Joel Pomerantz Named Director of Graduate Program in Immunology, Effective July 1

To school of medicine faculty, staff and trainees

Dear Colleagues:

I am pleased to announce that Joel Pomerantz, associate professor of biological chemistry, will become the director of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Graduate Program in Immunology, effective July 1.

Dr. Pomerantz, who has served as assistant director of the program for nearly four years, will assume leadership of the graduate program from Dr. Mark Soloski, who has directed the program since 1999.

Dr. Pomerantz earned his Ph.D. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 and then completed two postdoctoral fellowships in biology, the first at MIT and the second in David Baltimore's laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. He is an internationally recognized leader in studies of the functional specificity of signal transduction pathways that control gene expression and regulate cell proliferation, differentiation and death. Dysregulation of these pathways leads to autoimmunity, malignancy and other human diseases. Dr. Pomerantz is not only an exceptional scientist but also an outstanding teacher, adviser and mentor.

Johns Hopkins is grateful to Dr. Soloski for helping to grow the Graduate Program in Immunology from one that began in 1982 with only two students to the much larger and extraordinarily vibrant program it is today. We are confident that the program will thrive under Dr. Pomerantz's leadership, developing scientists who will contribute to the generation of new knowledge of the basic mechanisms of the immune system and the application of this knowledge to the understanding and treatment of disease.

Please join me in congratulating Dr. Pomerantz on his appointment to this very important position.

Sincerely,

Roy C. Ziegelstein, M.D., M.A.C.P.
Sarah Miller Coulson and Frank L. Coulson, Jr., Professor of Medicine
Mary Wallace Stanton Professor of Education
Vice Dean for Education, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine