Cohen: Commencement speaker at SUNY-Downstate School of Medicine

Harvey Jay Cohen, MD, the Walter Kempner Professor of Medicine, director of the Duke Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development and former chair of the department, was honored by the  SUNY-Downstate College of Medicine as honorary degree recipient and commencement speaker at a ceremony in New York City's Carnegie Hall on May 26. Dr. Cohen, a 1965 graduate of SUNY-Downstate School of Medicine, was awarded the Doctor of Science degree. [toggle title_open="Doctor of Science: Harvey Jay Cohen, MD, '65" title_closed="Read the SUNY-Downstate description of Dr. Cohen's work" hide="yes" border="yes" style="default" excerpt_length="0" read_more_text="Read More" read_less_text="Read Less" include_excerpt_html="no"]Harvey Jay Cohen, MD, is one of the country's leading authorities on geriatric medicine and medical education and a nationally recognized pioneer in the fields of geriatric oncology and geriatric hematology. A native of Brooklyn, he is also a 1965 graduate of the College of Medicine. A member of the faculty at Duke University School of Medicine for more than four decades and a former chair of medicine there, Dr. Cohen is currently the Walter Kempner Professor of Medicine and director of the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development. At Duke, he built one of the most successful geriatrics research and training programs in the United States. Soon after arriving at Duke in the Division of Hematology and Oncology, Dr. Cohen also became chief of medicine at the local Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Center. His research had been on multiple myeloma, which mostly affects older patients, and it was at the VA that he became interested in the relationship between oncology and geriatrics. Dr. Cohen helped establish Duke's Division of Geriatric Medicine in the 1970s and was the architect of Duke's fellowship program in geriatric medicine, which was ranked fourth in the nation by U.S. News and World Report in 2010. Under Dr. Cohen's guidance, Duke's program in internal medicine consistently received olie of the highest levels of funding from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Cohen also was chairman of the National Institute of Aging's Board of Scientific Counselors from 1999-2003 and is a past president of the American Geriatrics Society, the Gerontologic Society of America, and the International Society of Geriatric Oncology. The author or co-author of more than 250 peer-reviewed articles, he created a national model for the assessment and treatment of geriatric patients with cancer, and a model educational program for medical students to teach them to understand and empathize with frail elderly patients. In honor of his groundbreaking work in geriatric oncology, Dr. Cohen was given the 2010 B. J. Kennedy Award for Scientific Excellence in Geriatric Oncology by the American Society of Clinical Oncology. On that occasion, Dr. Cohen was described as "uniquely suited to apply the principles of geriatrics to improving the outcomes of older patients with cancer" and "an outstanding role model for transdisciplinary scholarship and multidisciplinary care."[/toggle] Click on the thumbnail image at left to read the SUNY-Downstate citation for the honorary degree awarded to Dr. Cohen.