UW News

August 22, 2002

Surgery’s Strauss Lecture features MGH chief surgeon

The Department of Surgery’s 53rd annual Strauss Lecture will be given this year by Dr. Andrew Warshaw, surgeon in chief and chair of the Department of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and W. Gerald Austen professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School.

He will speak on “Probing the Biology of Pancreatic Cancer” at 4 p.m., Friday, Sept. 13, in Hogness Auditorium at the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is free and open to everyone.

In spite of the best available treatment, pancreatic cancer kills nearly all of its victims, in part because of the late stage at which most cases are diagnosed. Warshaw now believes that better outcomes for pancreatic cancer patients will depend on understanding and controlling the developmental biology, functional genetics and protein interactions of pancreatic cancer cells.

Warshaw is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School and trained in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the faculty in 1972 and was named to his present position as surgeon in chief and surgery chair in 1997. He chaired the American Board of Surgery in 1993 and is a senior member of that group and a governor of the American College of Surgeons. Warshaw is editor in chief of the journal Surgery and a member of several other editorial boards.

He is known as an authority on pancreatic disorders and has written widely on the causes and treatment of inflammatory diseases and tumors of the pancreas.

The lecture honors the late Dr. Alfred Strauss, a 1904 UW graduate who went on to earn an M.D. degree from Rush Medical College of Chicago. As an indication of his continued interest in the UW, Strauss began sponsoring annual surgical lectureships at the School of Medicine in 1950. Today, sponsorship of the Strauss Lecture is maintained by Margery Friedlander, Strauss’ daughter.