News

On the eve of commencement, students, alumni, faculty and staff from Weill Cornell Medical College and Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences were recognized for their outstanding achievements with special awards, prizes, certificates and the Weill Cornell seal during three ceremonies on May 29 in Uris Auditorium and Griffis Faculty Club. The awards acknowledge exceptional academic achievement, scholarship, research, teaching and service.  

A number of Pediatric faculty and staff were recognized.  See below for the full list of award recipients.

Weill Cornell Medical College

Student Awards

The Clarence C. Coryell Prizes in Surgery and Medicine
Elizabeth Gardner Gilbert

Coryell Prize in Medicine
Cody Patrick Nolan

The Alfred Moritz Michaelis Prize in Medicine
Yunan Nie

The Oskar Diethelm Prize for Excellence in Psychiatry
Zhenzhen Shi

The Joan Severino Parisi Prize in Internal Medicine
Lee Solomon Gotesdiener

The David and Gladys Drusin Memorial Prize
Caitlin Krystyna Gribbin

The T. Campbell Thompson Prize for Excellence in Orthopedic Surgery
Tyler James Uppstrom

The Mitchell Spivak Memorial Prize in Pediatrics
Micha Virginia Thompson

The James A. Moore Scholarship
Aaron Bamberger Oswald

Production of an essential protein for maintaining a healthy immune response in the intestine called interleukin-2 (IL-2) depends on immune cells known as innate lymphoid cells (ILCs), according to a study by Weill Cornell Medicine researchers. The study, published April 3 in Nature, is the first to identify these cells and the factors that influence them as potential new targets for treating chronic gut inflammation associated with inflammatory bowel disease or food allergies.

“We have understood for quite a while that IL-2 is important for maintaining a healthy immune response in the gut,” said senior author Dr. Gregory Sonnenberg, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology in medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and a member of the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Dramatic inflammation occurs when humans or mice are missing IL-2, but the specific cells that make it and the regulatory pathways controlling its production in the intestine were previously unknown.”

The Department of Pediatrics welcomes Elizabeth Fiorino, MD to the Division of Pediatric Pulmonology, Allergy & Immunology.   An Assistant Professor of Clinical Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and an Assistant Attending Pediatrician at NewYork-Presbyterian Phyllis and David Komansky Children's Hospital, Dr. Fiorino is board certified in Pediatric Pulmonology and General Pediatrics. 

Dr. Fiorino has special interest in pediatric asthma, cystic fibrosis, interstitial and restrictive lung disease, and rare lung diseases in general.  She also has expertise in diagnostic procedures such as flexible bronchoscopy and pulmonary function testing.

She received her medical degree at New York Medical College and completed her residency at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, where she also served as Chief Resident. She then focused on her sub-speciality, completing a pulmonary fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Dr. Jeffrey Perlman grew up in South Africa and attended medical school there. But by 2006, when he was tasked with helping set up the pediatrics program at Tanzania’s Weill Bugando Medical Centre—then newly affiliated with Weill Cornell Medicine—he’d been living and working in the United States for decades. So coming face to face with the reality of how many newborn lives are lost in Africa’s medically under-resourced nations was both shocking and heartbreaking. “I saw all these babies dying unnecessarily,” says Dr. Perlman, a professor of pediatrics who directs the neonatal ICU at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. In America overall, according to figures released by the CDC in 2015, the neonatal mortality rate averages four for every 1000 births—and at a state-of-the-art hospital such as NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Perlman says, the number is just .7 per 1000. In Tanzania, by contrast, Dr. Perlman encountered a rate of 39 per 1000 births—or roughly two newborns dying every hour. Dr. Perlman resolved to change that.