Angela Green, Ph.D., R.N., and Mohamed A. Rehman, M.D., became the first endowed professors at All Children’s Hospital since it joined the Johns Hopkins Health System at a dedication ceremony Thursday in the hospital’s Research and Education Building.

The endowments are funded by gifts from Catherine and Eric Kobren, Sarasota-based philanthropists. The Kobrens have a long history of supporting an academic, data-driven approach to children’s health, and Eric Kobren serves as treasurer on the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Board of Trustees.

Green is the Catherine Kobren Endowed Professor in Patient Safety and Quality, and Rehman is the Eric Kobren Endowed Professor in Applied Health Informatics.

“These endowed professorships are so important to Johns Hopkins,” says Paul B. Rothman, Dean of the Medical Faculty and CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine. “They are how we retain and recruit the very best faculty to our institution. Because of these generous endowments, Dr. Green and Dr. Rehman will be able to continue and expand their groundbreaking work – work that will help patients here, and all over the world.”

Endowed professorships were established nearly 500 years ago with the creation of the Lady Margaret chairs in divinity at Oxford and Cambridge. These chairs were sponsored by Margaret, Countess of Richmond and grandmother of Henry VIII, in 1546. Henry VIII established the Regius Professorships at both universities in five subjects: divinity, civil law, Hebrew, Greek, and physics — what we now know as medicine and the basic sciences.

As a campus of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the endowed professorships will help Johns Hopkins All Children’s pursue its mission of teaching, research, patient care and advocacy.

“With leaders and researchers like Dr. Green and Dr. Rehman, All Children’s is poised to truly fire on all cylinders, looking ahead to a bright future of life-saving pediatric medical care and research that can save lives here and in institutions around the world,” says Ronald J. Daniels, J.D., LL.M., president of Johns Hopkins University.
Green is on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and is the vice president and chief patient safety and quality officer at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. She is a nationally recognized leader in patient safety and quality and has extensive experience in practice and academic settings. She is a member of the Children's Hospitals' Solutions for Patient Safety Clinical Steering Team and is actively involved in the Children's Hospital Association Quality and Safety Leaders Forum.

“In the weeks leading up to this, I was seeing the faces of children I’ve cared for over the years, parents I worked alongside,” says Green, who started her career as a clinical nurse. “It’s really those moments and memories and knowing that the children and families that we serve trust us that inspire me to go to work for quality and safety every day. The Kobrens’ gift helps us go beyond earning trust to building a best-in-class patient safety and quality program. I know the future we build will really honor the patients and families we serve.”

Rehman is professor of anesthesiology and critical care in the School of Medicine. He is the chair of the Department of Anesthesia and Pain Medicine at the hospital. Internationally recognized for his medical and clinical informatics expertise, Rehman also is director of Perioperative Health Informatics, leading a team that is involved in data-driven research to improve quality, safety and value. Rehman’s team is one of the few in the world working in real time consumer level and medical data to improve patient outcomes. It is working on a “digital twin” concept, a form of precision medicine that uses technology to simulate a human through genomics, physiology and environments/lifestyle over time.

“We are building models in St. Pete that the world will use,” Rehman says. “I would like to do in medicine what Eric did in finance 15 years ago. He wants us to think data, data, data.

“The goal for us is to have a paradigm shift from treating illness to preventing it, using the digital twins. Our goal is for every human being to have a digital twin.”

Catherine Kobren was the founding chairwoman for A Woman’s Journey, an annual Johns Hopkins Medicine women’s health seminar, in Sarasota and continued as chairwoman to sellout crowds for several years. Eric Kobren founded several investment and health related businesses, including Fidelity Insight, Kobren Insight Management and MediRegs.

“It really is our honor to be able to support this institution,” Eric Kobren says. “Angela continues to refine how we measure and improve on the quality of health care delivered to our patients.

“Dr. Rehman, the connected world is moving at light speed. I’m just amazed at what you can do and what your team can do to make it a safer environment and find those problems even before the best doctors can find them. It really is a thrill to be here, to be part of it, and to work with smart people. It’s very, very satisfying.”