2026 Daniel Drake Medals awarded to three pioneering physician-scientists

Robert H. Eckel, MD

Eckel, a 1973 graduate of the College of Medicine, is professor emeritus of medicine in the divisions of endocrinology, metabolism and diabetes, and of cardiology, at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. A Cincinnati native, he graduated as a member of Alpha Omega Alpha and was named a distinguished alumnus in 2013. During 40 years on the Colorado faculty, he held the Charles A. Boettcher Endowed Chair in Atherosclerosis and served as interim vice chancellor for research. His research focused on the tissue-specific regulation of lipoprotein lipase, the key enzyme that clears triglycerides from the blood, revealing its ties to insulin sensitivity, energy balance and body weight regulation and illuminating how obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes drive cardiovascular disease. He has authored more than 460 peer-reviewed publications and mentored 50 trainees, many of whom now hold leadership roles in academic medicine.

Eckel holds the rare distinction of having served as president of the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, the Obesity Society (formerly the North American Association for the Study of Obesity) and the Association for Patient-Oriented Research. He co-chaired the 2013 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Lifestyle Guideline and contributed to the 2013 cholesterol guideline, helping shape international standards for cardiovascular disease prevention. He also founded the Lipoprotein Apheresis Program at the University of Colorado, which is now part of the Cardiometabolic & Advanced Lipid Clinic he initiated at the University of Colorado Hospital, expanding care for patients with severe inherited lipid disorders. His honors include the American Heart Association's Gold Heart Award, the Endocrine Society's Outstanding Clinical Investigator Laureate Award and the National Lipid Association's W. Virgil Brown Distinguished Achievement Award.

Bruce C. Trapnell, MD

Trapnell, professor of medicine and pediatrics at the College of Medicine and director of the Translational Pulmonary Science Center at Cincinnati Children's, is an internationally recognized clinician-scientist whose work has transformed the diagnosis and treatment of rare lung diseases. He also serves as scientific director of the Pulmonary Alveolar Proteinosis (PAP) Foundation. Before joining UC and Cincinnati Children's in 1997, Trapnell spent 13 years as a physician-scientist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), where his work helped identify multiple cystic fibrosis-causing mutations and advance adenoviral vector-based gene therapy. In Cincinnati, he directed the Cystic Fibrosis Therapeutics Development Network Center for more than a decade, leading clinical trials that led to U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approval of Creon and Pancreaze to treat exocrine pancreatic insufficiency in patients with cystic fibrosis. As scientific director of the Alpha-1 Foundation, he created a research funding program that has provided more than $100 million to investigators studying alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.

Trapnell's most influential discoveries define the role of granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) in lung health and disease. His lab showed that impaired GM-CSF signaling causes PAP, demonstrated that GM-CSF autoantibodies cause the autoimmune form of the disease and developed the blood test now used worldwide as the gold standard for diagnosis. His research has led to the discovery of five previously unrecognized lung diseases, and his team developed pulmonary macrophage transplantation as a novel gene and cell therapy, initiating its first-in-human clinical trial.

In 2003, he co-founded the international Rare Lung Diseases Clinical Research Consortium with Francis X. McCormack Jr., MD, a 2025 Drake Medalist. The consortium's landmark MILES trial led to regulatory approval of sirolimus for lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) in the U.S. and in more than 40 countries worldwide. With NIH funding for more than 29 years, Trapnell has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, reviews and book chapters.

E. Steve Woodle, MD

Woodle, professor of surgery and the William A. Altemeier endowed chair in surgery at the College of Medicine, is a multiorgan transplant surgeon and transplant immunologist who has spent more than four decades advancing the understanding of organ rejection and pioneering immunosuppressive therapies that have reshaped transplantation. Earlier in his career at the University of Chicago, he performed a liver transplant on a 10-day-old infant, setting a Guinness World Record for the youngest liver transplant recipient. He joined the College of Medicine in 1999 and directed the Division of Transplantation for nearly two decades, building an internationally recognized program of clinical and research excellence. In 2001, he performed Ohio's first allogeneic islet transplant for type 1 diabetes. After undergoing his own liver transplant in 2003, Woodle returned to the operating room and became the first liver transplant recipient to perform a liver transplant.

Woodle has helped originate several therapeutic approaches now considered standard in transplantation. As a fellow, he conceived the genetic re-engineering of OKT3, the first FDA-approved monoclonal antibody - work later developed into teplizumab (Tzield), which the FDA approved in 2022 as the first immunomodulatory therapy for type 1 diabetes. He was the first investigator to introduce plasma cell-targeted therapy for a non-malignant human disease, using proteasome inhibitors to treat antibody-mediated rejection in kidney transplant recipients. He also pioneered corticosteroid-free immunosuppression, including the field's landmark double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of early corticosteroid withdrawal. He helped conceive and establish clinical kidney exchange for incompatible living-donor pairs, publishing the field's first peer-reviewed description in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997. Kidney exchange now accounts for roughly one in five living-donor kidney transplants in the U.S.

His scholarship includes more than 400 scientific publications cited more than 22,000 times, and he has delivered more than 700 invited lectures and mentored generations of transplant surgeons, physicians and pharmacists. In 2025, he received the American Society of Transplantation's Senior Achievement Award in Clinical Transplantation and was named an Ashbel Smith Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he earned his medical degree.

Featured photo at top: Daniel Drake Medal. Photo/University of Cincinnati.