ANN ARBOR—Provost Nancy Cantor, School of Public Health Dean Noreen M. Clark and Sherman A. James, professor of public health and chair of the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, at the University of Michigan were elected on Monday to the National Academy of Sciences‘ Institute of Medicine.

Their election to the prestigious group brings the total membership to 711, of which approximately 20 are current and former U-M faculty.

Established in 1970 as a unit of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute is broadly based in the biomedical sciences and health professions, as well as related aspects of the behavioral and social sciences, administration, law, the physical sciences, and engineering.

The Institute’s members, elected on the basis of their professional achievement, serve without compensation in the conduct of studies, conferences, and other Institute inquiries into matters of national policy for health. Election is both an honor and a commitment to serve in Institute affairs.

Members are elected by current members who select candidates based on their major contributions to health and medicine or to related fields, such as social and behavioral sciences, law, administration and economics. At least one-fourth of the members are drawn from professions other than the health arena.

Institute members volunteer their time as members of committees devoted to studies on a broad range of health policy issues. Recent studies have focused on the future of the smallpox virus, the current state of cancer care, the medical use of marijuana and donor organ procurement and transplantation.

Nancy Cantor is the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. As the University’s chief academic officer, she is responsible for the academic and budgetary affairs.

Prior to
As a psychologist, Cantor has spent much of her career investigating how human social intelligence connects individuals to their social environments, as individuals perceive opportunities and uncertainties in situations, set goals and expectations, anticipate outcomes, modulate effort, and retrospectively try to understand what happened and why.

She began by using the tools of cognitive psychology to experimentally demonstrate the complexity of social knowledge structures (self and social prototypes) that serve as the lens through which we perceive ourselves, other people and life situations. Her research has followed the life task goals that individuals set across the life course and the cognitive-behavioral strategies that allow them to cope with the significant ups and downs of daily life.

Noreen Clark, dean of public health, is the Marshall H. Becker Collegiate Professor of Public Health. She is the National Program Director for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Allies Against Asthma program and is a member of the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Clark’s primary research specialty is management of disease and she has conducted many large-scale program evaluations. She is attempting to identify the elements of self-regulation, and uses management of asthma and heart disease as models for examining constructs. Her studies of asthma self-management have contributed to the research literature and the field of practice by demonstrating that educational interventions can decrease hospitalizations and medical emergencies in low-income families. Her work has resulted in an archetype educational program for health care facilities distributed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and used in hundreds of clinics nationally and internationally. A program developed in subsequent research to adapt the model for use in public schools is being disseminated by the American Lung Association and has to date reached over 100,000 American school children. Other model programs for management of asthma and heart disease are currently being evaluated by Clark and her research team.

Sherman James, the John P. Kirscht Collegiate Professor of Public Health, is chair of public health’s Department of Health Behavior and Health Education; and founding director of the school’s newly established Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health. James holds joint professorships in the school’s Department of Health Behavior and Health Education and the Department of Epidemiology.

He is also a senior research scientist with the Survey Research Center of U-M’s Institute for Social Research and is a faculty associate with the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. James has also served as public health’s associate dean for academic affairs (1996-97).

A social epidemiologist, James’ research focuses primarily on the psychosocial and behavioral determinants of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in African Americans. He is the originator of the “John Henryism” concept which hypothesizes that repetitive, high-effort coping with social and economic adversity is a major cause of the high rates of CVD (especially hypertension) typically seen in poor and working class African Americans.

James is active in international as well as national public health research and teaching endeavors. He has served on four NIH study sections, and three NIH Data and Safety Monitoring Committees.