Meet the UC College of Medicine 2020 Distinguished Alumni

Lane F. Donnelly MD
Class of 1990

Lane Donnelly, MD, currently serves as chief quality officer and Christopher G. Dawes Endowed Director of Quality at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and Stanford Children’s Health. He also is a professor of radiology and pediatrics and the associate dean, maternal and child health (Quality and Safety) at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Additionally, he serves as the co-executive director of the Stanford Medicine Center for Improvement.

Dr. Donnelly has been a national leader in improving pediatric patient safety. From 2005 to 2010 he was the project manager at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to reduce serious safety events. The program was the first to demonstrate a statistically significant reduction (80% reduction during five years) in such events and received several national recognitions. The findings of this program have been used at more than 140 children’s hospitals participating in the Solutions for Patient Safety collaborative and have significantly improved pediatric patient safety nationally. He also has worked at bringing attention to the issue of excessive CT radiation dose to children. He was co-author in 2001 of two American Journal of Roentgenology articles on the topic, which led to national changes in the way that pediatric CT is practiced.

Dr. Donnelly has been a National Institutes of Health-funded researcher, published 270 peer review manuscripts, and has authored several textbooks, including Pediatric Imaging: The Fundamentals.

He has received numerous national recognitions, including: International Quality Radiology Network’s Quality-Improvement in Radiology Practices Paper Competition: Annual Award 2008; 2012 British Medical Association Book Awards; Singleton–Taybi Award for Lifetime Achievements in Education from the Society for Pediatric Radiology (2009); Journal of the America College of Radiology 2018 Paper of the Year Award; and the Radiological Society of North America Honored Educator Award (2019).

Dr. Donnelly received his undergraduate degree from Ohio State University before coming to the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He completed his residency in diagnostic radiology at UC in 1994 and a fellowship in pediatric radiology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center in 1995.

Before joining Stanford University, he was radiologist-in-chief and Frederic N. Silverman Chair of Pediatric Radiology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (2002 to 2011); inaugural chief medical officer/physician-in-chief at the Nemours Children’s Hospital, where he helped plan, staff and open their new hospital in Orlando, Fla., in 2012; enterprise vice president and enterprise radiologist-in-chief for the Nemours Foundation (2011 to 2015); and chief quality officer for hospital-based services at Texas Children’s Hospital (2015 to 2017). He also has held faculty positions at the UC College of Medicine, Duke University Medical Center, the University of Central Florida School of Medicine, Florida State University School of Medicine, and the Baylor College of Medicine.

Cornelius L. Hopper, MD
Class of 1960

Cornelius Hopper, MD, is the emeritus vice president for health affairs for the University of California System. He completed his undergraduate work at Ohio University in 1956 before attending the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. When he graduated in 1960, he became the first African American male to receive a medical degree from UC. Following service as a battalion surgeon with the Marines, he received training in internal medicine at Marquette University and in neurology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he remained on faculty until 1971.

Responding to the nation's civil rights revolution and national concerns regarding access to care for underserved rural populations, in 1971 Dr. Hopper became director of the John A. Andrew Memorial Hospital at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, later becoming vice president for health affairs there. During the next eight years, he organized the first National Health Service Corps field station in the southeastern U.S., established one of the nation’s first rural-based Area Health Education Centers, and pioneered a unique multi-county primary care system in south-central Alabama (Tuskegee Primary Care Network) that utilized telemedicine concepts.

In 1979, Dr. Hopper became special assistant for health affairs at the University of California System. He became vice president for health affairs in 1983 and, until his retirement in 2000, he served as the senior administrative officer for the nation's largest university health sciences system, encompassing 14 health professions schools on six campuses with an enrollment of 13,000 students and a budget of more than $3 billion.

During his tenure, he led the reorganization of the Board of Regents governance of the university’s academic medical centers, planned the mid-1980s downsizing of selective health professions enrollments, coordinated a major revision of the university's Uniform Clinical Compensation Plan for medical and other health sciences clinical faculty, and led the development of Changing Directions in Medical Education, a plan modifying the mission and curriculum of the university’s five medical schools to accommodate expanded undergraduate and postgraduate training in primary care.

Dr. Hopper has served on numerous national, regional and state advisory committees and councils, including the National Institutes of Health; Department of Health, Education and Welfare; American Public Health Association; and the American International Health Alliance. He also has served on the boards of the Samuel Merritt Health Sciences University in Oakland, Calif., Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., and the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles.

Dr. Hopper has been the recipient of the Ohio University Medal of Merit, the Daniel Drake Medal from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Medallion, and Distinguished Service Awards from the Regional Medical Program Services and the Veterans Administration.

Warren A. Webster, MD
Class of 1970

Warren Webster, MD, is a retired Cincinnati internal medicine and infectious disease specialist. A native of Youngstown, Ohio, he completed his undergraduate education at Youngstown State University before coming to the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he received his medical degree in 1970. He remained in Cincinnati to complete his internship and internal medicine residency at UC and General Hospital. He then completed a fellowship in infectious disease at UC.

Dr. Webster was in private practice in Cincinnati from 1977 until his retirement in 2011. For much of that time, he served as a clinical instructor at the UC College of Medicine. He also was a teaching attending physician at Christ Hospital throughout his career. He maintained a close relationship with Deaconess Hospital during this time, serving as chair of internal medicine from 1987 to 1992 and president of the hospital’s medical staff from 1992 to 1994. At Deaconess, he also served as head of quality assurance from 1994 to 1996 and head of infection control from 1996 through 2005. Additionally, Dr. Webster served as president of the Cincinnati Society of Internal Medicine for 1996-1997.

“Compassion,” “commitment” and “role model” were attributes used in reference to Dr. Webster in the letters of support he received for the Distinguished Alumni Award. One nominator noted that while he was not a medical researcher who “frequently receive this award,” Dr. Webster was “an internist who exemplifies the highest standards of medical care, using the important and most current lessons of research in his day-to-day care of patients. Many other physicians followed his example; many became his patients.” Another echoed these sentiments by writing: “He epitomizes the highest quality front-line medicine as a practicing internist. There are many fine researchers and professors but these advances must be transmitted to patients. I think it is time to honor one of the physicians who did this in an outstanding manner.”

Dr. Webster’s diagnostic skills were observed by several nominators. “He was the physician that other physicians called about difficult, complex and confusing patient problems,” one wrote. “Because of his help and guidance, the quality of care was raised in the entire community.” Another stated that “Dr. Webster practiced as a particularly outstanding internist with tremendous diagnostic skills, compassion and commitment. Every patient of his knew that they were always in great hands and that he would do the very best for them and their families.”

His participation in medical missions to Africa and Haiti, tutoring inner-city Cincinnati youth, and his efforts to fund scholarships for medical students also were praised.

Dr. Webster was recognized as a tremendous role model: “He is the front-line physician that should be held up as a model for us all”; and “Many students, residents and young physicians looked to Dr. Webster and said, ‘That’s the way I want to practice.’”