School of Medicine Alumni Award Winners
Meet the extraordinary people who make us proud to be part of the OHSU alumni community.
Congratulations to the 2024 School of Medicine Alumni Award Winners
Navid Madani, Ph.D. ’99
Charles A. Preuss Distinguished Alumni Award
“Dr. Madani has a perfect combination of knowledge, skill, background, and institutional support to facilitate this critically important humanitarian effort.” – David Kabat, Ph.D.
Navid Madani, a senior scientist in the Department of Cancer Immunology and Virology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DCFI), has devoted her career to researching HIV and raising awareness of the disease. She is the founding director of the DFCI Science Health Education (SHE) Center, which promotes best practices in medicine, scientific research and the standardization of health care among scientists, clinicians and students from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, along with their counterparts in the U.S. A primary goal of the SHE Center is to support female clinicians, scientists and students in MENA countries.
After the 911 attacks in 2001, Madani, an Iranian emigrant, began to explore ways to promote mutual understanding among people from her home region and adopted country. Her work led to the launch of the SHE Center. At the exact same time that she founded the center, Madani was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer.
“I was scared, but I felt like, it’s going to be okay,” Madani says. “Now I know what cancer patients go through. I can talk to them. I can talk to scientists about improving cancer drugs. I can talk to physicians.”
Sharl Azar, M.D. ’10 R ’13 F ’16
Walter C. Reynolds M.D. Community Service Award
“I began to delve into understanding the lives of our patients and realized there was a social justice and advocacy component to this work, which was born and bred into me in my training at OHSU.” – Sharl Azar, M.D.
Sharl Azar, founder and director of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Comprehensive Sickle Cell Disease Treatment Center, believes the research and treatment of sickle cell disease (SCD) has historically been limited because the disease primarily affects people of color: the U.S. Black population makes up 90% of the nearly 100,000 SCD patients in this country. At the MGH Center, Azar has formed a comprehensive pain and suffering management team for his SCD patients. When the center opened, Azar and his team left the primarily white Beacon Hill neighborhood around the center to visit Boston’s communities of color. They raised awareness about SCD and participated in neighborhood health fairs. Azar became a political advocate, drafting a bill and—with a local representative—introducing it before the Massachusetts state legislature. If passed, it will expand resources for SCD statewide.
Wayne Burton, M.D. ’74
Esther Pohl Lovejoy Leadership Award
“I’ve been very fortunate to have a career that combined clinical medicine, population health management and research.” – Wayne Burton, M.D.
Wayne Burton can reflect with pride on over 40 years as a nationally-recognized innovator and longstanding leader in today’s well-established field of occupational medicine. When he started, occupational medicine was focused on workplace-related injuries and illnesses. In his many years at Bank One and JPMorgan Chase, Burton oversaw an expansion of employee health services from a single clinic to 30 locations, serving hundreds of thousands of employees worldwide. Among the innovations he introduced, Burton launched initiatives related to preventive care and screenings, women’s health and mental health. He was also in the vanguard of addressing issues such as HIV and AIDS in the workplace.
Holly Corbitt, Ph.D. ’18
Richard T. Jones Distinguished Alumnus Scientist Award
“I want to keep evolving with the science—computers and science are really the lynchpin to everything that’s moving forward in the future.” – Holly Corbitt, Ph.D.
Holly Corbitt earned her Ph.D. in molecular and medical genetics at the OHSU School of Medicine, working in the lab of Cheryl Maslen, Ph.D. Corbitt studied genetic risk factors related to pediatric heart defects and diseases in Maslen’s lab. After earning her Ph.D., Corbitt immediately made the jump from academia to industry, joining biotech giant Illumina. After a year, she made the move to the much smaller Twist Bioscience where she is a senior manager overseeing a bioinformatics applications team developing sustainable synthetic DNA tools used in a range of industries, from medicine to agriculture.
Abby Dotson, Ph.D. F ’16
Early Career Achievement Award
“I love being at the intersection of science, technology, and public policy.” – Abby Dotson, Ph.D.
Abby Dotson has been a national leader in developing innovative ways to connect emergency health care providers with patients’ treatment choices when facing serious illness. A research assistant professor of emergency medicine in the OHSU School of Medicine, she also serves as director of the Oregon Portable Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Registry, last year becoming executive director of the National POLST Collaborative. Oregon’s POLST technology initiative enables medically fragile and seriously ill patients to register their medical orders for end-of-life care in a statewide database. The information is considered “portable” because it is accessible wherever patients go for treatment, whether it’s a doctor’s office or a hospital emergency room.
Moira Ray, M.D. ’11 R ’15, M.P.H. ’11
Early Career Achievement Award
“A huge part of my QI job was helping people do the right thing and making the right thing be the easy thing to do.” – Moira Ray, M.D., M.P.H.
When Moira Ray was first introduced to a quality improvement (QI) curriculum as a graduate student, she thought she had no time for what felt like extra work heaped upon the already full physician workload. Ray currently sees a variety of patients at her family medicine clinic and was recently named the associate director of quality for OHSU’s Department of Family Medicine. She has also worked as a clinical epidemiologist at the OHSU Center for Evidence-based Policy, completing evidence reviews for a collaborative of 25 state Medicaid agencies and programs. As the QI lead for her clinic, Ray helped develop a system leading to better patient health outcomes for individuals with diabetes by creating a review committee where team members could present patient needs and get valuable feedback from an interprofessional group.
