Congratulations to the following faculty members who have received promotions in the division of General Internal Medicine.
It gives me tremendous pleasure to announce promotions of two faculty members to Full Professor. As you know, these academic promotions mark faculty members’ scholarly achievements and are a hallmark of professional accomplishment in our school. Faculty appointed to Full Professor have achieved recognition within Duke and at peer institutions as leaders in their fields both nationally and/or internationally. Please join me in congratulating Drs. Laura Beskow and Reed Johnson on this tremendous accomplishment!
- Dr. L. Ebony Boulware, Chief, Duke Division of General Internal Medicine
New Full Professors
Laura Beskow, PhDDr. Beskow received her undergraduate degree in nutrition from Iowa State University; her master’s degree in public health, with a concentration in health law, from Boston University; and her PhD in health policy, with a minor in epidemiology, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Between her master’s and doctoral degrees, she gained valuable experience working at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, and then received a career development award to work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Genetics and Disease Prevention. After receipt of her PhD, Dr. Beskow was selected through a national search to join the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy, where she was appointed as an Assistant Research Professor in January of 2007. She was promoted to Associate Professor of Medicine in 2013.
Dr. Beskow has established herself as a leading expert in “research on research ethics”, including on such topics as human subjects protections and regulations, research recruitment, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, and research participant access to research results. A defining characteristic of her research is the successful application of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to gather empirical data from a variety of stakeholders in order to inform research policy and practice.
Over her distinguished career, she has been first author on publications in Science, JAMA, Nature Medicine, Science Translational Medicine, and Genome Research, among others. She has authored and co-authored six book chapters, and was recently invited to author a major article on “Lessons from HeLa cells: Ethics and policy of biospecimens” for the prestigious Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. Further, she is an active peer reviewer for journals as diverse as the American Journal of Bioethics; American Journal of Epidemiology; American Journal of Human Genetics; Canadian Medical Association Journal; European Journal of Human Genetics; Health Affairs; Journal of the National Cancer Institute; and Nature Biotechnology. She received recognition from Genetics in Medicine for being a Top Reviewer in 2013.
She has given more than 70 presentations in professional, academic, and community-based settings across the country, and is regularly sought as a speaker (by the professional organization, Public Responsibility in Medicine & Research, for example). She has served on expert advisory boards for NIH-funded grants of colleagues at other institutions, and was invited as an outside expert to chair an Informed Consent Task Force for the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network.
Beyond her primary focus on research, Dr. Beskow has provided education and guidance on research ethics to students, faculty, and staff throughout Duke. In addition to giving a variety of lectures and seminars, she is often consulted by researchers both inside and outside Duke for assistance with ethical challenges they are actually encountering. Such exchanges have been strikingly mutually beneficial—in the process of offering advice about the issue at hand, Dr. Beskow frequently has an opportunity to put her empirical findings into practice (for example, when helping improve consent forms and processes), as well as identify emerging real-world problems that serve as the basis for successful grant applications.
Her promotion to Professor in Medicine is a relection of Dr. Beskow’s superb strengths as a social science researcher, her expertise in research ethics and policy, her mentorship and teaching abilities, and her ethics and policy leadership in the Duke community and nationally.
F. Reed Johnson, PhDF. Reed Johnson, PhD, has more than 35 years of academic and research experience in health and environmental economics. He has served on the faculties of several universities in the United States, Canada, and Sweden, as Distinguished Fellow at Research Triangle Institute, and currently as Senior Research Scholar in the Duke Clinical Research Institute. As a staff member in the US Environmental Protection Agency's environmental economics research program during the 1980s, Dr. Johnson helped pioneer development of basic nonmarket valuation techniques. These techniques are now widely used for benefit-cost analysis in health and environmental economics. He has designed and analyzed numerous surveys for measuring preferences for and value of health outcomes, health-risk reductions, and improved environmental quality.
Dr. Johnson has over 125 publications in books and peer-reviewed journals. His current research involves estimating general time equivalences among health states and patients' willingness to accept side-effect risks in return for therapeutic benefits. Dr. Johnson has conducted preferences studies in therapeutic areas including screening studies for HIV, colorectal cancer, and Alzheimers' disease, as well as the value of whole-genome sequencing, and a study of diabetes-prevention programs for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. He led the first FDA-sponsored study to quantify patients' willingness to accept benefit-risk tradeoffs for new health technologies. The results are being used to inform reviews of regulatory submissions and are the basis for recent FDA draft guidance on incorporating patient preferences in regulatory reviews.
Dr. Johnson is also instrumental in launching the Preference Evaluation Research (PrefER) Group at the DCRI with Shelby Reed, PhD. This group will conduct novel studies in preference evaluation working with faculty at Duke and internationally.