People in the News -- August

A number of AAFP members received various honors and awards this past month.

George Harris, M.D., M.S., of Lee's Summit, Mo., and John Rogers, M.D., M.P.H., M.Ed., of Houston, were recently appointed to the Health Resources and Services Administration Advisory Committee on Training in Primary Care Medicine and Dentistry.

The 23-member committee advises the HHS secretary and the U.S. Congress on a wide range of policy and program issues in family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, dentistry and physician assistant training programs.

Harris is professor of medicine in the department of community and family medicine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine, where he also is assistant dean for year 1 and 2 medicine.

Board-certified in family medicine, Harris holds certificates of added qualifications in adolescent medicine and sports medicine. He served two years in the National Health Service Corps Scholarship Program in rural Florida and is a former chair of the AAFP Commission on Finance and Insurance.

Rogers is professor of family and community medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

In addition to a family medicine residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rogers completed a residency in preventive medicine at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he also earned a master's degree in public health and became a Robert Wood Johnson Faculty Development Research Fellow.

Rogers is board-certified in both family medicine and public health/general preventive medicine, and he has a certificate of added qualifications in sports medicine.

He is a past president of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine and co-chairs its group on the patient-centered medical home. He has written extensively on the development and redesign of primary care training programs at the predoctoral and residency levels.

Other FP members of the advisory committee are Desiree Lie, M.D., M.S. Ed., of Los Alamitos, Calif.; Charles Mouton, M.D., M.S., of Washington, D.C.; and Harry Strothers, M.D., M.M.M., of East Point, Ga.

Jeffrey Susman, M.D., of Cincinnati, has been named dean of the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy in Rootstown. Susman, who also will serve as professor of family medicine at the medical college, assumes his new post on Sept. 7.

Currently, Susman is chair of the department of family and community medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he has served since November 1999. Before that, Susman was a professor of family medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha and associate dean for primary care and faculty development at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine.

Susman is board-certified in family medicine and is a member of the AAFP Commission on Quality and Practice. He has served as a member of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Board of Directors and currently is secretary of the Association of Departments of Family Medicine. Susman will retain his current position as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Family Practice.

Kurt Stange, M.D., Ph.D., of Shaker Heights, Ohio, has been selected to participate in the Network on Inequalities, Complexity and Health, an initiative of the NIH's Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. Stange is Gertrude Donnelly Hess, M.D., Professor of Oncology Research and professor of family medicine, epidemiology & biostatistics, oncology and sociology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He also is editor of the Annals of Family Medicine.

Stange, who was named to a five-year stint as an American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor in 2007, is a past president of the North American Primary Care Research Group and a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine.

The goal of the new multidisciplinary network is to use state-of-the-science conceptual and computational models to isolate behavioral, social and biological factors that interact to cause health inequalities, with the end goal of identifying areas in which interventions or policy changes could have optimal impact in eliminating such disparities.

Michael O'Dell, M.D., M.S.H.A., of Kansas City, Mo., has been selected chair of the department of community and family medicine at Truman Medical Center Lakewood and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. He also will serve as a professor in the department.

Previously the program director at the North Mississippi Medical Center Family Medicine Residency in Tupelo, O'Dell also served as chief quality officer and director of medical education for the medical center. He was associate editor of the Mississippi State Medical Journal and served on its editorial board.

O'Dell is a past president of the Mississippi AFP and chaired the AAFP Commission on Quality and Practice in 2008-09.