image: Christopher Chute, M.D., Dr.P.H., (left) and Jeffrey Rothstein, M.D., Ph.D. (right)
Credit: Johns Hopkins Medicine
Two faculty members at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), an independent organization of leading professionals from multiple scientific fields including health, medicine and the natural, social and behavioral sciences. NAM serves alongside the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering to provide objective advice for the nation and international scientific communities.
An announcement of 100 new members was made Oct. 21.
Being elected to NAM is considered one of the highest honors in health and medicine. Current members elect new members based on their major contributions to advancements in medical science, health care and public health.
The following are the new members from Johns Hopkins.
Christopher Chute, M.D., Dr.P.H., is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics. He also has primary faculty appointments at the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine, public health and nursing. He is the chief research information officer for Johns Hopkins Medicine, deputy director of the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research at Johns Hopkins, co-chair of the Johns Hopkins Data Trust’s research subcouncil, and head of the biomedical informatics and data science section in the Division of General Internal Medicine. The National Academy of Medicine has recognized Dr. Chute for his work on how clinical data is represented to support data inferencing and discovery science in the learning health system, focusing on ontologies, classifications and real-world data. He chaired the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases’ 11 revision, which transformed the century-old system to support data science, and he co-leads many large-scale national repositories of electronic health record data to advance outcomes research. His work has led to many discoveries that have changed clinical practice. Dr. Chute joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2015.
Jeffrey Rothstein, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of neurology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Also at Johns Hopkins, he is the founder and director of the Robert Packard Center for ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) Research, director of the Brain Science Institute, and the founder and co-director of the ALS clinic. He is also a member and ex-executive of the American Association of Physicians, an honorary medical society with members who are physicians with outstanding credentials in basic or translational biomedical research. His lab first discovered that excitotoxicity might be a common pathophysiological process in sporadic ALS, which led to riluzole for ALS. Dr. Rothstein made discoveries on fundamental pathways that underlie familial and sporadic ALS, including excitotoxicity, astroglial dysfunction, oligodendroglial dysfunction, and the role of nuclear pore complex and nucleocytoplasmic transport in familial and sporadic ALS. The author of more than 360 research articles on ALS pathophysiology and on basic neuroscience, Dr. Rothstein is also the founder and director of the Answer ALS program, which combines longitudinal clinical data, at home smartphone data collection and generation of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) neurons from more than 1,000 U.S. ALS patients, and their comprehensive biological analytics, leading to a dataset of 6 billion biological and clinical data points per patient.