Warshaw, Joseph (19362003)

Joseph Warshaw was a American pediatrician who investigated the growth of human organs in fetuses using biochemical, cell biological, and molecular techniques. Throughout his career, Warshaw was a staunch supporter of education for pediatric scientists and was responsible for launching new academic programs and raising funds for medical research. He is unanimously considered a leading figure in pediatrics for his contributions to the understanding of how organs mature during pregnancies.

Warshaw was born in Miami, Florida, in 1936. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Florida. He then went on to Duke University where he received his medical degree. He served his residency in pediatrics at Duke and the University of Rochester. Warshaw held faculty positions at prestigious institutions such as Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital from 1967 to 1973; the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he was hired as a professor and chair of pediatrics between 1982 and 1987; the Children's Hospital at Yale-New Haven, where he was Physician-in-Chief; and Yale University School of Medicine, where he served as Professor and Chairman of Pediatrics and Deputy Dean for Clinical Affairs. Warshaw worked at Yale from 1973 to 1982 and from 1987 to 2000. After he left Yale, he became Dean of the University of Vermont College of Medicine, a position he retained until his death.

Since his early career at Harvard, Warshaw developed a particular interest in the care of newborns and in the area of developmental metabolism. His extensive research in these fields are summarized in more than 100 papers and several book-length studies. Warshaw served on many editorial boards of academic journals, including Pediatrics and Pediatric Research, and he coedited Oski's Principles and Practice of Pediatrics. Because of the prominent positions he held as university administrator in various institutions, Warshaws career was equally divided between scientific research and academic organization.

He always encouraged medical students to apply scientific discoveries to daily patient care. While dean at the University of Vermont, he gave a fundamental contribution to the launching of the university's new medical curriculum in 35 years, which combines basic and clinical sciences with notions of leadership and team building. While at UMV, Warshaw also helped to devise the joint M.D./Ph.D. program and to attract more funds for university research, focusing in particular on areas such as [Page 1756]cancer, cardiovascular disease, neuroscience, and lung biology.

In addition to holding prestigious positions at American universities, Warshaw was also a Josiah Macy Faculty Scholar at the University of Oxford. Throughout his career, he served on medical societies, committees, and boards of trustees. Warshaw was a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, the Society for Pediatric Research becoming its president in 1982, the American Pediatric Society, the American Society for Biologic Chemists, the American Society for Cell Biology, the Eastern Society for Pediatric Research, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science.

Warshaw founded and served on the Steering and Selection Committees for the Pediatrician/Scientist Training Program and took part in the Advisory Council of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health. He chaired the board of trustees of the International Pediatric Research Foundation and lent his expertise to many external review committees, including the Scientific Advisory Board of St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, Toronto Children's Hospital Research Institute, and the Children's Hospital of Cincinnati.

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