The ATS will recognize four physicians and researchers for their remarkable contributions to medicine during Sunday’s Awards Session, featuring the Amberson Lecture and the presentation of the Trudeau Medal and two Distinguished Achievement Awards.

Amberson Lecture
Jahar Bhattacharya, MD, DPhil., will deliver this year’s Amberson Lecture on “Lung Injury as Seen Through the Lens of the Alveolus.” He is professor of medicine and director of lung research at Columbia University in New York. The Amberson Lecture recognizes exemplary professionalism, collegiality, and citizenship through mentorship and leadership in the ATS community.

Jahar Bhattacharya

In his lecture, Dr. Bhattacharya plans to cover several key points including:
– Visualizing the onset of alveolar injury
– Macrophage-epithelial interactions in alveolar immunity
– Alveolar mitochondria in injury resolution

Dr. Bhattacharya said the goal of his lecture is to convey unique alveolar mechanisms of evolution and resolution of immunity. “The ATS membership will learn about new mechanistic approaches to therapy for lung injury.”

Dr. Bhattacharya’s live lung studies led to the discovery of a new class of lung macrophages, now called sessile alveolar macrophages (SAMs), that communicate Ca²⁺ with the lung epithelium via GAP junctions to suppress immunity during endotoxin challenge.  His group has recently demonstrated that S. aureus stabilize in the lung in alveolar niches, accounting for the severity of lung injury in an infection model. His work has had implications for basic understanding of lung vascular biology, cellular physiology, immunity, and the pathogenesis and repair of acute lung injury. 

Jacob I. Sznajder

Edward Livingston Trudeau Medal
The recipient of this year’s Edward Livingston Trudeau Medal is Jacob I. Sznajder, MD. The Trudeau Medal recognizes lifelong major contributions to prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of lung disease through leadership in research, education, or clinical care. Dr. Sznajder is professor of medicine and cell and molecular biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. His research has focused on the mechanisms of lung injury and edema clearance, effects of hypercapnia and hypoxia, and signal transduction pathways in the lungs. Dr. Sznajder is passionate about the training of physician/scientists and researchers of diverse backgrounds.

Distinguished Achievement Awards
John Hansen-Flaschen, MD, ATSF, and Meir Kryger, MD, will receive this year’s Distinguished Achievement Awards. 

John Hansen-Flaschen

Dr. Hansen-Flaschen is a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He served from 1990 to 2015 as the third chief of the Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Division at the university, where he also founded the multidisciplinary Paul Harron Lung Center in 2007.

Dr. Hansen-Flaschen redirected his scholarship to an exploration of the burdens endured by patients and family members in ICUs. At a time when many people thought the practice was tantamount to euthanasia, he was the first at the University of Pennsylvania to palliatively withdraw mechanical ventilation in the presence of family members and with full medical record documentation. The practice took hold locally and was reported in a series of newspaper articles published in 1983 that won a Pulitzer prize for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Dr. Hansen-Flaschen expanded on that experience to write about and advocate for routine, active engagement of intensivists in family-centered palliative care of patients near the end of life. He was also one of the first to draw the attention of medical intensivists to the benefits and perils of intravenous sedation and analgesia for the palliative management of acute respiratory failure. 

Meir Kryger

Meir Kryger, MD, is a professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who has been treating patients with sleep disorders for more than 40 years. He has also worked as professor of medicine at the University of Manitoba in Canada, and was director of the Sleep Disorders Center at St. Boniface Hospital Research Center, the first clinical laboratory studying patients with sleep breathing problems in Canada. He described what is probably the first case of sleep apnea in North America while a trainee at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Canada. 

Dr. Kryger is chief editor of The Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine, a textbook that is now in its sixth edition, and the Atlas of Clinical Sleep Medicine. He has published more than 200 peer reviewed articles and book chapters. His next project is called Dreaming in Color, which explores how artists look at sleep.