Institute elects two from faculty

Two faculty members at the School of Medicine have been elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. The IOM recognizes major contributions to health and medicine, and its members advise the nation on health policy.

Bennett A. Shaywitz, M.D., chief of pediatric neurology, professor of pediatrics and neurology and a member of the Child Study Center, and his wife, Sally E. Shaywitz, M.D., have been recognized by the IOM for their transforming studies of dyslexia, which have placed the disorder on the cutting edge of neuroscience. (Sally Shaywitz was elected to the IOM in 1998.) The Shaywitzes are the founders and co-directors of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development-Yale Center for the Study of Learning and Attention, which is widely regarded as the premier center of its kind nationally. Bennett Shaywitz joined the Yale faculty in 1972 and is the author of more than 300 scientific papers. In the late 1980s he brought the new technology of functional magnetic resonance imaging to bear on the study of children with dyslexia and currently leads a research group that is using this technology to investigate the neural basis of reading and dyslexia.

Bradford H. Gray, Ph.D. ’73, a lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale and director of the Division of Health and Science Policy at the New York Academy of Medicine, is an authority on health care policy and the ethics of human research. Gray joined the New York Academy in 1996 after eight years at Yale, where he was director of both the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Program on Non-Profit Organizations, an internationally recognized research center. He also has the unusual distinction of being an elected fellow of both The Hastings Center, the internationally recognized bioethics research institute, and the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy. He is the editor of Milbank Quarterly, a leading health policy journal.