Washington People

Historian Iver Bernstein, PhD, takes an exhaustive, interdisciplinary approach to any topic he studies. Colleagues say he asks the questions that no one else thinks to ask and brings fresh perspectives to the long-ago past. Bernstein is passionate about revealing unspoken or unremembered history that is suppressed in national stories. His book on The New York City Draft Riots is considered by some to be “the gold standard” on the topic.

Andrey Shaw, MD, wanted to be a classical pianist and had just finished his bachelor’s degree in music when he realized that he didn’t like getting up on stage and performing in front of a crowd. Plan B was to study medicine. That didn’t quite work out exactly as planned, either, but it eventually lead him to a successful career researching the immune system, the kidney and anything else that catches his scientific interest.

Amy Kweskin regularly engages in what Barbara Feiner, the university’s CFO, calls “a balancing act.” As university treasurer, Kweskin works to ensure the university has enough liquidity to manage its day-to-day operations. But she also has to make sure the university is not keeping too much extra cash around, missing investment opportunities for longer-term gains. It’s a process that is “critical to the smooth running of our operations,” Feiner says.

p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {margin:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;font-size:12.0pt;font-family:Times;} .MsoChpDefault {font-family:Cambria;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in;margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} Orthopaedic surgeon John C. Clohisy, MD, came from a medical family. His father was a general surgeon, and his mother a nurse anesthetist. More than half of their 10 children followed them into the field. But even that family pedigree didn’t make a career in medicine a “slam dunk” for Clohisy because he also was interested in teaching and research. Luckily, academic medicine allows him to pursue all three. 

It’s not easy being a Chicago Cubs fan. Just ask Chakravarthi Narasimhan, PhD, the Philip L. Siteman Professor of Marketing at Olin Business School. Though Narasimhan’s sports life may have more downs than ups, his professional life has been a grand slam. “Chak is a key member of the school’s senior faculty and has built an outstanding marketing group here at Olin,” says colleague Todd Milbourn, PhD.

Brent Ruoff’s quick thinking and calm demeanor have likely saved his own life in the wilderness, and he draws on these same skills when diagnosing and caring for patients who arrive with shattered bones, gunshot wounds or head injuries. 

Raised in a secret town in Siberia and trained in control theory for ICBM guidance, Igor Efimov, the Lucy & Stanley Lopata Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science, wouldn’t be working at WUSTL had the Soviet Union not broken up immediately after he defended his dissertation in biophysics, providing him an opportunity to leave. His research specialty is disturbances of cardiac rhythm known as arrhythmias, electrical impulses that race around and around the heart instead of moving from one end of the heart to the other and then pausing before repeating.

Julie Margenthaler’s practice centers on treating young women with breast cancer, who are more likely to be African-American and to have aggressive disease. “These women are empowered, and they bring a great energy to my practice,” Margenthaler, MD, says. “Yes, there are times when they are frightened — you have to face your mortality when you get a breast cancer diagnosis — but they also have an incredible optimism.”

Charlie Robin, the affable, bespectacled, red-haired, 6-foot-6 executive director of Edison Theatre, is responsible for the slate of shows that make up the annual Edison Ovations and ovations for young people series. It’s a challenge, each year, to come up with a schedule that is intellectually stimulating and fits the mission of Washington University in St. Louis. “A lot of my job is curating a season that is not only about finding good work,” he says, “but one that will develop the openness and interest of the audience to be more expansive, more adventurous and willing to have fun.”

Though some cardiologists may have dabbled in musical pursuits from an early age, few have opened for Aerosmith. How does one who dropped out of college to play drums and follow dreams of being a professional musician end up chief of cardiology at a major medical school? “I needed a day job,” says Douglas L. Mann, MD. Today, Mann studies inflammation and its role in heart failure.