Congratulations to Professor Fred T. Lee Jr., MD for winning the 2021 Hector F. DeLuca Scientific Achievement Award. The award will be presented during the 2021 Wisconsin Biohealth Summit on October 7th, 2021. The Biohealth Summit is presented by BioForward and provides an opportunity for Wisconsin’s biohealth community to celebrate successes and collaborate.
Dr. Lee has been selected for the award for his numerous scientific achievements in biohealth. He has over 250 scientific publications, more than 60 major awards, 25 patents and inventions, and substantial grant funding. He has invented two of the most widely used tumor ablation devices, which have treated over 50,000 patients to date. You can learn more about Dr. Lee’s research here.
“I feel extremely fortunate and honored to have won the Hector F. DeLuca Scientific Achievement Award for 2021, primarily because it highlights the fertile environment for discovery that we have here at the University of Wisconsin, UWSMPH, and the Department of Radiology. I am very grateful to our university, medical school, and department leadership for the many opportunities that I have been given to push the boundaries of scientific discovery,” he says.
“However, as we all know, most medical advances require a multidisciplinary team of talented individuals-and I am getting too much credit for the work of many others: Chris Brace, Paul Laeseke, Jamey Weichert, Tim Ziemlewicz, Louis Hinshaw, Meg Lubner, Emily Knott, Annie Zlevor, Jim White and my longtime partner Dan van der Weide from the School of Engineering contributed much of the work upon which this award is based. Lastly, without moving our discoveries from ‘bench-to-bedside,’ patients would not benefit from our work in the lab. To achieve this, we partnered with and learned from talented business people like Laura King, Dan Sullivan, Rick Schefelker, Ginger Sands, Jim Berbee, Mike Blue, and the WARF team who took our ideas and transformed them into medical devices that are being used around the world today,” Dr. Lee adds.