Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center honored four caregivers with the 2011 James W. Varnum Quality Award, according to a Thursday DHMC press release. The recipients Richard Fedorchak, Amy Moore, Sara Roebuck and James Tracy have collectively served patients for almost 50 years and were selected from several dozen nominees, the press release said. Fedorak is a nurse coordinator in the pediatric hematology and oncology deparment, Moore is a certified medical assistant in orthopaedics, Roebuck is a staff nurse for the oncology infusion suite at Norris Cotton Cancer Center and Tracy is manager of support services and education in the pathology department. The award, which recognizes outstanding national leaders in health care quality improvement initiatives, is presented annually and is named for Jim Varnum, a health care leader who served as president of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock alliance, according to a December 2010 DHMC press release. Varnum attended the Oct. 19 awards ceremony this year, the press release said.
Brown University announced an 18.5 percent return on its endowment, totaling $2.5 billion for the fiscal year 2011, The Brown Daily Herald reported Thursday. Market success precipitated this gain, which exceeds both last year's 6.9 percent return and the university's average return of 7.7 percent over the past 10 years, The Daily Herald reported. The gains come after Brown's $2.8 billion endowment declined 27 percent following the 2008 economic recession. Brown's investment strategy is "slightly more conservative" than that of its peer institutions due to its smaller endowment, Beppie Huidekoper, Brown's executive vice president for finance and administration, said in an interview with The Daily Herald. Within the Ivy League, Columbia University's endowment grew the most up by 23.6 percent followed by those of Princeton University and Yale University, which grew by 21.9 percent each. Dartmouth posted a 18.4 percent increase over the same period.
New York University discontinued its funding for National Merit scholarships because of the belief that students should not receive financial reward based on standardized test scores, Bloomberg Businessweek reported Friday. NYU's first-year students will not receive scholarships, but upperclassmen scholars will continue to receive funding from the organization, Bloomberg reported. NYU is now one of at least nine institutions that have removed themselves from the program, along with the University of California system's six campuses, University of Texas, Austin and Wake Forest University, Bloomberg reported. Dartmouth and other Ivy League schools do not award merit-based aid and as a result already do not participate in the program, Bloomberg reported.
