November 12 Nov 12
2022
Saturday Sat
Event

Alumni Awards Dinner 2022

Each year, the Stanford Medicine Alumni Association presents awards to distinguished alumni for exceptional service to Stanford Medicine and outstanding lifetime contributions to medicine and the biomedical sciences. The Alumni Awards Dinner is an evening awards ceremony celebrating the achievements and in recognition of our outstanding alumni award recipients.

This event is by invitation only.

Alumni Awards & 2022 Recipients

J.E. Wallace Sterling Lifetime Achievement Award in Medicine

In the summer of 1953, J. E. Wallace Sterling, president of Stanford University, persuaded the university trustees to move the School of Medicine from San Francisco to the main Palo Alto campus. The school was moved in 1959, and was transformational in its bringing together, in one location, the resources and pioneering breakthroughs of the School of Medicine, Stanford Hospital, and Stanford University. Stanford Medicine grew steadily in national stature until it attained and now holds a respected place in the front ranks of medical education, scientific achievement, and clinical medicine.

Many years following the move to campus, retired faculty surgeon Gunther W. Nagel, MD ’21, proposed that the school establish an award in Sterling’s name to recognize a distinguished graduate. In 1983, the Stanford Medicine Alumni Association Board of Governors conferred the first J. E. Wallace Sterling Lifetime Achievement Award, now presented annually to a Stanford University School of Medicine MD graduate in recognition of exceptional lifetime achievement in medicine.

 

Sharon Hunt, MD ’72

Dr. Sharon Hunt became interested in cardiology while working summers in a research lab at the Cleveland Clinic as a teen. When she started her career at Stanford as a medical student in 1967, she was one of just seven women in her class. Two years later, Norman Shumway performed the first adult heart transplant in the United States at Stanford. Throughout medical school, Dr. Hunt worked in cardiology research, and became familiar with the trainees and faculty in cardiology. She completed her residency in internal medicine in 1974, and her cardiology fellowship in 1977, both at Stanford, and then joined the faculty. 

The early years of heart transplantation were difficult, and few patients survived very long. In 1977, when Hunt finished her training, survival rates for heart transplant patients began to improve, with one-year survival reaching about 60 percent. The heart surgeons at Stanford were looking for cardiologists to provide long-term care for their transplant recipients who were beginning to survive for longer periods of time and approached Dr. Hunt to join their team. She became a cornerstone of this successful program and was instrumental in improving survival rates by identifying and treating rejection and determining how to reduce the side effects of the drugs used to suppress the immune system. Today, one-year survival after heart transplantation is about 90 percent, and some patients live up to 30-35 years.  

A leader in the field of transplant cardiology, Dr. Hunt has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles, and in 2012 received one of the most coveted awards in the field—the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, joining her mentors Norman Shumway and Margaret Billingham. In 2014, she was awarded Stanford’s Albion Walter Hewlett Award for her lifetime of contributions to clinical medicine at Stanford. 

As a professor emeritus, she continues her clinical practice at 20 percent capacity and is also involved in a moderate amount of writing and editing, working with the online textbook UpToDate among others. 

Yvonne A. Maldonado, MD ’81

Yvonne Maldonado is the Taube Professor of Global Health and Infectious Diseases and senior associate dean for faculty development and diversity at Stanford School of Medicine.

Dr. Maldonado received her MD and completed a pediatric internship at Stanford, before conducting her pediatric residency and fellowship in pediatric infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins University. She then served as a lieutenant commander in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and as an epidemic intelligence service officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1988, she joined the Stanford faculty and is now a professor in the Department of Pediatrics (Infectious Diseases) and the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health. 

Since 1992, Dr. Maldonado has been continuously funded for her work in developing clinical and epidemiologic methods to determine the natural history and prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV infection; understanding immunologic aspects of global measles elimination; and identifying polio eradication strategies through her pioneering field research in Africa, Mexico, and India. She is currently a leader in the national COVID-19 pandemic response, including directing studies to support FDA emergency use authorization approval of a COVID-19 vaccine for children aged 6 months to 11 years. Dr. Maldonado has been a member of numerous national and international committees focused on global child health and control of life-threatening infections in infants and children. She has also been the program director for three National Institutes of Health-funded training grants and has trained more than 100 undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral scholars in pediatrics, infectious diseases, and epidemiology. 

The author of more than 250 research publications, she also serves as co-editor of Infectious Diseases of the Fetus and Newborn Infant and the Red Book, the annual report from the Committee on Infectious Diseases, American Academy of Pediatrics. As senior associate dean, she has built programs to address academic workforce diversity and health disparities and has published research on equity, diversity, and health disparities. She is a first-generation Latina who continues to be a role model because of her dedication to medicine and public health and her successes as an investigator, educator, clinician, and leader in her field.

