B
ruce Rapkin, Ph.D., director of Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s
new Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Comprehensive Cancer Prevention
and Control Program, has something in common with President Obama:
a background as an effective community organizer.
“People living in low-income, medically underserved communities often
don’t have access to the full range of services and treatment options available,” says
Dr. Rapkin (pictured above, second from right, with colleagues David Lounsbury, Ph.D.;
Hayley S. Thompson, Ph.D.; and Elisa S. Weiss, Ph.D.). “I’ve worked for more than 20
years to help such people receive the support they need. I look at the different levels
of assistance offered in the community and try to find the best way to organize these
services so we can help people solve the health problems confronting them.”
The new cancer prevention and treatment program was created with the help of a
generous $7 million donation from Marilyn and Stanley Katz, longtime Benefactors of
the College of Medicine.
Dr. Rapkin was recruited to Einstein from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center,
where he worked for 16 years—the last six as director of the Community Health and
Health Disparities Laboratory. As part of his strategy for serving the Bronx, Dr. Rapkin
is building on the community-academic partnership model he developed at Sloan-
Kettering, where he and his team were actively involved in promoting early detection
of breast cancer. Three key members of that team (shown above) have accompanied
Einstein Cancer Center
nEws
newsletter for the
Albert Einstein Cancer Center
Issue 1 • Fall 2009
Fighting melanoma’s spread
– page 3
in thiS iSSuE
2 Message from the Director
3 New Faculty
3 Discoveries
4 Our Donors
Tackling Cancer
Block by Block
(continued on page 2)
science at the heart of medicine
T his year, 2009, marks the 37th year in which the Albert
Einstein Cancer Center has been a National Cancer
Institute–designated center. In fact, we were among the
first cancer centers in the