Brookmeyer and Griffin Elected to AAAS Section Chair Positions (web article)

Two Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health faculty members were individually recognized at last week’s American Association for Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) meeting in St. Louis, Mo. Ron Brookmeyer, PhD, professor of Biostatistics and Chair of the Master of Public Health Program, was named chair-elect of the Statistics Section of AAAS. Diane Griffin, PhD, MD, professor and chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, began her term as chair of the AAAS Medical Sciences Section.

AAAS is dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. Members of its 24 separate sections arrange symposia for the annual AAAS meetings and provide expertise for association-wide projects.

Brookmeyer will serve three years on the Statistics Section—chair-elect, chair and past chair. His research focuses on the development and application of statistical methods and models to track the health of populations. He is currently working on models for a range of public health problems, including AIDS, biosecurity and Alzheimer’s disease. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Statistical Association.

Griffin’s research focuses on how viruses cause disease. In her work, for example, she studies Sindbis virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and causes encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. She is also investigating measles, a disease that continues to cause the deaths of a large number of children in developing countries. Griffin was elected to membership of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in October 2004 and to the National Academy of Sciences in April 2004. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Microbiology and the Infectious Disease Society of America.