1st
appeared 29 March 1999
Irwin Receives Highest Honor in Field of
Adolescent Medicine
 The Society for Adolescent Medicine has given its most
distinguished award to Charles E. Irwin Jr, professor and vice chairman of pediatrics at
UCSF, director of the division of adolescent medicine at UCSF and chief of adolescent
medicine for Lucile Packard Children’s Health Services at UCSF. The award for
Outstanding Achievement in Adolescent Medicine was presented on March 20 at the society's
annual meeting in Los Angeles.
"This is the highest honor one can achieve in the field of adolescent medicine,"
said Susan Riggs, chief of adolescent medicine at Brown University and chair of the
Society's awards committee. "Probably more than any single individual, (Irwin is)
responsible for the establishment of adolescent medicine as a subspecialty in pediatrics
and in internal medicine."
Among Irwin's contributions: He served as the first chair of the American Board of
Pediatrics' Subboard of Adolescent Medicine from 1991-1998. He is a faculty member of the
Institute for Health Policy Studies at UCSF and directs two policy centers: the National
Adolescent Health Information Center and the Policy Center on Middle Childhood and
Adolescence. He has led generations of specialists in adolescent health through UCSF's
Interdisciplinary Adolescent Health Training Program, which was founded in 1977 and is one
of two such long-term continuously funded programs in the US.
Riggs said that Irwin's career has paralleled the development of adolescent medicine. He
is regarded as a leading expert on the health trends of adolescents. His research focuses
on risky behaviors during adolescence and on methods of identifying adolescents who are
prone to initiate health-damaging behaviors. In recent years he has worked to implement
what was learned from earlier studies with interventions that target those youths most at
risk.
Among Irwin's other awards are the American Academy of Pediatrics' Adele Hofmann Award for
Lifetime Achievement in Adolescent Medicine (1998); the Swedish Medical Society's
International Lectureship Award (1996); the Ambulatory Pediatric Center Award for Clinical
Training in the Behavioral Sciences (1990); and the National Center for Youth Law's annual
award recognizing his research on high-risk youth (1988).
Links:
Lucile
Packard Children’s Health Services
Two UCSF Professors Honored
at Pediatrics Conference
Source: Janet Basu, News
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