PROSE Awards Judges - Bios

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Joseph S. Alpert, MD is Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine and special assistant to the dean at the University of Arizona (UA) College of Medicine, Tucson, United States. He came to the UA from the University of Massachusetts in Worcester where he was professor of medicine, director of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, and vice chairman of medicine. He was chairman of the Department of Medicine at the UA College of Medicine from 1992 – 2006.

Dr. Alpert earned his undergraduate degree from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. He completed his residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in cardiovascular disease at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital) in Boston. After his fellowship, Dr. Alpert served as staff cardiologist and director of the coronary care unit at the Naval Regional Medical Center in San Diego, California, where he was also an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego. Following his military service, Dr. Alpert returned to the Harvard Medical School and the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital where he was director of the Samuel A. Levine Cardiac Unit. In 1978, he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Board-certified in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease, Dr. Alpert has received many awards for excellence in teaching from, among others, the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, the United States Navy, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Arizona. In 2004, he received the Gifted Teacher Award from the American College of Cardiology (ACC). Dr. Alpert is a past chairman of the Council on Clinical Cardiology of theAmerican Heart Association from which he received the Distinguished Achievement Award in 2001.

He is a master of the American College of Physicians and a fellow of the Council on Clinical Cardiology of the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Chest Physicians, and the European Society of Cardiology. He is an honorary member of the Danish Cardiovascular Society, the Israeli Heart Society, and the Argentina Cardiology Association. He has served on many national committees of professional organizations and is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the ACC and the Board of Directors of the American Board of Internal Medicine. He is a current member of the Board of Trustees of the Association of Professors of Medicine.

Dr. Alpert is the former editor of the journals Cardiology, Current Cardiology Reports, and Cardiology in Review. He is the current editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Medicine (“the Green Journal”), a member of the editorial boards of 10 cardiovascular journals, and an editorial reviewer for 15 internal medicine and cardiovascular disease journals. He has authored more than 40 books and monographs, and more than 500 publications including original articles, book chapters, reviews, and editorials, as well as many abstracts.

Steve Chapman is Publisher of McGraw-Hill Professional’s Technical Group. He has served in a variety of editorial positions at McGraw-Hill in the fields of engineering, computing, and telecommunications. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and English from the University of Delaware.

Barbara Chen is Director of Bibliographic Information Services and Editor of the MLA International Bibliography at the Modern Language Association. With a focus on literature, language, linguistics, film, pedagogy and folklore, the Bibliography is the most comprehensive research tool available to humanities scholars today . Prior to her tenure at the MLA beginning in early 2001, Barbara was Associate Director of Indexing Services at the H. W. Wilson Company, responsible for databases such as Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, Business Periodicals Index and Index to Legal Periodicals. She is a past president of the American Society for Indexing New York Chapter and has been a member of the PSP Electronic Information Committee since 2004.

F. Michael Connelly is Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of University of Toronto (OISE/UT), Founder and former Editor of Curriculum Inquiry, former Chair of Curriculum, and founding Director of the OISE/UT Center for Teacher Development. He has written on science education, curriculum studies, teacher education, multiculturalism and narrative inquiry and is the editor of The Sage Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction. He was Director of the Canada Project, Second International Science Study, and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education/OISE/UT doctoral program. He has made teaching a priority, with many former students winning dissertation, and research and teaching awards. He has worked with schools, school boards, and teacher organizations; and has written policy papers for the Science Teachers Association of Ontario, the Ontario Teachers Federation, the Ontario Ministry of Education, the Government of Egypt, the Government of Australia, UNICEF and the World Bank. He received AERA’s Division B Lifetime Achievement Award, the Canadian Society for the Study of Education’s Outstanding Canadian Curriculum Scholar Award, the Canadian Education Association Whitworth award, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Association’s award for excellence in teaching, and other scholarly awards. He has worked internationally in human resource development, curriculum, teacher education, and community schools in Jordan, Egypt, Hong Kong, West Indies, and China. He drafted the terms of reference for the Egyptian Professional Academy of Teachers. His long-term, ongoing, urban education research program in Bay Street Community School is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.  He is currently studying the narrative histories of immigrant family knowledge structures and ways of knowing as they interact with the Canadian school system, and he is establishing a community schools sister-school research and development network between Toronto and Shanghai.

