After 43 years, Stan Cohen is retiring. He deserves enormous credit for the successes of our group and I wanted to highlight some of his many accomplishments and innovations.

Clinical care:

• I am certain Stan has seen more kids with GI problems than any physician in the State of Georgia (possibly the entire country). He is well-known for his dedication and caring. Areas of special expertise include children with inflammatory bowel disease and children with special needs

Publications/Research:

• In addition to his numerous scientific articles and book chapters, Dr. Cohen edited two textbooks for physicians and wrote two books for parents: 1. Healthy Babies, Happy Kids: a Common Sense Guide to Nutrition for Growing Years. 2. What to Feed Your Baby
• Stan has participated in a lot of clinical research projects. Some notable publications include pioneering the use of the patency capsule for capsule endoscopy, developing a scoring system for capsule endoscopy, and the first prospective study of a specific diet for IBD

Service:

• He was the founding chairman of the Committee on Nutrition for the Georgia Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and chairman of the Physicians Advisory Board of The Georgia WIC Program. In this role, he developed a cost-sensitive, evidence-based algorithm to assist health care providers select the appropriate infant formula for infants with various problems. It is estimated that this saved the state of Georgia 56 million dollars
• Nutrition4Kids.com and the Nutrition4Kids Foundation were established by Dr. Cohen (with the help of his son David and Mark Lorimer) to provide medically curated educational content for parents and providers
• Stan has lectured extensively at local, national and international medical conferences
• He provided critical input in El Salvador during its civil war to lower infant mortality

Recognition:

• Premier Physician of the Crohns and Colitis Foundation of Georgia (1995)
• Turner Broadcasting featured Dr Cohen in 2001 as one of Atlanta’s “Super 17” for his contributions to the community and specifically for his role in starting Camp Colitiscope (now Camp Oasis)
• Honored by the Atlanta Alliance on Developmental Disabilities for his work on feeding and nutrition for children with neurodevelopmental delays
• Lay Education Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics for his work promoting a school curriculum to teach and promote non-abusive behaviors which was used in Fulton County and later adopted by other school systems in the country, the state of Hawaii and maternal child health programs
• He is also a recipient of The Natasha Trethewey Poetry Prize. His poems have been included in various poetry journals. Additionally, several of his poems have been published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, while others are archived and available audibly on TheArtSection website.  

Stan has many interests outside medicine. He has always had an interest in artwork, good eating, corny jokes, and his family. I am so grateful to Stan for helping to develop our GI group, for his service to children/families, his advice, his friendship and even most of his jokes.