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Marianne J. Legato
Wednesday, 13 June 2018 / Published in Gala

Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine Annual Gala 2018

This year’s gala signified a special celebration marking the Foundation’s 22nd anniversary. Why this particular choice of a date to celebrate an anniversary? It’s because we finally persuaded the two men who helped us shape and establish the original program at Columbia to let us honor and thank them publicly: Doctor Myron Weisfeldt, the former Chairman of the Department of Medicine, and Craig Wynett, who was and continues to be in charge of innovation at Procter & Gamble.

In an unforgettably exciting collaboration, we built the foundation for our work and celebrated its beginning in this very place, Doubles, on Valentine’s Day, 1997. Both men took a leap of faith in believing that studying the differences between the sexes would reap invaluable rewards. Indeed, the new discipline of gender-specific medicine is now a respected, internationally acknowledged discipline recognized by scholars at every leading university in the world. The success we’ve realized was beyond anything we imagined and the new insights we developed and disseminated have made crucially important improvements to the prevention, detection and treatment of disease in men and women.

Angel Berenguel, Sharon Redding, Dr. Marianne Legato _ Wendy Dauber (FGSM Executive Director)Angel Berenguel, Sharon Redding, Dr. Marianne Legato _ Wendy Dauber (FGSM Executive Director)
Tari Broderick, Dr. Marianne Legato, Dr. Jasna MarkovacTari Broderick, Dr. Marianne Legato, Dr. Jasna Markovac
Michael Derchin _ Robert Birch and Danielle StarkMichael Derchin _ Robert Birch (FGSM Board Members _ Gala Sponsors) and Danielle Stark
Marianne Legato (FGSM President) _ Marvin SlomowitzMarianne Legato (FGSM President) _ Marvin Slomowitz (FGSM Board Chairman)
Kenneth Bock _ Marlene KurzKenneth Bock _ Marlene Kurz (Gala Chairwoman)
James Valenti (Tenor)James Valenti (Tenor)
Dr. Marianne Legato, Michael Derchin & Dr. Kristin VoegtlineDr. Marianne Legato, Michael Derchin (FGSM Board Member _ Gala Sponsor), Dr. Kristin Voegtline (Johns Hopkins Scholar)
Dr. Marianne Legato, Dr. Gayatri Devi _ Sharon BaumDr. Marianne Legato, Dr. Gayatri Devi _ Sharon Baum
Dr. Gayatri Devi, Dr. Kirsten Healy (FGSM Associate Medical Director) _ Michael HealyDr. Gayatri Devi, Dr. Kirsten Healy (FGSM Associate Medical Director) _ Michael Healy
Craig Wynett (Gala Honoree), Dr. Marianne Legato, Dr. Mike Weisfeldt (Gala Honoree)Craig Wynett (Gala Honoree), Dr. Marianne Legato, Dr. Mike Weisfeldt (Gala Honoree)
Marianne J. Legato
Marianne J. Legato

Marianne J. Legato, MD, Ph. D. (hon. c.), FACP is an internationally renowned academic, physician, author, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of gender-specific medicine. She is a Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Legato is also the Director of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, which she founded in 2006 as a continuation of her work with The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University. She received an honorary PhD from the University of Panama in 2015 for her work on the differences between men and women.

At its core, gender-specific medicine is the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. Dr. Legato’s discoveries and those of her colleagues have led to a personalization of medicine that assists doctors worldwide in understanding the difference in normal function of men and women and in their sex-specific experiences of the same diseases.

She began her work in gender-specific medicine by authoring the first book on women and heart disease, The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Coronary Artery Disease, which won the Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association in 1992. Because of this research, the cardiovascular community began to include women in clinical trials affirming the fact that the risk factors, symptoms, and treatment of the same disease can be significantly different between the sexes. Convinced that the sex-specific differences in coronary artery disease were not unique, Dr. Legato began a wide-ranging survey of all medical specialties and in 2004, published the first textbook on gender-specific medicine, The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine. The second edition appeared in 2010 and the third edition, dedicated to explaining how gender impacts biomedical investigation in the genomic era, won the PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine from the Association of American Publishers in 2018. A fourth edition is forthcoming.

She also founded the first scientific journals publishing new studies in the field, The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine, and a newer version, Gender Medicine, both listed in the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine. She has founded a third peer-reviewed, open access journal, Gender and the Genome, which focuses on the impact of biological sex on technology and its effects on human life.

Dr. Legato is the author of multiple works, including: What Women Need to Know (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Eve’s Rib (Harmony Books, 2002), Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (Rodale, 2005), Why Men Die First (Palgrave, 2008), The International Society for Gender Medicine: History and Highlights (Academic Press, 2017), and most recently, The Plasticity of Sex (Academic Press, 2020). Her books have been translated into 28 languages to date.

As an internationally respected authority on gender medicine, Dr. Legato has chaired symposia and made keynote addresses to world congresses in gender-specific medicine in Berlin, Israel, Italy, Japan, Panama, South Korea, Stockholm, and Vienna. In collaboration with the Menarini Foundation, she is co-chairing a symposium on epigenetics, Sex, Gender and Epigenetics: From Molecule to Bedside, to be held in Spring 2021 in Italy. She maintains one of the only gender-specific private practice in New York City, and she has earned recognition as one of the “Top Doctors in New York.”

Tagged under: Annual Gala

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