Dr. Danielle Laraque Receives Prestigious Award from American Academy of Pediatrics
Dr. Danielle Laraque has been awarded the Job Lewis Smith Award for leading Mount Sinai’s outstanding efforts in community pediatrics.
Danielle Laraque, MD, Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics and the Debra and Leon Black Professor of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, is the recipient of the prestigious Job Lewis Smith Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Dr. Laraque was honored in recognition of her distinguished career and commitment to community pediatrics. She will receive the award at the 2010 AAP National Conference and Exhibition on Sunday, October 3, 2010, in San Francisco.
"Mount Sinai places a strong emphasis on the importance of community pediatrics," said Dennis Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at The Mount Sinai Medical Center. "The medical center sits in the most unusual place in the country, between one of the most affluent and one of the most underserved communities in America, and the fault line runs right through our campus. Dr. Laraque embodies our commitment to patient care, research, and educational efforts in our unique community." Mount Sinai’s patient population reflects a diversity of socioeconomic, racial and ethnic groups, with the medical center bordering the predominantly Latino and African-American communities of East Harlem and Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
A nationally recognized leader in preventive health in underserved communities, Dr. Laraque has dedicated her career to community pediatrics, which focuses on the importance of the community as a whole in treating the individual patient. Community pediatrics involves evaluating the patient and his or her family in a public health framework and considers environmental and social factors in treating them. Dr. Laraque is an expert in injury prevention, child abuse, adolescent health risk behaviors and issues related to health care delivery systems. As chair of the decision support subcommittee of the AAP Mental Health Task Force, she is an advocate for children’s mental health, focusing her attention on identifying changes in health systems that will facilitate the integration of mental health evaluation in primary care settings.
“Dr. Laraque is an asset to the Mount Sinai team in providing the local underserved community with the quality care it deserves,” said Lisa Satlin, MD, Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “It is an honor for her to receive this award.”
The recipient of the Roy Markus Scholarship supporting her medical studies, Dr. Laraque received her degree at the University of California at Los Angeles. She continued her studies as a resident at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where she was also a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow in General Academic Pediatrics. She then became an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and at Columbia University. She continued on as Assistant and Associate Professor at Columbia before joining Mount Sinai. She has remained at Mount Sinai for 10 years during which time she became a tenured Professor of Pediatrics and Professor of Preventive Medicine. She founded numerous programs including a joint General Academic Pediatric and General Internal Medicine fellowship in collaboration with Dr. Thomas McGinn, and the child protection program, the Child & Family Support Program.
The Job Lewis Smith Award of the Council on Community Pediatrics of the AAP is named for Job Lewis Smith, MD, one of the founding fathers of the American Pediatric Society and chief pioneer of American pediatrics. The award recognizes exceptional community service to children through teaching, public service, and innovations in patterns of patient care. Past recipients include Bronwen Anders, MD, who works with underserved communities in San Diego and Tijuana; Paula Duncan, MD, who develops primary care improvement strategies in Vermont; Gilbert Handal, MD, who is involved in improving school-based clinics and educational materials in El Paso, Texas; Cal Sia, MD in Hawaii, the father of the medical home concept; and Robert Haggerty, MD in Rochester who coined the term the new morbidities and championed general academic pediatrics.
About The Mount Sinai Medical Center
The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses both The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Established in 1968, Mount Sinai School of Medicine is one of few medical schools embedded in a hospital in the United States. It has more than 3,400 faculty in 32 departments and 15 institutes, and ranks among the top 20 medical schools both in National Institute of Health funding and by U.S. News & World Report. The school received the 2009 Spencer Foreman Award for Outstanding Community Service from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
The Mount Sinai Hospital, founded in 1852, is a 1,171-bed tertiary- and quaternary-care teaching facility and one of the nation’s oldest, largest and most-respected voluntary hospitals. In 2009, U.S. News & World Report ranked The Mount Sinai Hospital among the nation’s top 20 hospitals based on reputation, patient safety, and other patient-care factors. Nearly 60,000 people were treated at Mount Sinai as inpatients last year, and approximately 530,000 outpatient visits took place.
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