Medicine faculty win Doris Duke Awards

Two faculty members in the Department of Medicine have received Doris Duke Clinical Scientist Awards, the first ever awarded. Only 14 awards were made nationwide, and the UW was the only institution to receive more than one award.

The recipients are Dr. Marshall Horwitz of the Division of Medical Genetics and Dr. Jonathan Drachman of the Division of Hematology. Each will receive $100,000 a year for three years, plus an additional 8 percent to cover indirect costs.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation inaugurated the awards this year, and will make them annually to support new investigators at the assistant professor level as they begin their careers as independent clinical researchers.

The program focuses on development of clinical researchers in the areas of most interest to the late Doris Duke: heart diseases, AIDS, cancer, and sickle cell anemia and other blood disorders. The awards assist young scientists in building their clinical research programs to the point they can compete effectively for federal research funding.

Horwitz is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of California at San Diego. He received a Ph.D. in pathology from the UW in 1988, and an M.D., also from the UW, in 1990. He did his residency at the UW and was appointed an assistant professor in 1995. He is an attending physician in general internal medicine and at the Medical Genetics and Family Cancer Genetics Clinic at UW Medical Center. His research focuses on diseases that cluster in families, especially leukemia.

Drachman is a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University in biochemistry. He received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1989, and did his residency at the UW. He was appointed acting assistant professor in the Division of Hematology at the UW in 1997. He is an attending physician in UW Medical Center’s Cancer Center. His research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of megakaryocyte development and platelet formation, crucial to blood clotting. (Megakaryocytes are large cells in the bone marrow that give rise to platelets.)

Laurie McHale