Findings
Houston, Texas
Volume 7, Issue 8
September 2009

News Briefs

Garcia-Prats earns excellence award

Dr. Anthony Garcia-Prats, a pediatrician with the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative, has been selected to receive Chapman University's highest honor – the Albert Schweitzer Award of Excellence – for his achievements in bringing quality medical care to the African children of Lesotho and Tanzania.

Dr. Garcia-Prats is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and has been a doctor with BIPAI's Pediatric AIDS Corps since August 2006. He served in the Lesotho Children's Clinical Center of Excellence through February 2009 and currently is leading a scale-up of the new BIPAI center in Mbeya, Tanzania. Since its inception in 1982, the award has been presented to individuals or organizations that exemplify the spirit and philosophy of the late Dr. Albert Schweitzer, a philosopher, physician and humanitarian.

New VA anesthesiology chief named

Dr. Prasad V.D. Atluri, associate professor of anesthesiology, has been named anesthesiology chief at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center. He has been with the DeBakey VA since 1998, following his residency training at BCM. Dr. Atluri is also the director of education for all anesthesiology residents at the DeBakey VA. He has been recognized for his teaching excellence through numerous awards, including the Baylor College of Medicine's Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Dean H. Morrow Resident Mentor Award and the Fulbright and Jaworski Faculty Excellence Award for Teaching and Educational Leadership.

Researchers receive Hoshino Awards

Drs. Wan-Yee Teo and Keita Terashima, research fellows in the Cancer Genomics Program at Texas Children's Cancer Center working with Dr. Ching C. Lau, both won the prestigious Hoshino Awards during the Third World Federation of Neuro-Oncology this year. The children's cancer center is a joint program of BCM and Texas Children's Hospital.

The Hoshino Award is given to young investigators who submitted and presented the best papers that were judged by an international panel of experts in brain tumor research. Dr. Teo presented "Do medulloblastoma in adolescents have a distinct molecular signature and different tumor biology?" and Dr. Terashima presented "Genomic profiling of intracranial germ cell tumors with single nucleotide polymorphism array."

The World Federation of Neuro-Oncology is a scientific meeting that meets every four years and is organized by the Society for Neuro-Oncology in the United States, the European Association of Neurooncology and the Asian Society for Neuro-Oncology.