University Times

James P. Bradley, team physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers and orthopaedic surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), has been elected president of the National Football League (NFL) Physicians Society.

During Bradley’s two-year term as president, he will represent all 32 NFL teams’ physicians while interacting with various NFL boards and committees as well as the NFL Players Association.

The mission of the NFL Physicians Society is to support the league’s and players association’s commitment to provide their athletes with the best possible orthopaedic and medical care.

Bradley, who has been the Steelers team physician since 1991, also serves on the NFL Injury and Safety Panel.

He specializes in orthopaedic sports medicine and reconstructive surgery of the shoulder, elbow and knee. He is an associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at the School of Medicine.

Bradley also serves as an orthopaedic consultant to several local high school and college athletics teams.

Epidemiologist Lewis H. Kuller will be honored with a “Festschrift” March 28 and 29 to celebrate his contributions to the understanding and prevention of many chronic diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease.

The events will bring together current and former colleagues, students and friends to pay tribute to Kuller and to mark his 30-year chairmanship of the Department of Epidemiology at the Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH).

Kuller recently stepped down as chair in order to devote his attention to heading the department’s Center for Healthy Aging and pursuing his own research interests.

The Festschrift (a German term connoting a celebration) will include a March 28 reception, dinner and “roast”; March 29 events include a day of scientific papers delivered by some of the nation’s leading figures in public health and epidemiology, and a evening cocktail party at the Andy Warhol Museum with proceeds benefiting the Lewis H. Kuller Scholarship Fund.

Kuller came to Pitt as chair of the epidemiology department in 1972. He changed the department’s focus from infectious diseases to chronic diseases.

The many major research programs Kuller developed at GSPH over the years began with cardiovascular disease and hypertension; subsequently he started programs in women’s health, diabetes, cancer, aging, dementia and the role of inflammation in various diseases.

Pitt’s School of Law has named Richard Delgado, a leader of the critical race theory movement, the inaugural Derrick A. Bell Fellow and Professor of Law, and Jean Stefancic, legal writer, the Derrick A. Bell Scholar and Research Professor of Law. The appointments will be effective in May.

Delgado, currently the Jean Lindsley Professor of Law at the University of Colorado at Boulder School of Law, and Stefancic, a senior research associate at Colorado, are married. They serve as co-editors of the New York University Press series “Critical America.”

They also wrote “Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror” (Temple University Press, 1997), which won a Gustavus Myers award as the outstanding book on human rights in North America in 1998. In addition, they shared a 1993 Rockefeller Bellagio grant to complete “Failed Revolutions” (Westview Press, 1994).

The positions at Pitt are named for Derrick A. Bell, a 1957 graduate of Pitt’s law school. Bell is known for resigning from his tenured faculty position at Harvard to protest a lack of minority women faculty members. His book “Race, Racism and American Law,” 4th edition (Aspen Law & Business, 2000), helped to launch the critical race theory movement.

Delgado is a founding member of the Conference on Critical Race Theory. His books have received numerous national prizes. “The Coming Race War” (New York University Press, 1996) was the American Library Association Choice Outstanding Academic Book, and “The Rodrigo Chronicles” (New York University Press, 1995) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1995. Both books also won the Gustavus Myers award.

James Lindgren’s “The Most Prolific Law Professors in the Most-Cited Law Reviews” has ranked Delgado first among the nation’s approximately 5,500 law professors.

Stefancic writes about civil rights, law reform, social change and legal scholarship. Her 1996 book, “No Mercy: How Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations Changed America’s Social Agenda,” was recommended by the New York Law Journal as a “clarion call to those of us who have too long remained complacent that things will return to the more humane thinking of the bygone Great Society.”

Assad Panah, professor of geology and environmental science at the Bradford campus, has been named president of the National Association of Academies of Science (NAAS).

Panah, who also is the director of Pitt-Bradford’s geology department and its environmental studies program, was elected president at the joint annual meeting of the NAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Junior Academy of Sciences.

NAAS fosters the goals held in common by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and its member academies.

Panah has been teaching at Pitt-Bradford since 1984 and was promoted to full professor in 1989.

Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) will recognize AARP executive director and CEO William Novelli as the recipient of the 2003 Porter Prize, which recognizing outstanding performance in the field of health promotion.

At a public lecture at 2:30 p.m., April 7, Novelli will lecture on “2011: A New Vision for a Healthy America.” The lecture will be held in the GSPH auditorium.

As the head of AARP, the nation’s largest membership group devoted to people age 50 and over, Novelli is a leader in the international practice of social marketing, as well as in managed programs in cancer control, diet and nutrition, cardiovascular health, reproductive health, infant survival, pay increases for educators, charitable giving and other programs to promote health.

A Pittsburgh-area native, he joined AARP in January 2000 as associate executive director of public affairs and became the group’s executive director in 2001.

Previously he served as president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and as executive vice president of CARE, the world’s largest private relief and development organization.

Novelli also co-founded and was president of Porter Novelli, an international marketing communications corporation. He retired from the firm in 1990 to pursue a second career in public service.

He began his career at Unilever, moved to a major ad agency, and then served as director of advertising and creative services for the Peace Corps. He helped direct recruitment efforts for the Peace Corps, VISTA and social involvement programs for older Americans.

The Porter Prize was established in 1983 by the Health Education Center, Inc., to heighten awareness of health promotion and disease prevention. It is named in honor of Milton Porter (1910-1996), founding chairman of the Health Education Center, now an affiliate of Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield. Porter also served as a director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

The award is supported by The Adrienne & Milton Porter Charitable Foundation. The prize fosters the school’s mission to promote health and to prevent disease in individuals and their communities.

Faculty and staff from the Schools of the Health Sciences and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center received three of the seven Health Care Hero Awards presented March 6 by the Pittsburgh Business Times. This marked the seventh year for the awards program.

Evelyn Talbott, professor of epidemiology and communications science at the Graduate School of Public Health, received the health care innovation and research award for her groundbreaking research into a little-understood disorder that affects up to 7 percent of women: polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

Previously treated on a symptom-by-symptom basis by physicians unaware that a larger and more complicated disorder was present, PCOS is increasingly being recognized as a lifelong hereditary reproductive endocrine condition with physical and emotional consequences, including early development of cardiovascular disease.

Steven Kanter, vice dean of the School of Medicine, won in the health care educator category. In 1992, Kanter developed the medical school’s Office of Medical Education, which implemented a hybrid problem-based learning curriculum for medical students. He continues to oversee the ongoing development of the school’s curriculum.

Kanter’s work as an administrator and teacher has earned him recognition on the national and local levels from his peers and students.

The Artificial Heart Program team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center received the award in the medical professional/non-physician category. The team includes bioengineers Steve Winowich, the program’s clinical director; Rob Stone, Doug Lohman, Donald Severyn and Richard Schaub, and nurse coordinators Eileen Stanford and Lisa Carozza.

The group was recognized for its commitment to patients with end-stage heart failure whose only chance at life is through mechanical support.

John S. Lazo has been appointed the chair of the Extramural Grants Council for the American Cancer Society. His term runs from 2003 to 2005. Lazo has been chairman and professor of the medical school’s Department of Pharmacology since 1987.

Lazo’s research has focused on understanding the biochemical basis for anticancer drug actions and on identifying novel agents that affect aberrant cellular signaling. Most recently, Lazo has been investigating the biological functions of protein phosphatases, metallothionein and cysteine proteases in normal and malignant cells.