We are delighted to announce the establishment of the Rosemarie Hope Reid, M.D. Endowed Professorship to support the Director of the Primary Care Leadership Track in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. We are also delighted to announce that Dr. Colleen Christmas, director of the Primary Care Leadership Track, will be the inaugural recipient of the Rosemarie Hope Reid, M.D., Professorship, effective June 1, 2021.
Rosemarie Hope Reid, M.D., a 1992 graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, was a first-year pediatric resident at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Hospital in Dayton, Ohio, when she tragically lost her life in an automobile accident on May 7, 1993 at the age of 27. Rosemarie was a class leader whose kindness, generosity, enthusiasm and energy were an inspiration to her classmates and to everyone whose life she touched. Dr. Kris Jenner, Rosemarie’s medical school classmate, and his wife Dr. Susan Cummings (Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine Class of ’91), have created the Rosemarie Hope Reid, M.D. Endowed Professorship to support the Director of the Primary Care Leadership Track in the School of Medicine as a way to honor Rosemarie’s life and focus on primary care.
Dr. Colleen Christmas, the inaugural recipient of this professorship, is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology and in the Division of General Internal Medicine. Dr. Christmas received her medical degree from the University of Connecticut School of Medicine and went from there to the Medical College of Virginia for residency training in internal medicine. She came to Johns Hopkins in 1996 for fellowship training in geriatric medicine and she has been a continuous member of our faculty since 1999. She is a leader in primary care and geriatric medicine at Johns Hopkins, nationally and internationally. She is active in local and national medical organizations and is the Governor-elect of the Maryland Chapter of the American College of Physicians. Dr. Christmas shares, “Not only does the Professorship celebrate an area that has been long under-appreciated at Hopkins and beyond--the importance of training leaders and innovators in primary care--the gift will enable new innovation in primary care education that had not formerly been possible. I genuinely believe this funding will enable Johns Hopkins to lead in primary care education on par with its leadership in research and specialty care training.”
Dr. Christmas is co-founder and/or director of three important and innovative programs in the School of Medicine, the Miller Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence, Medicine for the Greater Good and the Aliki Initiative that focuses on patient-centered care and the importance of knowing patients as individuals. After serving as internal medicine residency program director at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center for nearly 10 years, Dr. Christmas shifted her focus to medical student learners and rapidly became a leader in medical student education in our School. She became the inaugural Director of the Primary Care Leadership Track (PCLT) in 2014, elevating primary care in our medical school through her infectious enthusiasm for primary care medicine and through her outstanding teaching and program development.
Dr. Christmas received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association in 2013; the Theodore Woodward Award for Teaching Excellence from the Maryland Chapter of the American College of Physicians in 2014; the Johns Hopkins Institute for Excellence in Education Award for Educational Scholarship in 2016; the Herbert S. Waxman Award for Outstanding Medical Student Educator from the American College of Physicians in 2020; and the 2021 Professors’ Award for Excellence in Teaching for Clinical Sciences Faculty from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Christmas was inducted in the Distinguished Teaching Society of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2017, and she was selected as the Speaker for the Medical Student White Coat Ceremony in 2018.
The Rosemarie Hope Reid, M.D. Endowed Professorship to support the Director of the Primary Care Leadership Track in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine honors one of our most inspirational graduates, Dr. Reid, and her passion for primary care. For so many reasons, Dr. Christmas is a most appropriate inaugural recipient of this professorship. We are planning for an in-person installation of Dr. Christmas as the inaugural Rosemarie Hope Reid Professor sometime in the fall. “I am quite honestly overwhelmed to be the inaugural recipient of the Rosemarie Hope Reid, MD Professorship. This is overwhelming validation for the work I and many others do in primary care education and offers exciting opportunities to innovate in that area. Even more so, I've been trying to learn as much as I can about Dr. Reid and to try to understand what such a person must have been like to have engendered so much love and adoration from her colleagues that first her medical school class created a scholarship for students at Johns Hopkins in her honor, and now two of her classmates, Drs. Kris Jenner and Susan Cummings, created this Professorship to honor her. Having her name attached to mine is a constant motivator to strive to be worthy of that name. It feels both happy and heavy at the same time,” notes Dr. Christmas.
Please join us in congratulating Colleen on this honor and wonderful recognition of her many accomplishments.