Every year, the Department of Medicine recognizes outstanding medical students with the following awards at the School of Medicine Convocation Ceremony. Please join us in congratulating this year's award recipients.
Dana Goplerud is the recipient of the Warfield T. Longcope Prize in Clinical Medicine. The award established in honor of Dr. Longcope, director of the Department of Medicine from 1922 to 1946, recognizes a graduating student entering the field of medicine whose performance in clinical medicine exemplifies in outstanding fashion the academic excellence and the human qualities that mark the true physician. Dana was selected for this award in recognition of her tremendous talent for patient care and compassion evidenced by her phenomenal clinical performance during Department of Medicine rotations. Dana has had a long-standing interest in care navigation work and hopes to combine clinical care and research in this area in an academic medicine-pediatrics primary care clinic. She completed a Master’s in Public Health during medical school. Her MPH projects included analysis of national data sets to study the relationship between industrial air pollution and the low-income housing tax credit. She also studied the impact of eviction on health and the challenges of tracking eviction data. As part of her participation in leadership of the Primary Care Leadership Track, she helped implement and assess a curriculum module on screening for social determinants of health. She has multiple publications and presentations of her work and was selected as a Mac Lipkin Presentation Award finalist at the 2021 Society of General Internal Medicine annual meeting. Dana will join the Medicine-Pediatrics Urban Health Primary Care Residency Program in July.
Caroline Plott is the recipient of the Sol Goldman Award, given annually to a Johns Hopkins medical student who is recognized by the faculty of the Department of Medicine, Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology for excellence in geriatrics and for exceptional sensitivity to older patients. This award is made possible by an endowment given by the family of Sol Goldman to perpetuate an interest in and commitment to geriatric medicine and gerontology among medical students. Cara is developing a career focused on promoting equity in her clinical, leadership and research roles. She has also been involved in policy work through her roles in the state medical society and the American Medical Association. She helped write policy and give testimony and met with Congressional staffers and Maryland delegates to advocate for policy issues. She has been a leader among her peers in the Primary Care Leadership Track. During the pandemic, she developed the COVID Response Outreach Program, which was a social determinant of health screening program to address the needs of vulnerable older adult populations during the pandemic. She designed the intervention, led training sessions and has submitted an application to the Institutional Review Boards to study the impact. Cara will join the Osler Medical Residency in July.
