Faculty Awards & Achievements

LaSalle D. Leffall Jr., M.D., F.A.C.S., the Charles R. Drew Professor of Surgery, received an Honorary Degree from Princeton University on June 5. Now in his 46th year on the surgical faculty, Leffall has taught approximately 5,000 medical students (of 7,500 graduates since the medical school’s founding in 1868) and helped train 270 general surgery residents (of 305 residents trained since the program’s inception in 1936). His professional life has been devoted to the study of cancer, particularly among African Americans.

The first African-American president of the American Cancer Society and the American College of Surgeons, he has received 13 honorary degrees from American universities and is an Honorary Fellow of six international surgical organizations. He has been chair of the President’s Cancer Panel since 2002 and was recently reappointed for a three-year term. The Howard University Press published his memoirs, No Boundaries- A Cancer Surgeon’s Odyssey, in 2005.
 

William B. Lawson, M.D., Ph.D., D.F.A.P.A., was invited to present at the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) 2007 National Conference, Making the Recovery Connection, in August. Lawson spoke on the topic “New Research and Treatment in Mood Disorders” and participated in the “Ask the Doctors” panel discussion with medical professionals and leading researchers. DBSA is the largest national support organization for people with mood disorders. Lawson is a professor and chair, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and director, Mood Research Program.

Faculty Appointment

Professor Lisa A. Crooms, J.D., has been appointed director of the Constitutional Law Center at Howard University School of Law. She is an expert in the intersection of international human rights law and domestic civil rights law, and she will soon host a unique program entitled, “Civil Rights, Human Rights and Race: An Applied Legal Scholarship Symposium,” which will be held Dec. 14 and 15, 2007.

Crooms teaches Constitutional Law, Gender and the Law, International Human Rights Law and Supreme Court Jurisprudence. She is also part of a team working with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on the African American Citizen project which is scheduled to be published by Oxford University Press in 2008. To read more about Crooms, including her bio, go to http://www.law.howard.edu/412.

 

Staff Awards & Achievements

Trina Coleman, Ph.D., manager, Operations and Maintenance, and professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, recently published a paper in the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. The paper, “Relativistic Multiple Scattering Theory and the Relativistic Impulse Approximation,” appears in the current online edition and is available at the following link: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/-ffissn=0954-3899/-ff30=all/0954-3899/34/9/001. It is also featured in the Sept. 2007 issue of the Journal.

Orlando Taylor, Ph.D., vice provost for Research and dean of the Graduate School, received the Honorary Degree, Doctor of Higher Education from The Ohio State University at the summer commencement ceremony on Aug. 26. The award was given by the university in recognition of Taylor’s “distinguished career in higher education and [his] outstanding contributions as a national leader in promoting excellence and advancing diversity in graduate education,” says Karen A. Holbrook, president, The Ohio State University.