UC College of Medicine Awards Highest Honor

CINCINNATI—The UC College of Medicine presented an alumnus and a current faculty member with the college’s highest honor, the Daniel Drake Medal, on Saturday, May 28.

Drake Medal recipients for 2016 are Scott Rauch, MD, a 1987 graduate of the College of Medicine and president, psychiatrist in chief and Rose-Marie & Eijk van Otterloo Chair of Psychiatry for McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts, and Arnold Schwartz, PhD, distinguished university professor of internal medicine at the UC College of Medicine.

The Drake Medal is given annually by the College of Medicine to living faculty or alumni for their outstanding and unique contributions to medical education, scholarship and research. The award was established in 1985 to honor the 200th birthday of Daniel Drake, MD, the founder of the Medical College of Ohio, the forerunner of the UC College of Medicine. Drake was one of the most influential physicians, educators and scientists of 19th century America. He also founded Cincinnati College, the Cincinnati Lancaster Seminary, Cincinnati Public Library, the Western Museum and Commercial Hospital and Lunatic Asylum (known today as University of Cincinnati Medical Center). He also established the Cincinnati Eye Infirmary and the Kentucky School for the Blind in Louisville.

Rauch and Schwartz received their medals during the college’s annual Honors Day, this year at the Aronoff Center for the Arts, during which 169 students received their medical degrees. Both will be celebrated this evening at a dinner at the Queen City Club. Their names, along with biographies and photos, have been added to the Daniel Drake Medal exhibit in the Medical Sciences Building on UC’s medical campus. 

Scott Rauch, MD

Scott Rauch, MD (Med ’87) is also professor of psychiatry and chair of the Psychiatry Executive Committee at Harvard Medical School and chair of Psychiatry & Mental Health for Partners Healthcare. His research interests relate to neuroimaging, neurobiology and care of depression and anxiety disorders. Rauch has been a leader in developing and applying new technologies in psychiatry and neuroscience in using neuroimaging to delineate the neural basis of psychiatric diseases and normal brain functions. He has played a leading role in advancing neurostimulation and surgical therapies for psychiatric disorders, as well as the use of technology to disseminate psychiatric care to improve access and cost-efficiency. Rauch also received the 2014 John Shaw Billings Alumni Leadership Award from the UC College of Medicine.

Arnold Schwartz, PhD

Arnold Schwartz, PhD, was the first to clone and characterize a human heart calcium channel and identify the sites for the calcium channel blocking drugs diltiazem, verapamil and amlodipine, which are widely used to treat heart failure and hypertension. Prior to that, he established the mechanism of action of digitalis, the oldest known drug. Schwartz earned his master’s at Ohio State University and PhD at SUNY Downstate, Brooklyn. Following postdoctoral fellowships in London and Aarhus, Denmark, he joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine. Since 1977 Schwartz has nurtured hundreds of graduate and medical students and young faculty at the UC College of Medicine as the principal investigator of a National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute training grant for 38 years, and a Program Project grant for 28 years. Schwartz also received the 2012 George Rieveschl Jr. Award for Distinguished Scientific Research from the University of Cincinnati.