School Notes: School of Medicine
July/August 2009

Yale neuroscientist to receive VA's highest scientific honor

Neurologist Stephen G. Waxman was awarded the William S. Middleton Award from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The Middleton Award is the VA's highest scientific honor and includes a cash prize and an award of $150,000 in research support. Waxman is the director of the Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration Research, a collaboration of Yale, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, and the United Spinal Association. He was honored for his research on spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, and painful nerve injuries. His research focuses on developing new therapeutic strategies that will restore functions such as sensation and the ability to walk after spinal cord, nerve, and brain injury. Waxman, who has served as chair of neurology since 1986, is transitioning to a full-time role as director of Yale's research center at the West Haven campus of the VA Connecticut Healthcare System.

Reconnecting with downtown

An ambitious plan to "create a footprint for what happens to New Haven over the next 15 years" will connect the medical school with downtown as it restores a street grid that doubles the size of the city's central business district. The linchpin of the plan is the removal of the Oak Street Connector, also known as the Route 34 East highway, which isolated the medical school from the downtown area. "This is one of the most exciting projects for the medical school," said Dean Robert Alpern, who added at a news conference to unveil the project that he was "ecstatic" at the prospect of the school being part of downtown. Reconfiguring the public infrastructure is expected to cost about $45 million and will be paid for through a combination of federal, state, and private development funding. Engineering work for this phase of the project has already begun.

Ten years of looking at art

An innovative tutorial designed to sharpen the observational skills of future physicians is a decade old and still attracting attention. The exercise, which is mandatory for all first-year med students, is a collaboration between the medical school and the Yale Center for British Art. Students study selected paintings and take a visual inventory of what they see. They then try to draw conclusions about what's happening in the painting. The exercise, developed by dermatology professor Irwin M. Braverman ’55MD and Linda Friedlaender, curator at the Yale Center for British Art, has proven so successful that more than 20 other medical schools have replicated it. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found a nearly 10 percent improvement in the observational skills of students who had gone through the training.