Alan Kazdin, Ph.D.

Psychologist to lead Child Study Center

Alan Kazdin, an expert on the behavioral problems of children, is named center’s fifth director.

Early in his career as a clinical psychologist, Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D., asked two fundamental questions about the work he was doing with emotionally troubled children: Does treatment work? And if so, why?

These questions might seem obvious, but Kazdin, the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology and professor in the Child Study Center, was surprised by how infrequently they were asked. “There are hundreds of interventions in practice but very few of them are examined in research. The key is making sure there is firm empirical evidence to guide patient care.”
That desire to know what works, and why, has made him an expert on empirically based treatment and one of the most frequently cited authorities on aggressive and violent behavior in children. His reputation as a down-to-earth problem solver and a personable leader with a sense of humor helped him guide the Department of Psychology through a major period of transition from 1997 to 2000.

All of these qualities contributed to his appointment at the end of February as the fifth director of the Yale Child Study Center, one of the medical school’s 22 academic departments and an international leader in child psychiatric treatment, research and professional training. The center was founded in 1911 by child development pioneer Arnold Gesell, M.D., Ph.D.

“Of the 75 or so chair appointments I’ve made, this is one of the three or four best. Alan Kazdin is a distinguished scholar and [was] an extraordinarily successful chair of the Department of Psychology,” Yale President Richard C. Levin said when he announced Kazdin’s selection February 28 in the center’s Harris Auditorium. In a letter to medical school faculty later that day, Dean David A. Kessler, M.D., cited Kazdin’s accomplishments, including 10 years of MERIT funding from the National Institutes of Health, 500 journal publications and 35 books, then added: “What cannot come across in reading about Dr. Kazdin’s background—but what I have come to learn and appreciate during countless hours of discussions with him over the last several weeks—is his deep commitment to child psychiatry and the Child Study Center. He has enormous respect for the center’s faculty and its staff and is very eager to build on the pre-eminence of its programs.”

A Cincinnati native raised in Los Angeles, Kazdin received his doctorate in clinical psychology from Northwestern University in 1970 before teaching at Penn State and, later, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where he directed both inpatient and outpatient services for children with psychiatric disorders. In 1989, Kazdin joined the Yale psychology department with a joint appointment in the Child Study Center. As the center’s director, he succeeds Donald J. Cohen, M.D. ’66, who died in October.

Kazdin, who assumed his duties on April 1, leads a faculty of about 90 members who are involved in an extremely wide range of activities and have special expertise in autism, Asperger and Tourette syndromes, obsessive-compulsive disorder, developmental disorders and the problems of children exposed to violence. “The center today is a world-ranked institution,” said Edward F. Zigler, Ph.D., a founder of the federal Head Start Program and a professor in both the Child Study Center and psychology department for the past 40 years. As for Kazdin, Zigler added: “He is without a doubt the finest child clinical psychologist in the United States today.”

In an interview in March, Kazdin said he is awed by the center’s greatness and, in close collaboration with the faculty, hopes to extend it.

“Yale has this tradition of taking a place that’s really great and asking, ‘How can we do this even better?’” he said. “The Child Study Center is Yale at its best. It has a stellar faculty and a tremendous reputation, and we are in the wonderful position of being able to build on that, thanks to commitments made by the president and dean.” These include provisions for additional slots to hire new faculty, a review of the salaries of all existing faculty “to make sure the greatness we have here is secure” and additional resources to support the center’s future growth. “Captain Kirk said space is the final frontier,” Kazdin quipped. “That applies very much to a university, too.”

As chair of the psychology department, Kazdin took charge at a moment when several senior faculty members were nearing retirement and others had moved to other universities. He guided the faculty in recruiting fifteen new members, including five in the senior ranks—more than half the current department, said Peter Salovey, Ph.D., professor of psychology and of public health, who succeeded Kazdin as psychology chair. “Alan is an energetic recruiter and an inspired organizer of research,” Salovey said. “I think he’ll be terrific in this new role.”

Kazdin will continue to direct the Yale Child Conduct Clinic, an outpatient treatment service for children and their families that he brought to Yale from Pittsburgh, but his focus will be on the Child Study Center.

