Nancy Farrell, chief administrative officer of the Weill Cornell Physician Organization, was elected chairman of the board at Fountain House in April. The organization is dedicated to the recovery of men and women with serious mental illness by creating working community to offer more than 100,000 members worldwide a sense of belonging and the opportunity to form relationships.
Dr. Ana C. Krieger, medical director of the Weill Cornell Center for Sleep Medicine, associate professor of clinical medicine, associate professor of medicine in clinical neurology and associate professor of clinical genetic medicine, was elected to the American College of Chest Physicians' Sleep Medicine Network Steering Committee. The committee strives to promote sleep medicine as a specialty, provide educational and research opportunities, and raise awareness of issues pertinent to the practice of sleep medicine. The college works toward prevention, diagnosis and treatment of all chest diseases with a network of nearly 19,000 members providing care in more than 100 countries worldwide.
Dr. Fabrizio Michelassi, the Lewis Atterbury Stimson Professor of Surgery and chairman of the Department of Surgery, was appointed to a one-year term as president-elect of the Society of Surgery of the Alimentary Tract. The society is committed to advancing the science and practice of surgery in the treatment of digestive disease by providing leadership in setting the standards for gastrointestinal surgery and interdisciplinary management of digestive disease, in North America and around the world.
Dr. Sheila Nirenberg, professor of physiology and biophysics and professor of computational neuroscience in computational biomedicine, gave the keynote address, titled "Talking to the Brain in its Own Language: a New Kind of Prosthetic Device for Treating Blindness" at the IEEE Workshop on Multimodal and Alternative Perception for Visually Impaired People on July 15in San Jose, Calif. The conference brought together researchers and practitioners from multiple disciplines to discuss fundamental issues in visual perception, computational intelligence, neuroscience and visual prosthesis for helping blind and visually impaired people and people working in visually challenged environments.
Dr. Pallabi Sarkar, postdoctoral associate in laboratory of Dr. Robin L. Davisson, professor of cell and developmental biology, has been selected by the New York Academy of Sciences to participate as a Fellow in the NeXXT Scholars Program for the 2013-2014 academic year. This program aims to engage, connect and advance young women from countries with predominantly Muslim populations and young American women to pursue undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and math fields.