Touro Celebrates Authors
Sixth Annual Celebration for Touro Faculty Members
With more than 1000 works published this year, Touro faculty had a reason to celebrate.
On November 10, members of Touro’s faculty gathered for a luncheon in Touro’s Manhattan office to celebrate the publication of 1037 works by 625 professors from Touro’s graduate and undergraduate divisions. This was the fifth annual celebration for published Touro faculty members.
The celebration is an annual tradition and the lists of journals spanned a wide gamut of fields and studies including Heart Rhythm, Journal of Pharmaceutical Science, Poetry and the Journal of American Jewish History. Several faculty members also published books, like Dr. Maya Katz of Lander College for Women and the Graduate School of Jewish Studies. Rutgers University Press published her book “Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation.”
The event wasn’t only a celebration, but a chance for colleagues to connect and collaborate. Participants also learned how to use Touro’s new Touro Scholar repository. The site allows visitors to peruse research from Touro’s faculty through subjects, professors or schools.
The program began with remarks from Bashe Simon, Touro’s Director of Libraries, and a demonstration of Touro Scholar by Scholarly Communications Librarian Carrie Levinson. Afterwards, Touro President Dr. Alan Kadish, eschewed a traditional speech and instead showed the audience how accessible Touro Scholar is, pulling up an article related to the mental health of students in medical school.
“We are incredibly proud of the substantial contributions of our faculty members in their respective field,” Dr. Kadish stated. “Through the Scholars site, our professors will be able to reach a wider audience and collaborate across disciplines with their fellow Touro faculty members.”
Afterwards Patricia Salkin, Provost of the Graduate and Professional Divisions and a professor at Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, spoke about the internet’s effect on the changing nature of professional research, advising the faculty to value peer-reviewed journals, but also look into new metrics.
“We must be scholars of the digital age,” she said.
The event concluded with a presentation by Dr. Katz from her latest book about a Soviet cartoon called Cheburashka’s House of Friends.
The lead character of Cheburashka’s House of Friends, a short-lived Russian animated show, was in Katz’s words, “more popular than Mickey Mouse.” Pointing to the theme of the show—a gathering of friends—Katz stated: “Without like-minded people, we’d be writers without anything to say.”
Dr. Ramona Baez, a professor at TouroCOM Harlem, said that she enjoyed the event. Her paper, “Double Inferior Venacava with Anomalous Hemiazygos Vein – A Case Report,” was published in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.
“Getting to collaborate with others is a great experience,” she said.
Dr. Patricia Precin, a professor at Touro’s School of Health Science Occupational Therapy program, agreed. “It’s about learning how we can learn more from each other,” she said.
