PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Charles Carpenter, M.D., a worldwide leader in AIDS research and training who has worked with HIV patients for nearly three decades, will be honored with the Susan Colver Rosenberger Medal during the University’s Commencement exercises Sunday, May 24, 2009.
“Dr. Carpenter received overwhelming support from the faculty for his nomination for the Rosenberger medal, the highest honor that the faculty can bestow,” said James Dreier, professor of philosophy and chair of the Faculty Executive Committee. “His contributions to Brown, to the medical profession, and to the suffering people of the world are exemplary and inspirational.” The faculty voted the medal in executive session at its April meeting.
“I deeply appreciate this award and will accept it in honor of my wife, my family and my many colleagues, without whom I could have achieved little or nothing,” Carpenter said.
Charles Carpenter
Carpenter, professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School, has been involved in the care of persons living with HIV since 1984. His research is concentrated in two main areas: the optimal treatment of HIV infection in North American women and therapeutic strategies that are effective in the developing world. For years, he has taught a course titled, “BC-107: Burden of Disease in the Developing World.”
He is director of the Brown University/Lifespan/Tufts University Center for AIDS Research, and he recently served as chair of the treatment subcommittee of the congressionally mandated National Academy of Sciences–Institute of Medicine committee to evaluate the President’s Emergency Plan for HIV/AIDS Relief.
Also at the federal level, Carpenter served from 1992 to 1999 as site director of the longitudinal Centers for Disease Control-supported HIV Epidemiology Research Study (HERS) and is now principal investigator of a CDC-supported study to better understand the incidence and etiology of metabolic and other complications related to effective HIV treatment and longer survival.
Carpenter is also co-principal investigator of the Fogarty AIDS International Training and Research Program (AITRP), which trains and mentors non-U.S. scientists in the conduct of ethically sound and scientifically rigorous laboratory, clinical and socio-behavioral research related to HIV/AIDS.
Carpenter joined Brown’s Department of Medicine in 1986, after serving as a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University until 1976, and then as Hord Professor and chair of medicine at Case Western Reserve University from 1973 to 1985. He served as physician-in-chief at The Miriam Hospital in Providence from 1986 to 1998.
The Rosenberger Medal
The Rosenberger Medal is awarded through the Susan Colver Rosenberger Fund, established by Jesse L. Rosenberger in 1919 as a memorial to his wife, the daughter of Charles K. Colver, Class of 1842. His gift provided that from time to time a medal should be awarded for “specially notable or beneficial achievement.”
Previous recipients include Sheila Blumstein, the Albert D. Mead Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences and former interim president of Brown; Theodore Francis Green, former governor and senator from Rhode Island; Brown presidents Vartan Gregorian, Howard R. Swearer and Henry M. Wriston; Charles Evans Hughes, former chief justice of the United States; Artemis A.W. Joukowsky, chancellor emeritus, and Martha Sharp Joukowsky, professor emerita; Alexander Meiklejohn, educator and Amherst College president; Sen. Claiborne Pell, the longest-serving U.S. senator in Rhode Island history; Stephen Robert, the 19th chancellor of Brown University; John D. Rockefeller Jr.; Thomas J. Watson Jr., former vice chancellor; and Mary Emma Woolley, educator and Mt. Holyoke president.