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.
Held by Jeanne M. Clark
JEANNE M. CLARK, A&S ’88, SPH ’98, is the inaugural recipient of The Frederick Brancati, M.D., M.H.S. Endowed Professorship in Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is a professor of medicine and director of the Division of General Internal Medicine. She holds joint appointments in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a core faculty member of the Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology, and Clinical Research and a member of the active staff of The Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Dr. Clark graduated cum laude with departmental honors in French from The Johns Hopkins University and received her medical degree as Junior AOA and with an Academic Achievement Award from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (UMDNJ-RWJMS). She completed internship and residency training in internal medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where she also served as chief medical resident. Dr. Clark then completed a General Internal Medicine Clinical Research Fellowship at Johns Hopkins, where she obtained a Masters of Public Health degree and was elected into the Delta Omega Honor Society in Public Health. She joined the faculty in general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins in 2000.
The author of more than 100 articles and two book chapters, Dr. Clark has devoted her career to studying the epidemiology and treatment of obesity and its consequences, especially type 2 diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. She has been a key investigator in several multi-center, landmark trials including the Diabetes Prevention Program trial (DPP), the Practice-based Opportunities for Weight Reduction trial (POWER), and the Action for Health in Diabetes trial (Look AHEAD). She is currently the principal investigator of a trial at Johns Hopkins to determine the comparative effectiveness and mechanisms of diabetes improvement following weight loss achieved by three methods: lifestyle change, gastric banding surgery, and gastric bypass surgery. In addition to her clinical trial work, she has conducted epidemiologic and translational studies, qualitative studies, systematic reviews, and health services research all aimed at improving our understanding of obesity and its consequences in order to better prevent, diagnose and treat these conditions, and improve the health of individual patients as well as the public. A practicing general internist, Dr. Clark is actively involved in medical education. She developed and continues to run a seminar for medical residents on “Weight Management,” as well as an online obesity module as part of the Johns Hopkins Internet Learning Center, which provides education for more than 600 medical houseofficers in residency programs across the country each year. She co-directs “Obesity Week” for the first-year medical students and continues to serve as Barker Firm Faculty within the Osler Medicine Residency Program. She is author of the chapter on “Obesity” in the textbook Principles of Ambulatory Medicine, 7th ed., and author of two modules within the Johns Hopkins Diabetes Guide (and POC-IT Guide for Diabetes) on “Obesity Management” and “Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis.”
Dr. Clark has served as the research mentor for all levels of learners from undergraduates to masters and PhD students in public health, where she has served as primary advisor and thesis committee member. She has worked closely with postdoctoral fellows in general internal medicine and in gastroenterology and as primary mentor for junior faculty on Career Development Awards. She was proud to direct the General Internal Medicine Clinical Research Fellowship from 2006 through 2011, where she had the opportunity to guide the training of the next generation of academic general internists and maintain it as one of the premier programs for developing leaders in academic medicine and public health. In recognition of her talents as a mentor, she won the Johns Hopkins Department of Medicine David M. Levine Excellence in Mentoring Award in 2009.
A passionate advocate for the advancement of women in medicine, Dr. Clark has been an active member of the Department of Medicine’s Task Force on Women’s Academic Careers in Medicine since she was a fellow. She is honored to have served as chair of the task force since 2008 and to lead a number of new initiatives aimed at addressing inequities in salary, leadership positions, and recognition and improving opportunities for work-life balance. In honor of this work, she is privileged to be a 2012 recipient of the School of Medicine’s Vice Dean’s Award for the Advancement of Women.