by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | December 30, 2015
From the December 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
RSNA Gold Medals
In a tradition that originated in 1919, Gold Medals are presented each year to individuals who have rendered exemplary service to the science of radiology and who have received unanimous approval by the RSNA Board of Directors. Gold Medal awards are RSNA’s highest honor. This year the organization recognized three individuals. Dr. Hedvig Hricak, M.D., Ph.D., Dr.h.c., is internationally renowned for her extensive research and clinical expertise in genitourinary and gynecologic oncologic imaging. Her pioneering work in MRI and MR spectroscopic imaging of prostate cancer and MRI and CT of gynecological cancers helped lay the groundwork for genitourinary and gynecologic oncologic imaging as we know them today.
Dr. Hricak was RSNA President in 2010. Hricak, a native of Zagreb, Croatia, earned a medical degree from the University of Zagreb in 1970. She came to the U.S. two years later, completing her radiology residency at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan, in 1977, followed by a fellowship at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, where she served as a senior staff member. She served from 1982 to 1999 as professor of radiology, radiation oncology and gynecology and, eventually, as head of abdominal imaging in the Department of Radiology at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1999, she assumed her current position as chair of the Department of Radiology, Carroll and Milton Petrie Chair, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York.
She also holds a senior position within the Molecular Pharmacology and Chemistry Program at the Sloan Kettering Institute and is a professor at the Gerstner Sloan Kettering Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, as well as a professor of radiology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Hricak received her Ph.D. (Dr. Med. Sc.) from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1992, and in 2005 became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate in medicine (Dr.h.c.) from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in its 500-year history. She was appointed to the RSNA Board of Directors in 2002 as liaison for publications and communications. Prior to her Board appointment, Dr. Hricak served as chair of RSNA’s Public Information Advisory Board and as a member of other RSNA public information committees.
She has authored or co-authored 18 books, more than 450 research articles, reviews and editorial articles, and more than 130 book chapters. She is an associate editor and editorial board member of numerous premier medical journals, serving as an associate editor of Radiology from 1985 to 1993 and a consultant to the editor of Radiology from 1993 to 1997. Hricak is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) and has served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Cancer Institute and the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
