Announcing the Scharschmidt~Crawford Translational Medicine Distinguished Lectureship and Award
The ASCI is honored to announce a new recognition for its community: the Bruce F. Scharschmidt & Peggy S. Crawford Translational Medicine Distinguished Lectureship and Award, which recognizes important contributions to the development of high-impact diagnostics or therapeutics for patients.
The Awardee delivers the Scharschmidt~Crawford Distinguished Lectureship at the annual AAP/ASCI/APSA Joint Meeting and receives an unrestricted $20,000 honorarium. Drs. Scharschmidt and Crawford have pledged a very generous philanthropic gift to the ASCI to fully endow the Award, the first of which will be presented at the 2025 Joint Meeting.
The ASCI will begin accepting nominations for the inaugural Award on September 5, with full details on eligibility criteria and the nomination process provided at that time.
About Drs. Scharschmidt and Crawford
Dr. Scharschmidt was elected to the ASCI in 1982. He served as the 1987-1992 Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Clinical Investigation and as the ASCI’s 1992-1993 President. He attended Northwestern University’s Undergraduate School and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine (NUFSM) and finished his postgraduate training at the National Institutes of Health and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He then served as Professor of Medicine and Chief of Gastroenterology at UCSF, where he and colleagues launched the UCSF liver-transplant program. In 1996 he was recruited to Chiron to head clinical development and biometrics. He was most recently Chief Medical and Development Officer at Hyperion Therapeutics where he oversaw the development of glycerol phenylbutyrate (GPB), an ammonia-lowering agent, which was approved for the treatment of urea-cycle disorders and which achieved success in a phase 2 trial for hepatic encephalopathy.
Dr. Scharschmidt has authored over 200 research and review articles, is inventor/co-inventor on multiple patents, and has published several children’s picture books intended as a fun and early introduction to science. He served as Editor of Sleisenger & Fordtran’s Textbook of Gastroenterology, on the National Board of Directors of the American Liver Foundation, on the President’s Council of UCSF’s J. David Gladstone Institutes, and as mentor to colleagues in academia and industry. He served on the External Advisory Board for the NUFSM Clinical and Translational Science Award (2008-2021), was named Distinguished NUFSM Alumnus in 2010, served as President of the NUFSM Medical Alumni Board (2015-2017), and received the prestigious Service to Northwestern Award in 2018. He has raised over $100,000 for multiple foundations, including the American Liver Foundation, the Karen Department of Health and Welfare (a Myanmar welfare organization for which he and his son organized a fund-raiser bike ride from central Thailand to the Myanmar border), and the National Urea Cycle Disorders Foundation.
Dr. Crawford has devoted her career to the care of her patients and mentoring the next generation of dermatologists. She graduated from Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where she also completed a rotating medical internship. She did further post-graduate training with Dr. Steven Katz in the Dermatology Branch of the NIH and completed her Dermatology Residency at UCSF. Afterward, she joined the Kaiser Permanente Medical Group of Northern California. She has served as Clinical Professor of Dermatology on the UCSF volunteer faculty, where she helped mentor and teach a generation of UCSF dermatology residents.
Dr. Crawford has been recognized multiple times as Community Faculty Awardee of the Year by the dermatology residents at UCSF, where she served as member and Chair of the Clinical Faculty Promotions Committee. She has also served on the Board of The Women’s Dermatologic Society, has been an awardee of the Mediterranean Academy of Women in Dermatology, and is a recipient of the Dermatology Foundation’s prestigious Clark W. Finnerud Award, given annually to one U.S. dermatologist who demonstrates exemplary service as a practitioner and teacher.
Drs. Scharschmidt and Crawford have two children: Brent Scharschmidt, MD, is a family medicine physician at the Permanente Medical Group of Northern California and Tiffany Scharschmidt, MD (elected to the ASCI in 2024), is Professor in the UCSF Department of Dermatology, where she currently serves as Vice Chair for Research.