Yale Bulletin and Calendar

December 7, 2001

Volume 30, Number 13

Two researchers honored with
election to Institute of Medicine

Two School of Medicine researchers have been elected as members of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

The Yale researchers, who were chosen by current IOM members in recognition of their contributions to health and medicine, are Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz, professor in the Departments of Pediatrics and Neurology, and in the Child Study Center, an expert on reading and dyslexia; and Bradford H. Gray, lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health (EPH), an authority on health care policy and the ethics of human research. IOM members work on behalf of the organization and assist on committees engaged in studies of national health policy issues.

Director of child neurology in the Department of Pediatrics, Shaywitz has been recognized by the IOM (along with his wife, Dr. Sally Shaywitz, who was elected to the IOM in 1998) for transforming studies of dyslexia (reading disability) from a social-cultural movement into its current status on the cutting edge of neuroscience. Their pioneering studies have revolutionized the understanding of reading and dyslexia. 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.

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 (fMRI) to the study of children with dyslexia, and he currently leads a research group that is using this technology to investigate the neural basis of reading and dyslexia. These ongoing studies have resulted in the first demonstration of sex differences in the functional organization of the brain for higher cognitive function. Recently he and his colleagues have used this technology to discover differences in brain organization and function in children and adults with dyslexia. He is now using fMRI to study how the brain changes as children with dyslexia are taught to read.

Gray, who holds a doctorate in sociology from Yale, is director of the Division of Health and Science Policy at the New York Academy of Medicine and editor of The Milbank Quarterly, a leading health policy journal. He joined the academy in 1996 after eight years at Yale, where he was adjunct professor in EPH and director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and the Program on Non-Profit Organizations, an internationally recognized research center. He retains a faculty appointment at Yale. He is also a fellow of both The Hastings Center, the internationally recognized bioethics research institute, and the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy.

He has served on the staff of the IOM, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, and the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Research. He has published extensively on matters pertaining to the ethics of human experimentation, for-profit and nonprofit health care, and the changing conditions of medical professionalism. His current research is concerned with managed care and with ownership issues in health care.

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