Alumni and Faculty Notes
1950s
Donald I. Feinstein, BA ’54, MD ’58, retired in July 2007 after 43 years on the hematology faculty at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), including roles as chief of hematology (1974 through 1990), chief of medicine at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center (1983 through 1997), and chief of medicine at USC University Hospital (1990 through 1997). Although retired, Feinstein’s love for his profession keeps him working full time. He and his wife, Jackie, have three children and one grandchild.
1960s
Donald R. Newman, MD ’64, has retired from Sharp Rees Stealy Medical Group in San Diego after 36 years as an internist, hematologist, and oncologist. His academic work as a clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego, clinical research, and group administration had been his major interests. He and his wife, Jeri (Vix), RN ’62, enjoy travel, nature, gardening, theater, family, and each other, and hope to remember and recognize classmates at the April reunion.
Morris Bol, MD ’69, retired in 2006 after 35 years in medicine. The first 29 were in family practice in Denver and then Norwich, Vt., where he also held an adjunct position at the Dartmouth Medical School in the department of family and community medicine. He spent the last six years as the regular surgical assistant to the orthopaedic surgeon in a community hospital, which he enjoyed. “I loved the camaraderie of the operating room and the dance of the procedure,” reports Bol. Now happily and actively retired in San Francisco, he is living with his life partner, Lewis, enjoying grandchildren and children in San Mateo, Calif. (Rebecca, whose birth announcement he wrote on the blackboard in one of his lectures in April of 1967, much to the consternation of one of his professors, is an OB/GYN physician in Burlingame, Calif.).
Soo Borson, MD ’69, is professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. She lives in Seattle and has two grown sons, Jake Wright (wife Jennifer) and Ben Wright (Stanford ’82; wife Jen; and daughters Savannah, Olivia, and Layla).
Michael Meagher, MD ’69, after 33 years of practicing diagnostic radiology, interventional and otherwise, at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine, a larger tertiary teaching facility in Honolulu recently decided to to slow down. He restricts himself to work at the local Shriners facility, research (IRB) administration, and teaching medical students. He retains his position as professor and chair of the division of radiology at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine. He and his wife, Lili, have been married for more than 40 years and enjoy time with their 4-year-old grandson. They look forward to seeing friends from the class of 1969 at the reunion.
1970s
Molly Cooke, ’73, MD ’77, a San Francisco internist and medical educator, is chair-elect of the board of governors for the American College of Physicians (ACP), the nation’s second-largest physician organization. She assumes this responsibility in April 2009 and will serve for one year. She is currently ACP governor for the Northern California chapter. Cooke is a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she holds the William G. Irwin Endowed Chair and is director of the Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators.
Her medical practice focuses on the care of patients with HIV and other chronic illnesses. Her major professional contributions include seminal works in HIV ethics during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. More recently, she has made advancements in medical education, establishing a professional development program for faculty members in the School of Medicine at UCSF. She has been a Fellow of the American College of Physicians (FACP) since 1986.
Herschel Lessin, MD ’79, has been appointed to several national American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) committees. He is a member of the Practice Management Online Editorial Advisory Board, a member of the executive committee of the Section on Administration and Practice Management, and a member of the Committee on Practice and Ambulatory Medicine. He will be the co-lead author, with Stanford alumnus and professor of pediatrics Larry Hammer, MD, of the next revision of the National AAP Policy on Improving Immunization Coverage. He has been very active in this issue and has been quoted on vaccine-related issues in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press. For the past 27 years, Lessin has been in private pediatric practice at the Children’s Medical Group in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He has two grown children, Kayla and Zachary. He recently returned from a medical mission trip to Ghana in West Africa.
1980s
Robin Allgren, PhD ’84, MD ’86, is founder and president of San Diegobased Breakthrough Bio Development LLC, which provides clinical research and regulatory affairs expertise as an independent consultant to biotech, pharma, medical device, diagnostic, and stem cell companies developing new investigational products.
2000s
Jeffrey Zarin, MD ’01, was appointed to the position of orthopaedic surgeon in the department of orthopaedic surgery at Boston Medical Center in October. He now also serves as assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery at Boston University School of Medicine. After receiving his medical degree from Stanford, Zarin completed his orthopaedic surgery residency at Harvard University and a fellowship in adult total joint arthroplasty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Kurt Grote, ’95, MD ’02, is living in Redwood City, Calif., and working as a consultant for health systems in the United States and worldwide at McKinsey & Company, where he is a partner. He and his wife, Amy, now have two children, Kellen, 6, and Lucy, 3.
Naveen Yalamanchi, MD ’04, switched gears from his residency at the UCLA department of orthopaedic surgery in 2006 to work as a health care analyst at the hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital Management in New York City. He invests primarily in the medical devices sector, with some exposure to biotechnology and specialty pharmaceuticals.
Deepika Nehra, MD ’07, a general surgery resident at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), was honored by the New England Surgical Society for research presented at its annual meeting this fall in Boston. Nehra earned first place in the Resident Essay Prize Competition based on a paper and oral presentation of research she conducted as part of the MGH residency program, which is an analysis of the effectiveness of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for the treatment of non-neonatal acute respiratory failure.
Francesco M. Marincola (Housestaff and Fellow) is the founder of the Journal of Translational Medicine, which publishes reports of research and studies dealing with the development and testing of new modalities of treatment as well as the interpretation of clinical outcomes. Marincola launched the journal with BioMed Central in July 2003.
After he completed his surgical training and research training in transplant and cancer immunology at Stanford in 1990, he moved to the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he continued his research in tumor immunology by developing strategies for studying tumor/host interactions in the context of human genetic polymorphism and cancer heterogeneity. Recently, he took a position as chief of immunogenetics with the NIH to broaden the scope of his work to other fields of human immunology in which genetic polymorphism is the hallmark of human disease.
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