Four Boston University School of Medicine faculty members have been promoted to full professorship for their achievement and scholarship in the school and in their fields.
BUSM Dean and Medical Campus Provost Karen Antman said these promotions are a result of long-term commitment and acknowledgment as an influence within the professors’ respective fields.
“Promotion to the rank of full professor generally requires at least five years as an associate professor and a distinguished record of scholarship and professional accomplishment recognized at regional, national and international levels and continued mentoring and training of others,” Antman wrote in an email. “Recognition as an authority in one’s specific area(s) of interest is essential.”
BUSM faculty members Gregory Grillone, Kalpana Gupta, Karen Quillen and Casey Taft were promoted from associate and research professorships to full professorships. Their specialties include otolaryngology, infectious disease, pathology and psychiatry, respectively.
Six BUSM faculty members were promoted during the 2013-14 academic year, The Daily Free Press reported on March 19, 2014. Eight were promoted in the 2012-13 year, and six were promoted in the 2011-12 academic year, Antman said.
Grillone, vice chairman of the otolaryngology department and the residency program director, was recognized for his research on early detection of head and neck cancer.
“It [the promotion] has kind of given me a little bit of motivation and spurred me even more to think about additional work and grants in the same area as what we’re doing now,” he said.
Grillone said he is proud of being part of helping the otolaryngology residency program grow in the years since he went through his residency training.
“One of my accomplishments is not necessarily something you can document in your CV, but something people who were writing letters for me and supporting my promotion saw was the persistence I had in helping the program through a sort of difficult time,” he said. “It went through this difficult period. I was instrumental in helping to keep the program going and then helping to increase its stature.”
Grillone said the program is now considered one of the best in the country and in top 10 for otolaryngology programs in the Northeast.
Gupta, whose case and research focuses on infectious diseases, has worked on treatment and prevention of urinary tract infections in women. She received funding to further her work.
“It some ways [the professorship] gives me even more recognition of my work and probably opens some doors to do other related types of work not just in UTI but in other healthcare-associated infections I’ve been working on,” she said. “It’s a validation of my work so far, but it also helps to promote future funding and opportunities.”
Gupta said she has overseen the creation of practices to help improve treatment for UTIs.
“The bottom line is that the guideline becomes the go-to document for clinicians around the world who are treating this condition and getting clinicians to read it, understand it, accept it and incorporate it into their practice,” she said.
Taft, a staff member at the VA National Center for PTSD and the main investigator on grants, researches domestic violence prevention in military veterans and service members.
“We develop these programs, called the Strength at Home programs to grant the Department of Defense, VA and the [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” he said. “We’ve been doing these randomized clinical trials. We developed these programs, and we evaluated them over the past several years.”
Taft said he hopes his plans to broaden this program will be helped along by the recent promotion. He said that ideally, the program would serve not only veterans and service members, but civilians as well.
“[The promotion is] one of those things along the way in your career where it just shows that you’re progressing as one would hope to progress as a research professor,” he said. “There’s really nothing more rewarding than preventing and ending violence in people’s relationships.”
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