Goldstein, Litvan and Miles fill endowed chairs in School of Medicine

Richard E. Goldstein, M.D., Ph.D., Irene Litvan, M.D., and Toni P. Miles, M.D., Ph.D., have been selected to fill endowed chairs in the School of Medicine.

Richard E. Goldstein has been named the Kenneth F. vonRoenn, M.D., Family Chair in Surgical Endocrinology.

Goldstein, who has been a surgery professor here since the summer of 2002, came to UofL after serving as an associate professor of surgery and medicine at Vanderbilt University. He also was surgical director of the Vanderbilt Thyroid and Surgical Endocrinology Center.

Goldstein has published extensively, primarily on subjects related to thyroid cancer and hyperparathyroidism, a disease generally caused by a benign tumor of the parathyroid glands.

Hyperparathyroidism affects about one in every 500 women and can cause significant neuropsychiatric changes including fatigue, depression and changes in memory.

Goldstein and his group of researchers currently are looking at changes in genes that may allow physicians to identify patients who are at greater risk for recurrent disease or death due to thyroid cancer. They also are examining oncogenes, which may play a role in the development of thyroid cancer.

Irene Litvan has been named the Raymond Lee Lebby Endowed Professor of Parkinson's Disease Research and director of the Movement Disorder Program at UofL.

The new professorship was created with a $1.55 million endowment made possible by gifts from the estates of Florence Lebby and Wilma Wise Nelson. Both gifts were matched with a grant from the state's Research Challenge Trust Fund.

Throughout her career, Litvan has played a pivotal role in improving the management of atypical parkinsonian and dementia disorders. Her most influential research, for which she received a Merit Award from the National Institutes of Health, was a series of multicenter studies to improve the diagnostic criteria of several neurodegenerative diseases.

Litvan and her scientific team currently are researching the development of better ways to understand, prevent and treat neurodegenerative disorders like parkinsonism and dementia.

Prior to accepting her post here, Litvan was chief of the Cognitive Neuro-pharmacology Unit at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. She also served as a consultant to the National Institutes of Health. Litvan has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and has served as chief editor of the Movement Disorder Society newsletter since 2000.

Litvan is the founder and CEO of the Litvan Neurological Research Foundation.

Toni P. Miles has been selected to fill the Ole A., Mabel Wise and Wilma Wise Nelson Chair in Clinical Geriatrics Research at UofL.

The new chair was created with a $2 million endowment made possible by a gift from the estate of Wilma Wise Nelson and matching funds from Kentucky's Research Challenge Trust fund, or "Bucks for Brains."

Miles, who holds a Ph.D. in anatomy in addition to her medical degree, was a professor of family medicine at the University of Texas before joining the staff here.

She also served as co-director of the Clinical Geriatric Oncology Program at the San Antonio Cancer Institute, director of geriatrics research at the University of Texas-San Antonio and deputy director of the Hartford Center of Excellence in Geriatrics Education.

Miles has published extensively, with 14 book chapters and more than 100 papers or abstracts to her credit.

Her current research interests include cancer screening among older men, the genetic and environmental aspects of frailty, and the effects of aging on the body.

She earned her medical degree from Howard University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Epidemiology, Demography and Biometry Program at the National Institute on Aging.