Six Penn experts elected to National Academy of Medicine

Six experts from the University of Pennsylvania have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), one of the nation's highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. Leaders in the fields of cardiology, nursing, palliative care, health justice, hematology and immunology are among the 100 new members, elected by current NAM members. They join dozens of other Penn members who are part of the prestigious group of health care thought leaders, clinicians, and researchers.

This year's new members are:

Zoltan Pierre Arany, Samuel Bellet Professor of Cardiology at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, is awarded for elucidating the causes of peripartum cardiomyopathy, a leading cause of maternal death after pregnancy, and for his world leadership in quantitative metabolic studies to address mechanisms of cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure and insulin resistance.

Kathryn H. Bowles, professor and van Ameringen Chair in Nursing Excellence in the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, is recognized for her work that led to the development and validation of a decision-support methodology that identified patients who need post-acute care, ensuring that high-risk patients were monitored and received adequate post-acute care plans when they were discharged to their home. Bowles also led a groundbreaking study that resulted in an important new diagnostic code to the CDC annual update of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) list.

Scott D. Halpern, John M. Eisenberg Professor in Medicine, professor of medical ethics and health policy and of epidemiology, and director of the Palliative and Advanced Illness Research Center at the Perelman School of Medicine, is recognized for making seminal contributions to improving care near the end of life by combining conceptual and empirical work. Through trenchant ethical analyses and leadership of the field's largest clinical trials, he has challenged old paradigms of serious illness decision-making and demonstrated how low-cost, scalable interventions can improve care quality and outcomes.

Eugenia South, Ralph Muller Presidential Associate Professor at the Perelman School of Medicine; associate vice president of health justice for the University of Pennsylvania Health System; and faculty director for the Center for Health Justice, is recognized for being among the country's foremost leaders in developing and testing interventions to dismantle structural racism and prevent firearm injury in Black neighborhoods. She has made substantive, field-changing scientific and real-world contributions to advancing health via the lens of racial, environmental, and economic justice.

Alexis A. Thompson, chief in the Division of Hematology; Elias Schwartz MD Endowed Chair in Hematology at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; and professor of pediatrics in the Perelman School of Medicine is recognized for leadership in sickle cell disease (SCD), including creation of the first national SCD learning community, the largest SCD data repository, and collaborations to improve care for children with SCD in sub-Saharan Africa, and for her role in recent FDA approval of gene therapy and other novel SCD therapeutics.

E. John Wherry III,the Richard and Barbara Schiffrin President's Distinguished Professor and chair of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in the Perelman School of Medicine is a pioneer in the field of T cell exhaustion, the mechanisms by which T cell responses are attenuated during chronic infections and cancer. These exhausted T cells also have an emerging role in autoimmunity. He helped identify the role of the "checkpoint" molecule PD-1 and others for reinvigoration of exhausted T cells in cancer. His work has defined the underlying molecular and epigenetic mechanisms of exhausted T cells, and his laboratory has also recently focused on applying systems immunology approaches to define Immune Health patients across a spectrum of diseases. In 2020-2021, his laboratory established a new Immune Health Project to interrogate and use immune features to identify novel treatment opportunities.