992, who died in 2013, was the Samsung Professor of Medicine, Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine, director of the Division of General Internal Medicine, and a member of the active staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Dr. Brancati also held joint appointments in the Department of Oncology and the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and was a core faculty member of the Welch Center. He directed the Prevention & Control Core of the NIDDK-funded Hopkins-UMB Diabetes Research & Training Center. An associate director of the Johns Hopkins Clinical Research Network, he served as interim director of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research.
Dr. Brancati was an internationally recognized expert on the epidemiology and prevention of type 2 diabetes and related conditions. He authored more than 230 peer-reviewed scientific papers, with over 20 years of continuous NIH funding, and was a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Association of Physicians and the Alpha Omega Alpha and Delta Omega honor societies.
Dr. Brancati was also a highly regarded teacher and mentor, having won numerous teaching and mentoring awards from medical students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows at Hopkins, including the Advising, Mentoring & Teaching Recognition Award from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (twice), the David M. Levine Mentorship Award from the Department of Medicine, an Aequanimitas Tie from the Osler Medical Housestaff and a Diversity Recognition Award from The Johns Hopkins University for his track record of mentoring women and minorities.
In 2011, Dr. Brancati won the prestigious Kelly West Award for Outstanding Achievement in Epidemiology from the American Diabetes Association and the Chief of the Year Award from the Association of Chiefs of General Internal Medicine. In 2012, he was named a Distinguished Service Professor by The Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees in recognition of his service to the General Internal Medicine Division and to Johns Hopkins Medicine.
Dr. Brancati received his BA from Harvard University in 1981 and his MD from Columbia University in 1985. After residency training in internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served as chief resident, he came to Johns Hopkins in 1989 for a postdoctoral fellowship in the Division of General Internal Medicine and earned a master’s degree in clinical epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He joined the Department of Medicine faculty in 1992, was promoted to professor in 2003, and was named director of the General Internal Medicine (GIM) Division in 2004. During his tenure, the GIM Division grew to include 80 full-time faculty, 150 part-time faculty, 17 postdoctoral fellows and more than $30 million per year in NIH and other federal grants (up from $12 million per year in 2004).
He was the founding executive medical director of the Office of Business and Strategic Alliances and of Johns Hopkins Healthcare Solutions. In these roles, Dr. Brancati championed innovative collaborations with industry partners with a focus on population health. One of these collaborations led to an NIH-funded trial of a novel telephone and web-based weight loss program which became the first commercial health care product marketed in connection with the Johns Hopkins name. At his Dean’s Lecture in 2012, Dr. Brancati advocated for a campus-wide focus on population health research and development in collaboration with industry partners.