“I’m eager to meet with the faculty and discuss what they perceive as strengths and weaknesses and to move on those issues with their help,” Kazdin said before assuming his new duties. “We have to solve the problems of child psychiatry. That requires discipline and careful planning. It’s something we’ll do together, and my job will be to mobilize that plan.”

Carolyn M. Mazure, Ph.D.

Carolyn Mazure, a leader in women’s health
research, appointed associate dean

Carolyn M. Mazure, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and director of Women’s Health Research at Yale, has been named associate dean for faculty affairs at the School of Medicine. Her responsibilities include overseeing the appointment and promotion process, providing counsel to the dean and deputy dean for academic and scientific affairs regarding faculty issues and collaborating with other key members of the medical school administration to facilitate the academic life of the faculty. Mazure assumed her new role in February.

Mazure will also continue to direct Women’s Health Research at Yale, the largest interdisciplinary women’s health research program in the country. The program funds innovative studies in women’s health and focuses on understanding sex-specific determinants of health and disease. Mazure has played a national role in support of research funding, testifying before the U.S. Congress in two consecutive years.

A member of the faculty since 1982, Mazure has focused her research on depressive disorders, and she remains an active clinician. She has served on special ad hoc and standing grant review committees for the National Institute of Mental Health. She is interested in predictors of illness onset and outcome in depression and, more recently, in addictive disorders. She is the principal investigator for the NIH-funded Yale Interdisciplinary Women’s Health Research Scholar Program on Women and Drug Abuse, and is the principal investigator for the Sex-Specific Factors core of the NIH-funded Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center, studying sex-specific factors in nicotine dependence and treatment.

Mazure was director of the Adult Inpatient Psychiatry Program for nine years, and more recently was chief of psychology for the Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and serves on two editorial boards.

Joseph M. Piepmeier, M.D.

Renowned neurosurgeon, specialist
in brain tumors, named endowed professor

Joseph M. Piepmeier, M.D., who specializes in brain tumors and spinal cord traumas, has been appointed the Nixdorff-German Professor of Neurosurgery. A member of the Yale faculty since 1982, Piepmeier serves as director of the Neuro-oncology Unit at the Comprehensive Cancer Center and is director of the School of Medicine’s Neuro-oncology Laboratory. In both the clinic and the laboratory he focuses on neuro-oncology and is among the first neurosurgeons in Connecticut to use the gamma knife, an instrument that allows surgeons to operate on the brain without using a scalpel.

Piepmeier has served as a co-investigator on two research projects on spinal cord trauma, the National Acute Spinal Cord Injury Study II and the National Acute Spinal Cord Injury Study III. He was also the primary investigator on several grant-funded research projects on brain abnormalities. Piepmeier’s honors include an Allied National Research Award and the Wakeman Award for Research in the Neurosciences. Piepmeier has been a visiting professor and lecturer at universities across the globe, including the Nipon Medical School in Tokyo, the Al Shorouk Hospital in Cairo, the Hospital Sainte-Anne in Paris, the University of Lund in Sweden and the University of Torino in Italy. The chair of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons from 1999 to 2001, he is currently secretary of the Neurosurgical Society of America and of the Connecticut Neurosurgical Society. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuro-oncology, and has served on the editorial boards of several other professional journals.

Notes

A New York magazine cover article titled “Surgery Without Scars ...” has included nine surgeons in the Yale Medical Group on a list of the top 100 minimally invasive surgeons in the tri-state area. The surgeons are Kevin R. Anderson, M.D., John A. Elefteriades, M.D. ’76, HS ’83, Amy L. Friedman, M.D., Richard Gusberg, M.D., James C. Rosser Jr., M.D., Ronald R. Salem, M.D., Clarence T. Sasaki, M.D. ’66, HS ’73, Neal Seymour, M.D., and Robert Udelsman, M.D.

