News in Brief

​Mary D’Alton, MD, chair of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology and the Willard C. Rappleye Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology, was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2013. Dr. D’Alton also is director of services for the Sloane Hospital for Women of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.

Election to the IOM is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine. Dr. D’Alton joins more than 40 P&S faculty who are IOM members. The honor recognizes individuals who have demonstrated professional achievement and commitment to service. The 70 new members elected this year raise IOM’s total active membership to 1,753.

Dr. D’Alton specializes in high-risk maternal fetal medicine, prenatal diagnostic procedures, and management of maternal health complications. She has implemented a multidisciplinary approach to treating highest-risk pregnancies and to diagnosing and treating fetal complications. She was instrumental in setting up Columbia University Medical Center’s Carmen and John Thain Center for Prenatal Pediatrics, a regional coordinated-care center for the treatment of fetal complications, which opened in 2010. 

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to a Columbia adjunct faculty member, James Rothman, PhD, adjunct professor of physiology & cellular biophysics. He shared the award with Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Thomas Sudhof of Stanford University. Dr. Rothman was the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Physiology (Chemical Biology) at P&S and director of the JP Sulzberger Columbia Genome Center before being recruited to Yale in 2008. Dr. Rothman and Dr. Schekman also shared the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, Columbia’s top honor for achievement in biology and biochemistry research, and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, both in 2002.