Medical School honors two alumni

Two Southern Illinois University School of Medicine graduates will receive distinguished alumni awards during commencement exercises Saturday, May 21, in Springfield.

The award from the Medical School's Alumni Society Board of Governors recognizes outstanding contributions to medicine and distinguished service to humankind.

The 2005 recipients are 1977 graduate Dr. Ronald L. Johnson, a family practitioner working in Pittsfield and Pike County since 1981, and 1980 graduate Dr. Susan E. (Anderson) Swedo, associate director for child and adolescent research and chief of the developmental psychopathology and prevention research branch at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md.

Johnson, from Hillsboro, trained as a respiratory therapy technician and a received a bachelor's degree from Eastern Illinois University in 1974. He completed his family practice residency at the medical school's program in Carbondale in 1980.

Swedo, originally from Geneseo, earned her bachelor's degree at Augustana College in Rock Island in 1977, and completed her pediatric residency at Children's Memorial Hospital at McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University in 1983. She began her career on the faculty of Northwestern University while also practicing as a pediatrician in Evanston, including co-directing the pediatric ICU at Evanston Hospital from 1983 to 1986. She began as a research fellow in child psychiatry in NIMH in 1986 and became a senior staff research fellow in 1988. She has authored more than 90 professional books and articles.

Commencement exercises for the medical school's 31st graduating class begin at noon in the Sangamon Auditorium at the University of Illinois Springfield. Sixty-seven physicians and one doctoral student will graduate.