Jeff Dean is Executive Editor for Social Sciences and Humanities at Wiley-Blackwell, working in the Boston office. He acquires text, reference, and academic books in philosophy and related fields, and manages the philosophy list and several other acquisitions editors. He studied German and philosophy as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, and went on to receive a PhD in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

Michael Fisher began his career in book publishing at Temple University Press in September 1978, when he was hired as a manuscript and production editor. He was at Temple for 3 years and then took a job as a project editor for a college textbook publisher. After six months in that job he was hired as an acquisitions editor in science and medicine by Praeger Publishers. Following four years at Praeger, Michael moved to ISI Press and then to W.B. Saunders in Philadelphia. In 1988 he was hired as Senior Medical Editor at Williams & Wilkins in Baltimore. He was Editor-in-Chief for Clinical Medicine when, in April 1992, he moved to Harvard University Press as Executive Editor for Science and Medicine. In November 2004 Michael was appointed Editor-in-Chief at HUP.

Nigel Fletcher-Jones joined Pri-Med Inc., a global provider of clinical education, recently as Publishing Director from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT where he was Communications Director.  Since the early 1990s, Nigel has held executive level positions with international publishing companies including Blackwell Publishing Inc., Nature Publishing Group (where he was the Publisher of the highly-influential Nature research journals), Elsevier and Cell Press.  Throughout his career, he has advised CEOs on strategic issues influencing the global publishing industry and has successfully developed many research products and services for both the biomedical and clinical medicine markets.  Nigel was one of the pioneers of online journal publishing and continues to be deeply involved in the development of community-targeted web services.  He is a former member of the AAP/PSP Executive Council and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Durham.

James M. Jasper has worked as a writer, consultant, magazine editor, professor and – briefly – standup comedian. His books include Nuclear Politics, about energy policy in France, Sweden, and the United States; The Animal Rights Crusade, an examination of the moral dimensions of protest coauthored with Dorothy Nelkin; The Art of Moral Protest, a cultural and emotional approach to social movements; Restless Nation, which looks at the negative and positive effects of Americans’ propensity to move so often; and Getting Your Way, which develops a sociological language for talking about strategic action that avoids the determinism of game theory. He has taught at Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, the New School for Social Research, and now teaches in the sociology Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Myer Kutz has headed his own firm, Myer Kutz Associates, Inc., since 1990.  For the past several years, he has focused on developing engineering handbooks and encyclopedias on a wide range of technical topics, such as mechanical, materials, biomedical, transportation, and environmentally conscious engineering, for a number of publishers, including Wiley, McGraw-Hill, William Andrew, and Elsevier.  Earlier, his firm supplied consulting services to a large client roster, including Fortune 500 companies, scientific societies, and large and small publishers.  The firm published two major multi-client studies, “The Changing Landscape for College Publishing” and “The Developing Worlds of Personalized Information.”  Before starting his independent consultancy, Kutz held a number of positions at Wiley, including acquisitions editor, director of electronic publishing, and vice president for scientific and technical publishing.  He holds engineering degrees from MIT and RPI and worked in the aerospace industry.  In addition to his edited reference works, he is the author of eight books, including “Temperature Control”, published by Wiley, “Rockefeller Power”, published by Simon and Schuster, and Midtown North, published under the name Mike Curtis.

Jean Laponce has been the Modern Western European History & Philosophy Librarian at Columbia University since 2003. Laponce is also currently an adjunct assistant professor in the Core Curriculum program at Columbia.

Laponce has a Ph.D. in modern European history from Columbia University, and an M.A. in early modern European history from the University of British Columbia. Prior to starting in his position with the Columbia University Libraries in 2003, Laponce taught in the Department of Liberal Studies at Western Washington University for five years.

George Lobell is presently the Executive Editor for Economics/Quantitative Methods at Wiley Blackwell’s HSS division, where he has worked for 3 years. Previously, he was an Advanced Mathematics/Statistics acquisitions editor at Prentice Hall and before that an economics/finance editor at Scott, Foresman and DC Heath for nearly 15 years. A double major in Math and English at Carnegie Mellon, he also audited the Film Studies program at NYU many years ago. Ardent film goer at MOMA and Film Forum, with an outside passion for reading history books, he dabbles in travel, having spent weeks in countries like Iran, Burma, Paraguay, Uruguay, Kyrgyzstan, Syria, Macedonia, Albania, and all the usual countries of Europe and S. America. He does look forward to traveling in sub-Saharan Africa. (Oh lord, so little time, so many books to read and countries to visit!)

