Five Penn faculty were elected to the National Academy of Medicine

Five University of Pennsylvania faculty are among 100 new members of the National Academy of Medicine announced on Monday.

Said A. Ibrahim, who starts Dec. 1 as medical school dean at Thomas Jefferson University, also was elected to the nonprofit honorary society.

Two of the five new academy members from Penn are affiliated with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

More than 90 Penn and CHOP faculty have been named to the academy since it was established in 1970, then called the Institute of Medicine. Five were elected in 2022 as well, including Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, the two newest recipients of the Nobel Prize in medicine.

The academy provides scientific guidance on matters of health policy, operating independently of the U.S. government.

Jefferson hired Ibrahim in August as dean of Jefferson’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College. A physician-researcher who studies health disparities, he was a senior vice president at Northwell Health, the largest health care system in New York state. He previously worked at Penn and was chief of medicine at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.

Penn’s five electees for 2023 are:

Kurt T. Barnhart, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. Also a professor of epidemiology, Barnhart studies ectopic pregnancy, miscarriage, and infertility. He researches the use of biomarkers to predict and diagnose disease.

Christopher B. Forrest, a professor of pediatrics and the director of the Applied Clinical Research Center at CHOP. Forrest is executive director of PEDSnet, a national research network that has created a database of more than 13 million children for the study of health outcomes. He coedited the new Handbook of Life Course Health Development, which has been downloaded more than 900,000 times.

Susan L. Furth, chief scientific officer and an executive vice president at CHOP. Furth oversees more than 1,000 researchers and 2,600 employees at the hospital’s research institute, and she is a principal investigator for a national study of children with chronic kidney disease. At Penn’s Perelman School, she is a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology.

Desmond Upton Patton, a professor in Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice and the Annenberg School for Communication. Patton is the founding director of SAFElab, a research project that examines how to support youth of color in coping with grief and violence in social media environments.

Robert H. Vonderheide, director of Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center. Vonderheide studies ways to harness the immune system as a weapon against cancer, and has developed new treatments for pancreatic and breast cancer.