Division News

Annually the Department of Medicine names an individual from each division to receive an award for excellence in education. Accompanying this recognition is a $5000 gift! This year's beneficiary in GIM is Dr. Sharon Rubin, a clinician-educator and Assistant Professor of Medicine.

Hayden Bosworth, PhD, recently traveled to Singapore, where he led five workshops on implementation and dissemination in Duke-NUS graduate medical school. Bosworth’s workshops, which were held from July 13 to 16, attracted more than 150 participants from local universities and hospitals, government health-care agencies,  and other institutions. The workshops provided an overview of conceptual frameworks, program evaluation, appropriate methods and programs designs, primary and secondary outcome measures, and disseminating results.

For this week’s faculty spotlight, we talk to David Edelman, MD, (pictured with his three children Adam, Isaac, and Sara, during a recent trip to the Alhambra in southern Spain), a 21-year veteran of the division of General Internal Medicine. In this interview, Edelman talks about health systems interventions to improve chronic diseases, why successful interventions for veterans and other specific populations don’t always translate to the general public, and his efforts to expand his cooking repertoire.

Nrupen Bhavsar, PhD, is the subject of this week’s faculty spotlight. In this interview, Bhavsar talks about understanding and improving chronic disease at the population level, his work in the QDACT team, and a recent Cancer article that examined how a major clinical trial actually affected treatment for elderly women with breast cancer.

For this week’s faculty spotlight, we talk to hospitalist Onyinye (Onyi) Iweala, MD (left in photo), who looks forward to every new problem or patient complaint as an intellectual puzzle to be solved. In this interview, Iweala talks to us about the intellectual and emotional pleasures of working in internal medicine, following in the footsteps of a famous mother, and how she stays in shape while working full-time and raising two children.

Will Yancy, MD, MHS, associate professor of medicine (General Internal Medicine), will be the new program director of the Duke Diet and Fitness Center beginning July 1. Dr. Yancy is an expert voice on diet and weight loss, particularly the low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet; the low-glycemic load diet; and the low-fat, reduced calorie diet. He has also conducted extensive research on:

New research from a team including lead author William Yancy, MD (left), as well as Eugene Oddone MD (center), and Corrine Voils, PhD (right), provides new insights into the effects of participant choice in diet on weight loss. The study, published in the latest issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, compared weight loss of participants who were either offered a choice in their diets, to patients who were randomly assigned to a diet plan.

John W. Williams, MD, MHSc, is the subject of this week’s faculty spotlight. In this interview, Williams talks about directing the Durham VA Evidence Synthesis Center, implementing mental health care into patient-centered medical homes, the 1989 SGIM Conference in New Orleans and hiking Mount Kilimanjaro. How long have you been at Duke? How long have you been at the division of General Internal Medicine? I came to Duke as a fellow in 1988, left at the end of 1991 for a faculty position in San Antonio, and returned to the division in July of 2001.

This May, Paul Lantos, MD, gave two presentations on geospatial tools and analysis--one nearly 7,000 miles apart from the other. On May 19, Lantos gave a lecture on geospatial methodology and analysis for the One Health Training Program at the Duke Global Health Institute.

George Jackson, MD, MHA (left), and John W. Williams, Jr., MD, MHSc (right), wrote an invited commentary on the benefits of patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) for the latest issue of JAMA Internal Medicine.