• Robert Arnold, the Leo H. Criep Chair in Patient Care and professor of medicine in the Pitt School of Medicine’s Division of General Internal Medicine, has been named president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) for a one-year term. The announcement was made at the 2005 Annual Assembly of the AAHPM in New Orleans last month.
Arnold also is chief of the section of palliative care and medical ethics, director of the Institute for Doctor-Patient Communication and codirector of the Institute to Enhance Palliative Care, all at Pitt.
He is currently a faculty scholar on the Project on Death in America and is working to teach physician leaders how to educate peers to better communicate about ethical, psychosocial and existential issues at the end of life. Arnold’s clinical activities focus on providing palliative care consults in a tertiary-care hospital and providing primary care to HIV-positive inpatients. His research activities focus on teaching ethics to residents, doctor/patient communication regarding end-of-life issues, and organ donation. He is a past president of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities.
• Harvey White, associate professor in Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, has been elected vice president of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA) for 2004-05. Established in 1939, ASPA advocates forgreater effectiveness, progressive theory, and practice in government, as well as global citizenship.
• Richard Schaub will receive the Pitt School of Engineering (SOE) Young Alumni Award at the SOE Distinguished Alumni Ceremony on March 16. Schaub will be honored for his work at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s clinical mechanical circulatory support (MCS) program, where Schaub has worked full-time since completing his Ph.D. in the Department of Bioengineering IN 1999.
• Dan Songer, director of campus police and safety at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, has been named president of the College and University Police and Security Association of Western Pennsylvania. Songer had been the organization’s vice president for the last two years. He will serve a two-year term as president.
The association comprises chiefs and directors of campus police or security departments along with their assistants. Songer has been Pitt-Bradford’s director of campus police and safety since 1996. Before that, he worked for several years as a part-time police officer on the campus. He began his career in law enforcement in 1974 with the Foster Township (Pa.) Police Department.
• A textbook written and edited by Helene Lawson, professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2004 by Choice magazine. The magazine chose Lawson’s book, The Cultural Study of Work (Association of College and Research Libraries), which addresses the cultural aspects of work.
Every year, the January issue of Choice features an Outstanding Academic Titles list that represents the top 10 percent of about 7,000 scholarly works that the magazine reviewed during the previous year. In compiling the list, Choice editors look at the overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, importance relative to other literature in the field, distinction as a first treatment of a given subject, originality or uniqueness of treatment, value to undergraduate students, and importance in building undergraduate library collections.
Most academic libraries in the United States use Choice as a guide when selecting and purchasing materials, according to Trisha Morris, director of library services at Pitt-Bradford. “This is quite an accomplishment and an honor,” she said. “Every academic library will now take a second look at this book, and, if they didn’t buy it when it was first published, might buy it now.”
The Cultural Study of Work addresses how people interact socially in the workplace, what kind of identities people derive from work, how people are affected or altered by their jobs, and how people view their jobs. The book also deals with the burgeoning service industries and how they’ve created new cultures of work, and the impact of computerization on the work world.
