Milewicz Named Distinguished Professional Woman

Dianna Milewicz, M.D., Ph.D.

Dianna Milewicz, M.D., Ph.D., who holds the President George Bush Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine, will be honored Wednesday, Dec. 7, as the 2005 Distinguished Professional Woman.

2005 Distinguished Professional Woman Committee on the Status of Women will honor Milewicz and three recipients of the President’s Award for Mentoring Women at the annual awards banquet in the Edwin Hornberger Conference Center, 2151 W. Holcombe Blvd. The event begins at 5:30 p.m. with a cash bar, followed at 6:30 p.m. by dinner and the awards ceremony.

Winners of the mentoring awards are Faculty – Luann Aday, Ph.D., the Lorne D. Bain Distinguished Professor in Public Health and Medicine, UT School of Public Health; Administrative and Professional – Karen Adler Storthz, Ph.D., associate dean for research, UT Dental Branch at Houston; and Classified Staff – Denise Carpenter, senior trainer, Human Resources.

Milewicz is professor and director of the Division of Medical Genetics, UT Medical School at Houston, and a faculty member in the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston. She was nominated by Hariyadarshi Pannu, Ph.D., research instructor in the Division of Medical Genetics.

She was named a Doris Duke Distinguished Clinical Scientist in 2002 and was elected a fellow of the Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine Program in 2004. Her research program focuses primarily on vascular diseases to understand the genetic basis of aortic aneurysms and dissections.