Govindan receives award relating smoking and disease

Ramaswamy Govindan, MD, the Anheuser-Busch Endowed Chair in Medical Oncology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, is one of two researchers to receive the 31st annual Alton Ochsner Award Relating Smoking and Disease. The award recognizes investigators who promote understanding and awareness of that relationship. 

Govindan, who also is a Siteman Cancer Center research member, is a leader in lung cancer clinical trials and translational research. His research focuses on genomic changes in patients with lung cancer.

The other award recipient is Michael Fiore, MD, director of the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and a senior consultant for the National Cancer Institute (NCI). 

The two investigators accepted the award in October at the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, in Denver. 

The Ochsner Award memorializes Alton Ochsner, co-founder of the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. In 1939, Ochsner was the first to publish evidence relating cigarette smoking as the primary cause of lung cancer. He graduated from Washington University School of Medicine in 1920 and briefly trained in internal medicine at what is now Barnes-Jewish Hospital.