Sonja V. Batten, Ph.D., has been hired as the associate director of Women’s Health Research at Yale. Batten has demonstrated talents in research, clinical work, supervisory responsibilities and educational outreach efforts. Her primary interest is the effect of traumatic events on women’s psychological and physical health. Batten earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno, and interned at the Medical University of South Carolina. She is completing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship with the Women’s Health Sciences Division of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Boston.

Paul G. Barash, M.D., professor of anesthesiology, delivered the Winter College Lecture to the College of Anesthetists at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in December. His lecture was entitled Myocardial Ischemia Monitoring: A Sequential Systems Approach. This lectureship is one of two awarded annually by the Royal College and is delivered by a prominent individual who is not a fellow of the college. Barash also served as one of the judges for the Annual Registrar Research Award.

A symposium and reception to honor the contributions of Sidney J. Blatt, Ph.D., professor of psychiatry and psychology, were held on April 13 at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association’s Division 39 (Division on Psychoanalysis). Paul Wachtel, distinguished professor of psychology, and Diana Diamond, associate professor of psychology, both at the City University of New York, and former students of Blatt, made presentations at the symposium. The events were sponsored by institutions and organizations with which Blatt has been affiliated during his career, including the Yale Departments of Psychiatry and Psychology; the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass.; The Sigmund Freud Center for Psychoanalytic Research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; The Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis; The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; The Society for Personality Assessment; The Connecticut Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology and the Sections on Clinical Research and Clinical Practice of the APA’s Division 39.

Valerie Maholmes, Ph.D., the Harris Assistant Professor of Child Psychiatry, and James P. Comer, M.D., HS ’67, the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry and founder of the 33-year-old School Development Program, spoke at the opening of The Discovery Room at Public School 28 in Paterson, N.J., in January. The Discovery Room is a Yale program that was first developed during Comer’s “School Power” days. Maholmes revived the program and tailored it to meet the needs of children with behavioral problems. Students are provided with instruction and support and are taught how to interact appropriately in the classroom, with the ultimate goal of improving their academic achievement.

Martin E. Gordon, M.D. ’46, clinical professor of medicine and chair of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Associates’ board of trustees, was a finalist in the basic and clinical category of the Time Inc. International Health and Medical Media Competition in November, for his film Microscopy, Tools of the Biomedical Sciences. Created in honor of the Yale University Tercentennial Celebration, the film was supported by an unrestricted grant from the Carl Zeiss Foundation.

Yale School of Medicine Dean David A. Kessler, M.D., was elected in January to chair the board of directors of The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. He will lead the foundation’s efforts to improve the lives of children worldwide through pediatric research, training and advocacy. Kessler served as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from 1990 to 1997, where he spearheaded efforts to accelerate drug review, improve food labels and curb teenage tobacco use. In 2000 the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation created the Glaser Pediatric Research Network, which consists of five academic medical centers that collaborate on finding better treatments for seriously ill children, training pediatric clinical investigators and serving as a united voice to advocate for policies that improve children’s health worldwide.

William V. Tamborlane Jr., M.D., professor and section chief of pediatric endocrinology, is heading a national group that will be testing the most advanced blood sugar sensing technology for children with type 1 diabetes, research that may lead to the first artificial pancreas. The project, involving five centers around the country, is sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. In addition to Yale, the group includes diabetes centers at the University of Colorado, Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and in Jacksonville, Fla. The first study the centers will undertake is validating the accuracy of the two available glucose sensors and how they work under various conditions, such as during exercise or after eating different meals.

Anthony N. van den Pol, Ph.D., professor of neurosurgery, was awarded a $1.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study a neurotransmitter whose loss in the brain is believed to be responsible for narcolepsy, an often-misunderstood disease marked by an uncontrollable desire to sleep. The grant will enable van den Pol and colleagues in his lab, including Xiao-Bing Gao, Ph.D., and Ying Li, Ph.D., cellular electrophysiologists, and Prabhat K. Ghosh, Ph.D., associate research scientist, to focus on the electrical behavior of the nerve cells in the hypothalamus that make hypocretin.

Send faculty news items to Claire Bessinger, Yale Medicine Publications, P.O. Box 7612, New Haven, CT 06519-0612, or via e-mail to claire.bessinger@yale.edu.