Susan B. Shurin, MD, professor of pediatrics and oncology at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, has been appointed to a new position at the University, vice president and secretary of the corporation.

Susan B. Shurin

"The job was created in concert with the CWRU Board of Trustees' recent governance reforms and changes in the organizational structure of senior management implemented by President Edward M. Hundert.

While new to CWRU, the position exists at other research universities and enables university administration to have a focused interface with the Board of Trustees.

Among her new responsibilities, Shurin will serve as a liaison between board leadership, individual trustees and the University president. She will support and advise the president and board in relation to University governance and other areas as assigned.

A faculty member at CWRU for 25 years, Shurin has been involved in faculty governance, having chaired both the Faculty Council of the School of Medicine and, more recently, the University Faculty Senate. She also served as chair of the University Faculty Senate's personnel committee and was a member of the search committee that named Hundert as president.

At the School of Medicine, Shurin served as a member of the committees on medical education and on students. She teaches in the hematology committee; pediatrics clerkship; and electives in pediatrics, hematology and oncology.

Shurin has been chief of the division of pediatric hematology/oncology at Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital for 16 years, serving as medical director of the inpatient and ambulatory patient care units at Rainbow and the Ireland Cancer Center. At University Hospitals of Cleveland, she also ran the pediatric hematology/oncology training program, and the hemophilia treatment center.

She has been involved in laboratory research on neutrophil physiology and clinical research in the areas of iron metabolism and chelation therapy, sickle cell disease, hemophilia and childhood cancer. Shurin was principal investigator for the Children's Cancer Group, an National Cancer Institute-funded cooperative clinical trials group, and the Multicenter Study of Hydroxyurea in Sickle Cell Disease, a National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute-funded study.

In 2000-2001, Shurin was a fellow in the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine program, sponsored by the School of Medicine's former Dean Nathan A. Berger. Her teaching awards include election to AOA, the medical honor society, by CWRU medical students and the Golden Stethoscope award from the Rainbow Clinical Faculty.

Her memberships in professional organizations include the Children's Oncology Group, where she is chair of the bioethics committee; the National Childhood Cancer Foundation; American Society of Hematology/Oncology; American Society of Hematology American Cancer Society; American Academy of Pediatrics; and the American Board of Pediatrics. She is a consultant for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the Clinical Trials Evaluation Program of the National Cancer Institute and on the editorial boards of several specialty journals.

Shurin moved to Shaker Heights from Boston in 1977. Her son, Jonathan, is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, Calif. Her husband, G. David McCoy, faculty in the department of environmental health sciences at the CWRU School of Medicine, has two children and a five-year-old granddaughter in New York.