Comes with $250,000 each, for individual achievement.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Sanjeev Arora and Abraham Verghese are among the recipients of the 2014 Heinz Award, an annual honor given out to recognize individual achievement across a variety of different fields.
A total of five recipients were named for this year’s award, and each will receive a cash prize of $250,000.
Established in 1993 by the famous Heinz family, the award recognizes accomplishments in the following fields: Arts and Humanities, Environment, Human Condition, Public Policy, and Technology, the Economy and Employment.
Arora is being awarded for his contributions to helping change the healthcare sector irreversibly by creating video conferencing technologies that can be used by physicians and doctors around the world. This allows them to share medical information faster, and even helps with educational purposes such as showing how medical procedures are done. While video conferencing is certainly not all that new, the application of it in the field of healthcare has been described as revolutionary by some.
Currently, Arora is the Director of Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) and a tenured Professor of Medicine, in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (UNMHSC). He has been educated in both India and the US, earning his M.D. in Pune and completing a residency in New Delhi before coming to New York. His areas of clinical expertise are gastroenterology and hepatology.
Verghese is being recognized for his work as a writer and physician. He is currently a professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University Medical School and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine, but is also a renowned author and public speaker. His novel “Cutting for Stone,” which contains autobiographical elements of his time growing up in Ethiopia, was featured on the New York Times Bestsellers List and was lauded by newspapers across the country. His talks often deal with healing the body in more ways than just physical.
As the Heinz Family Foundation put it, “Dr. Verghese’s widely acclaimed writings touch the heart and inform the soul, giving people of all walks of life a true understanding of what it is to heal the whole person – not just physically, but emotionally.”
Verghese was born to parents originally from Kerala, but has lived in Ethiopia too. He earned his MBBS degree from the Madras Medical College in 1979 before coming to the US. He joined a residency program at East Tennessee State University from 1980 to 1983, and in 1991, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com