 

Arthur Kornberg and Paul Berg Lifetime Achievement Award in Biomedical Sciences

In 2010, the Stanford University Medical Center Alumni Association Board of Governors established an award to recognize the lifetime achievements of Stanford University School of Medicine alumni in the biomedical sciences. This award carries the names of Arthur Kornberg, MD, and Paul Berg, PhD, in recognition of their pioneering contributions to medicine and their service to Stanford.

In 1959, Dr. Kornberg came to Stanford as chair of the newly established Department of Biochemistry. In the same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine along with Severo Ochoa for their work in elucidating how DNA is built. These basic studies paved the road to recombinant DNA and genetic engineering, now important elements in the treatment of cancer and viral infections.

Dr. Berg also came to Stanford in 1959. His work with recombinant DNA, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1980, helped launch the biotechnology industry.Drs. Berg and Kornberg brought to Stanford a passion for discovery, groundbreaking research, and a strong spirit of excitement and cooperation. They helped forge an environment that has produced generations of highly successful students and postdoctoral fellows, and in so doing, shaped the future of the School of Medicine. This lifetime achievement award honors their legacy.

 

Richard Aldrich, Jr., PhD ’80

Richard Aldrich graduated with high distinction from the University of Arizona in 1975 with a BS in biological sciences. He received his PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University, after which he did postdoctoral work at Yale University under the direction of W. Knox Chandler and Charles F. Stevens and joined the faculty at Yale in the Section of Molecular Neurobiology. In 1985 he returned to Stanford as a faculty member in the Department of Neurobiology and subsequently the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, where he served as department chair from 2001-2004. Dr. Aldrich was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1990 until 2006, when he moved to the University of Texas in Austin, where he is the Karl Folkers Chair in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research II and a professor of neuroscience. 
 
Dr. Aldrich studies the molecular, biophysical, and physiological function of ion channels—the molecular units of electrical signaling in cells. They are the proteins that regulate the movement of ions—such as sodium, calcium, and potassium—into and out of cells. They are responsible for the conversion of external sensory signals to the electrical language of the nervous system and for the integration of these signals to generate appropriate behavior. Ion channels are also important for the generation and regulation of the heartbeat, for contraction of muscles, and for the release of hormones in the bloodstream. 
 
Work in the Aldrich Lab is directed towards understanding the mechanisms of ion channel function and the role of ion channels in electrical signaling and physiology. The Aldrich Lab uses a combination of molecular biology, electrophysiology, biophysics, cellular and systems physiology, and computational biology to explore questions about the mechanics and function of ion channels. A second research focus is on the biophysics of the calcium signaling protein calmodulin. 
 
Dr. Aldrich has served on the council and as president of the Society of General Physiologists, and of the Biophysical Society. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and Sigma Xi, and is a member of the National Academy of Science.

 

Marian Carlson, PhD ’78

Marian Carlson received her AB summa cum laude in biochemical sciences from Harvard University in 1973 and her PhD in biochemistry from Stanford University in 1978. After completing postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1981, where she was a professor of genetics and development, now emerita, and served as a senior associate dean and vice dean for research at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center from 2005-2008.  
 
Dr. Carlson’s laboratory used genetic and molecular genetic analysis in yeast to identify and elucidate conserved mechanisms of signal transduction and transcriptional regulation. Notably, her lab identified the genes encoding the SNF proteins of the SWI-SNF chromatin remodeling complex and the SNF1/AMP-activated protein kinase pathway, which are highly conserved and have major roles in human regulatory processes.  
 
In 2008, she took a leave of absence to serve as a senior scientific officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), supporting the research of HHMI investigators across the nation and guiding the Institute’s Early Career Scientist Program. In 2010, she accepted a part-time role at the Simons Foundation and became director of its Life Sciences Division in 2013, where she established a program focusing on microbial oceanography, marine microbial ecology and evolution, computational biogeochemical modeling of marine ecosystems, and origins of life. Microbes in the global ocean capture solar energy, produce and consume greenhouse gases, export carbon to the deep sea, and support the food web—and thus have key roles in sustaining life on earth. Efforts to maintain a planet that is a healthy habitat for humans will rely on deeper understanding of global marine microbiomes. 
 
Dr. Carlson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a past president of the Genetics Society of America, and received the 2009 Genetics Society of America Medal.

 

Location

Stanford University School of Medicine
291 Campus Dr.
Palo Alto, CA 94305
USA

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Stanford University School of Medicine

291 Campus Dr.
Palo Alto, CA 94305
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