Lecture Dates

February 22: Emergency Public Health & Medical Response in Aceh, Indonesia
April 19: Globalizing Science
May 11: The First Millennium Village Project: Validation of Millennium Development Goals


Event Information (subject to change without notice.)

Emergency Public Health & Medical Response in Aceh, Indonesia
Ronald J. Waldman, M.D., M.P.H.
Rachel T. Moresky, M.D., M.P.H.
Tuesday, February 22, 4:00 - 6:00 P.M.
P&S Alumni Auditorium
630 West 168th Street

Drs. Waldman and Moresky talk of their recent experiences working for the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Aceh in the aftermath of the Tsunami

Ronald J. Waldman, M.D., M.P.H. is Director of the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, and former Director of its Program on Forced Migration and Health. Dr. Waldman began his career with the World Health Organization’s Global Smallpox Eradication Program in Bangladesh. He subsequently worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for more than twenty years where, among other assignments, he directed technical support activities for the Combating Childhood Communicable Diseases Project. In the 1980s and 1990s he and his colleagues at the CDC published a series of studies on the epidemiology of refugee health. He has worked in complex emergencies in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Albania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan and, most recently, Iraq.

Dr. Waldman was the coordinator of the Task Force on Cholera Control at WHO from 1992-1994 and the Technical Director of the USAID-funded child survival BASICS Project from 1995-1999. He serves in an advisory capacity to a number of international non-governmental organizations, including the International Rescue Committee, Action Against Hunger, and Doctors of the World and is a member of the Board of Directors of Physician for Human Rights. He recently served as currently co-coordinator of the Task Force on Child Health and Maternal Health and was a lead author of its report, “Who’s got the power — transforming health systems for women and children” for the UN Millennium Project.

Dr. Rachel T. Moresky is currently the Founding Director of International Emergency Medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian-University Hospitals of Columbia and Cornell Division of Emergency Medicine, where she is also developing an International Emergency Medicine Fellowship. She is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University and full time Emergency Medicine Physician at NewYork-Presbyterian.

Dr. Moresky completed a Fellowship in International Emergency Medicine at The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. She also completed her Masters in Public Health in Population and International Health at The Harvard School of Public Health. She served as an Instructor in Medicine — Harvard Medical School and as an Associate Attending Physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Emergency Medicine. Dr. Moresky also completed her BS in Engineering at Brown University focusing on the development of medical products for low income nations.

Dr. Moresky has implemented and collaborated on projects with the WHO, USAID and other NGOs in Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, India and Romania. She has extensive experience in the Middle East and is currently working on projects in Gujarat India and Tanzania on Emergency Medicine Training and pre-hospital care. She was one of the collaborative authors on the Head and Neck Trauma Guidelines — Essential Trauma Care Program, Violence and Injury Prevention Department, a World Health Organization project. Most recently, Dr. Moresky spent a month in Aceh Utara, a northern province of Indonesia, where she served as a health officer for The International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) Mobile Emergency Relief Team. Dr. Moresky provided public health assistance on large-scale measles immunization projects, provided medical care for patients in IDP camp clinics and worked on infrastructure development. Her interests include international emergency medicine systems development to improve timely access to medical care in low income countries; humanitarian relief; disaster medicine and public health applications of emergency medical care.

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Globalizing Science
Harold Varmus, M.D.
President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Tuesday, April 19th, 5:30 PM
Hammer 401

Harold Varmus, former Director of the National Institutes of Health and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, has served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City since January 2000.

Much of Dr. Varmus’ scientific work was conducted during 23 years as a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco, where he and Dr. J. Michael Bishop and their co-workers demonstrated the cellular origins of the oncogene of a chicken retrovirus. This discovery led to the isolation of many cellular genes that normally control growth and development and are frequently mutated in human cancer. For this work, Bishop and Varmus received many awards, including the 1989 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Varmus is also widely recognized for his studies of the replication cycles of retroviruses and hepatitis B viruses, the functions of genes implicated in cancer, and the development of mouse models for human cancer (the focus of much of the current work in his laboratory at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center).

In 1993, Varmus was named by President Clinton to serve as the Director of the National Institutes of Health, a position he held until the end of 1999. During his tenure at the NIH, he initiated many changes in the conduct of intramural and extramural research programs, recruited new leaders for most of the important positions at the NIH, planned three major buildings on the NIH campus, and helped to increase the NIH budget from under $11 billion to nearly $18 billion.

He is a graduate of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, worked as a medical student in a hospital in India, and served on the medical house staff at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.

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The First Millennium Village Project: Validation of Millennium Development Goals
Richard J. Deckelbaum, M.D.
Director, Institute of Human Nutrition
Wednesday, May 11th, 5:30 PM
Hammer 401

Richard Deckelbaum, M.D. directs the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University and has had a long professional involvement with translation of basic research in the cell biology of lipids and issues of human nutrition to population health and disease in pediatric population. He has published extensively on the role of children’s nutrition in heart disease on basic pathways of lipid metabolism, and on factors linking nutrition to global health. He chaired two American Heart Association (AHA) New York Affiliate task forces that first identified needs for young people and subsequently developed program plans on those needs (i.e. inactivity and overweight among our youth) which are now the basis for programs in New York City.

Dr. Deckelbaum has also lead international programs sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate the molecular biology of intestinal parasites and the epidemiological manifestations of infection, with particular focus on chronic diarrhea and malnutrition. Dr. Deckelbaum has served as a consultant to the Institute of Medicine on research programs studying diarrheal diseases and nutrition in the Middle East. He was the Principal Investigator on a program project studying enteric pathogens with investigators at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and at Columbia University, which was an international collaboration in infectious diseases and nutrition research (ICIDR) funded by the NIH.

Dr. Deckelbaum is the author of over 200 articles, reviews and chapters, including a text book entitled Preventive Nutrition: A Comprehensive Guide to Health Professionals now in its 3rd edition. He is the recipient of numerous research grants and serves a variety of advisory boards for nutrition and clinical research. In 1996, building upon his record of collaborative research with Ben-Gurion University, he developed the collaboration between Ben Gurion University of the Negev and Columbia University, from which developed the Medical School for International Health. Dr. Deckelbaum has served as a member of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and chaired an international March of Dimes Task Force on Nutrition and Optimal Human Development, and is part of a RAND Task Force on "Strengthening the Palestinian Health System."

Other recent international health and nutrition projects include leadership of a U.S. Agency for International Health-funded conference on the nutritional status of Palestinian populations, and health and nutritional intervention programs in Africa that are linked with the Millennium Development Goals related to improving health and nutrition on a worldwide scale.

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