May 21, 2020 | Community, COVID-19, Featured
Actor, singer, and Broadway performer Ciarán Sheehan thanked health care workers at The Mount Sinai Hospital with a repertoire of emotional, uplifting Broadway tunes on Tuesday, May 19. Mr. Sheehan completed the stirring musical performance before dozens of socially distanced patients, staff, and onlookers in the Guggenheim Pavilion with the hopes that his voice would echo throughout the Hospital.
“Mount Sinai holds a special place in my heart because my first son was born here,” said Mr. Sheehan of his desire to perform at the Hospital. “I wanted to say thank you for all that they are doing. I hope they enjoy it.”
Mr. Sheehan, who starred in Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, performed various theatre standards including “Bring Him Home” and “Music of the Night” from the respective productions. He also performed “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel—a musical drama about love and loss—which may resonate with the difficulty faced by both patients and health care workers, many of whom have been compelled to distance themselves from friends and family during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It is my favorite Rogers and Hammerstein song about overcoming adversity in life and being guided and cared for by those who love you, whether you can see them or not.”
From left: David L. Reich, MD, President, The Mount Sinai Hospital; Ciarán Sheehan; and Erica Rubinstein, LCSW, CPXP, Vice President, Patient Experience, Mount Sinai Health System, prior to the performance.
Staff look on as Mr. Sheehan performs.
Mar 31, 2020 | Community, Research
Mone Zaidi, MD, PhD, left, accepting the honor in February from Steven Chu, PhD, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Nobel laureate in Physics.
Mone Zaidi, MD, PhD, Director of the Mount Sinai Bone Program, and Professor of Medicine (Endocrinology, Diabetes and Bone Disease) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society. Dr. Zaidi, who accepted the award on Saturday, February 15, at the AAAS conference in Seattle, Washington, was selected for his seminal contributions to endocrinology and skeletal biology, particularly the discovery of pituitary-metabolic circuits that regulate body fat, bone mass, and metabolism.
The lifetime honor was awarded to 443 scientists, of whom 35, including Dr. Zaidi, are in medical sciences. He says, “I am grateful that the research conducted by my laboratory colleagues is appreciated as having an impact on the scientific community.”
Updated on Nov 14, 2025 | Community
The host, Ritzy Bitz, third from right, with the contestants, from left: Tyler Martinson, Phil Cohen, Julio Ramos, Christopher Panebianco, Ben Ben-Zvi, and Felipe Garzon.
Delivering a good time for a good cause, the Second Annual Mount Sinai Charity Drag Race was held in Stern Auditorium on Thursday, February 6. More than 400 people attended the event, which was inspired by the reality television competition RuPaul’s Drag Race and raised $7,800 for the Ali Forney Center—a Harlem-based nonprofit dedicated to supporting homeless LGBTQ youth. The Drag Race was organized by oSTEM (Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) at Mount Sinai and the Stonewall Alliance.
The event was hosted by drag star Ritzy Bitz and featured six contestants: four Icahn School of Medicine students, a research associate, and a New York University graduate student.
“This event hits everything we stand for—increasing visibility of the LGBTQIA+ community, bringing together diverse students, faculty, and staff, and actively engaging the broader New York community,” says an organizer and contestant, Christopher Panebianco, PhD candidate in Biomedical Sciences. “And it’s a fun night.”
Mar 10, 2020 | Community
Hansel Arroyo, MD, and Lyse Aybar, LCSW
Two Mount Sinai mental health professionals traveled to Puerto Rico in February to aid residents recovering from recent disasters—Hurricane Dorian in August 2019 and a 6.4 earthquake in January 2020. Thousands of displaced people are living in government camps, as smaller quakes still shake the island.
“This is a serious ongoing crisis. People have been traumatized, and they need mental health assistance,” said Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, who on Monday, February 3, sent a delegation of 26 bilingual volunteers to Puerto Rico, including Hansel Arroyo, MD, Director of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai’s Institute for Advanced Medicine and Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery; and Lyse Aybar, LCSW, Clinical Manager of the Comprehensive Emergency Psychiatric Program at Mount Sinai Beth Israel.
Deployed from four days to a week, volunteers provided crisis counseling in government camps and in the cities Yuaco and Villabla; conducted mental health canvassing; and staffed a crisis telephone hotline.
Mar 10, 2020 | Community
The Mount Sinai and Helsinki teams were led by Tao Xu, MD, Medical Director, Mount Sinai International (MSI); Jonathan Wetzel, MBA, Senior Director, MSI; and Sanna-Maria Kivivuori, MD, PhD, EMBA, Chief Quality Officer, Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS). Top leaders not pictured are Szabi Dorotovics, MD, MBA, President, MSI; and Markku Mäkijärvi, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer, HUS.
Mount Sinai International (MSI) has entered into a collaborative relationship with the Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) in Helsinki, Finland. A 12-person team from Mount Sinai recently performed a week-long assessment of HUS facilities.
The initial focus is advising HUS on achieving Joint Commission International accreditation in six clinical areas (Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine; Ophthalmology, Otorhinolaryngology, and Oral Surgery; Pediatrics; Obstetrics and Gynecology; Psychiatry; and Oncology).
HUS is a 17-hospital system that includes Helsinki University Hospital—one of the largest hospitals in Europe and the largest university hospital in Finland—which treats the nation’s most severe and rare illnesses.
Mar 10, 2020 | Community, Featured
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams, MD, MPH, center, with David L. Reich, MD, President and Chief Operating Officer, The Mount Sinai Hospital, right, and Jonathan S. Gal, MD, Assistant Professor, Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine.
The Mount Sinai Hospital in February hosted a lecture by U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams, MD, MPH, who called upon the hospital’s medical community to embrace their role as “health advocates” while helping to guide the public in critical areas such as smoking cessation and the treatment and prevention of opioid abuse.
During a question-and-answer session in Hatch Auditorium that was led by Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, Dr. Adams said, “We need more of you to use your voices.”
There is a lot of misinformation on the internet, said Dr. Adams, a board certified anesthesiologist. “It’s going to take a hands-on approach for us to communicate to people what it will take for them to be healthy.”
Dr. Adams discussed his priorities as Surgeon General. He said he was pleased that the United States has the lowest rate of cigarette smoking among adults and youth in history, but was also dismayed by a rise in e-cigarette smoking among high school and middle school students.
For the first time in 20 years, he said, national opioid-related deaths were decreasing, yet every 11 minutes someone still dies from opioid abuse. He also said the trend toward legalizing the use of marijuana in many states did not take into account the negative effects of its active ingredient, THC, on the developing brains of youngsters or on pregnant women.
Medical professionals in every specialty should help people understand the health consequences of their actions, he said, and be as well trained in handling drug abuse as they are in managing relatively commonplace complications, such as hypertension.