Helle Mathiasen holds a Cand.mag. degree in English and Ancient Greek from Copenhagen University and a Ph.D. in English from Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts.

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, she emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts. Since then, she has taught English composition, and the humanities and medical humanities, including literature and medicine, to undergraduate and graduate students at Tufts University, the University of California, San Diego, the University of Massachusetts, Boston College, and the University of Arizona.

Founder and Director of the Program in Medical Humanities at the University of Arizona College of Medicine (2003-2006), she currently holds the title of Clinical Professor of Medical Humanities Emerita in the College of Medicine, University of Arizona.  She has received numerous awards and scholarships from governments and private institutions, including the Ministry of Education in Denmark, Harvard University, Boston College, and the University of Arizona. She has received several teaching awards from the University of Arizona. She has published four book chapters and numerous invited articles and book reviews with Yale University Press, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Humane Medicine, Family Medicine, The American Journal of Medicine,  American Journal of  Cardiology, Journal of the American Medical Association, Pharos,  and Arizona Society of  Geriatrics Society Journal. Professor Mathiasen is currently Section Editor for Medical Humanities Perspectives in The American Journal of Medicine (the “Green Journal”). She serves as an annotator for the medical humanities database: medhum.med.nyu.edu.

She has given more than 50 scholarly presentations in Denmark, the United States, Caracas, Venezuela, Taipei, Taiwan, and Sao Paolo, Brazil on topics such as, the humanities, literature and medicine, medical ethics, medicine in art, the Danish Resistance in World War II, the Rescue of the Danish Jews, and Modern Danish Women Authors.

She has been a resident of Tucson, Arizona, since 1993. Her email address is mathiase@email.arizona.edu.

Carol McGall, Wiley-Blackwell’s Medical Marketing Director, oversees the teams charged with marketing book, journal and database products globally. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers College, Coffey has been a member of the scholarly publishing community her employment with IEEE in 1995, where she marketed membership to electrical engineers. Subsequent professional experience includes serving as Marketing Manager for Chemistry/Biochemistry textbooks for W H Freeman, and VP Sales & Marketing, Distance Learning Solutions at Pearson Education. Coffey joined John Wiley & Sons, Inc in 2004 as Associate Marketing Director, US Journals, transitioned to Associate Marketing Director, Life Sciences US with the Wiley-Blackwell merger in 2007, and assumed her current role in July of 2008. She has been a member of the PSP Journals Committee since 2006.

John Ryden was director of Yale University Press from 1979 until he retired early in 2003.  He began his publishing career as a sales rep in the college division of McGraw-Hill in 1965.  After moving to Harper & Row in 1968 he was appointed editor and later editor-in-chief. From 1974 to 1979 he was editor-in-chief and associate director of the University of Chicago Press.  He is a past president of the Association of American University Presses and was a member of the board of directors of the Association of American Publishers. He presently serves on the boards of Beacon Press and the Central European University Press in Budapest.

Henry Tom, Executive Editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, joined the Johns Hopkins as Social Sciences Editor in 1974, after four years as History and Political Science Editor at the University of Chicago Press.  As Social Sciences Editor he acquired in all subfields of history, including the Press’s traditional strengths in U.S. history, European history, history of technology, and history of medicine.  He also diversified the political science list beyond its international relations core.  He has handled the economics list at varying times and spearheaded exploratory lists in sociology and religious studies.  Today he handles books primarily in political science and European history.  He holds a Ph.D. in early modern European history.  He has consulted for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Association for Documentary Editing, Center for American Places, Professional and Scholarly Publishers division of the Association of American Publishers, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.  He has also been a planning consultant for University of Notre Dame Press and Louisiana State University Press.  He has served on PSP book awards committee since 2006.

Toni M. Tracy is Director of Publisher Relations for Portico and is responsible for working with the scholarly publishing community to facilitate their participation in Portico.  Prior to joining Portico in 2005, Toni spent twenty-five years in medical publishing in senior level positions at Williams & Wilkins (now part of Wolters Kluwer Health) and Churchill Livingstone (now part of Elseiver) as well as leading an online medical education program at Sanofi-Aventis Pharmaceuticals.  Toni holds a bachelors degree from Marywood University and is a graduate of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business Executive Program.