printable versionCornfield and Weinberg awarded Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorships
BY KRISTA CONGER
Kenneth Weinberg
David Cornfield
The Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health and the School of Medicine recently established two new endowed professorships. Kenneth Weinberg, MD, is the first holder of the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in Pediatric Cancer and Blood Diseases, and David Cornfield, MD, is the first holder of the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine.
The Professorship in Pediatric Cancer and Blood Diseases was established in February through a gift from Anne and Robert Bass. Matching funds were also contributed from the Campaign for Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, which was led by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
The Bass family requested that the first holder of the professorship be a member of the Department of Pediatrics whose research, teaching and/or clinical practice is focused on bone marrow transplantation. Subsequent holders of the professorship should specialize in pediatric hematology, oncology, or stem cell transplantation and be regarded by the medical community as forward thinking in their approach to cancer research or the provision of care to children with cancer.
Weinberg comes to Packard Children's from Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, where he is the director of the hospital's clinical laboratory, division of bone marrow transplantation and research immunology and a professor of pediatrics and molecular microbiology and immunology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. In 2003 he received the H. Russell Smith Award for Innovation in Pediatric Biomedical Research for outstanding contributions to the field of pediatric immunology. He attended medical school at Stanford and completed his residencies in Montefiore Medical Center in New York and at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles. He is board certified in pediatrics and in pediatric hematology/oncology. He will arrive at Packard Children's full-time in June to serve as the new director of pediatric stem cell transplantation.
Anne and Robert Bass have strong ties to both Stanford and children's health. Robert Bass, who is the president of the Fort Worth investment firm Keystone Inc. received an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He joined the university's board of trustees in 1989, and was board chairman from 1996 to 2000. He was re-elected to the board in 2002. Anne Bass is a director of the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health and was co-chair of the Campaign for Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, where she is a member of the board of directors.
Although the Bass's dedication to children inspired an anonymous donor to establish the Professorship in Pediatric Pulmonary Medicine in 2000 a national dearth of outstanding pediatric pulmonary experts resulted in a lengthy search to fill the position. Cornfield arrived at Packard Children's in November 2005 from the University of Minnesota, where he was the head of pediatric pulmonary and critical care medicine.
Cornfield is now the director of Packard Children's Pulmonary Care and Cystic Fibrosis Center of Excellence and the hospital's chief of pediatric pulmonary medicine. His arrival will serve both to broaden the center's strong base of general pediatric pulmonary medicine and to enhance its ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations with pediatric critical care specialists and others at Packard Children's.