Leah Lowenstein Award

The Leah Lowenstein Award is presented annually to the faculty member who is the model of a medical educator whose humane teaching reaches and influences all students regardless of gender, race or socioeconomic background. These are the traits espoused by the late Leah Lowenstein, a medical educator and first female Dean of a co-educational medical school. Any faculty member at the School of Medicine may be nominated for the award, and nominations are made by members of the graduating class of Yale School of Medicine.

Leah Lowenstein was one of just three women in her medical class in 1954 at the University of Wisconsin and went on to become a lead kidney disease researcher and a faculty member at Boston University School of Medicine, and served on the faculty of Tufts University School of Medicine and the Thorndike Memorial Laboratories at Harvard Medical School. She was also a medical advisor for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and a member of the study sections of the National Institutes of Health. In 1982, she was named vice president and dean of Jefferson Medical College, the first woman dean of a co-educational medical school. Lowenstein grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and was an accomplished cellist—a music scholarship helped to finance her medical education. She earned her PhD at Somerville College, was a research associate at Oxford University, and completed her residency at Beth Israel Hospital at Harvard Medical School and a fellowship in renal and metabolic diseases at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Tufts. Throughout her career, Lowenstein was an advocate for women in medicine.