UNIVERSITY OF THE WITWATERSRAND, JOHANNESBURG

Arthur H Rubenstein Receives Distinguished Service Award from Association of American Medical Colleges

Arthur H RubensteinArthur H Rubenstein, MBBCh (Witwatersrand, 1960), honorary DSc Med (Witwatersrand, 2001), Executive Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania for the Health System, and Dean, School of Medicine, received the Abraham Flexner Award for Distinguished Service to Medical Education from the Association of American Medical Colleges ( MC) on 7 November 2009.
The Flexner Award was established by the MC in 1958 to recognise extraordinary individual contributions to medical schools and to the medical education community as a whole.

According to the MC, ?Dr Rubenstein s career epitomizes what Abraham Flexner envisioned for the future of US medical education, with a greater emphasis on research, an integrated, institutional focus on learning, and a joy for the university environment and academic medicine as a profession. Nearly 50 years after publication of the Flexner Report, a young physician educated in South Africa began his career in US academic medicine. That young physician has become his generation s most influential purveyor of the Flexnerian methodand the complete academic medicine physician leader.?

An internationally renowned endocrinologist, Dr Rubenstein was part of a team that, in 1979, demonstrated how a genetic mutation led to an abnormal form of insulin and, in turn, diabetes. But it was ?his pursuit of these findings at the clinical level and new therapeutic interventions that elevate his efforts to a Flexnerian level,? said Michael S Brown, MD, former Penn board member and currently director of the Jonsson Center for Molecular Genetics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Dr Rubenstein has worked to create a translational research infrastructure at Penn strengthened by many interdisciplinary research institutes, including the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics. The latter, said Dr Brown, has ?redefined the model of translational research as a distinct academic discipline in the American medical center.?

Dr Rubenstein previously served as Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago and as Dean of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.