The Alan Chait Award for Excellence recognizes a faculty member who has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to mentorship, teaching, and professionalism for trainees.
This award honors Dr. Chait’s two passions—teaching in the clinical setting and providing mentorship for trainees in the research setting. The award is funded from the division and aims to recognize the outstanding teaching in both the clinical and research environments.
The award recognizes a clinical or research faculty member each year.
Clinical
Clinical faculty or physician scientists eligible for the award can include professors, associate professors, or assistant professors at any site.
The clinical faculty member should demonstrate outstanding teaching skills, clinical knowledge, and professionalism in the clinical environment. The clinical faculty member will be selected by consensus from the clinical fellows (Years 1-3), and presented to the Fellowship Administrator before the annual May graduation.
Clinical fellows will be asked to nominate three faculty members, with the goal of awarding a single winner based on the collective responses.
Research
Research faculty eligible for the award can include professors, associate professors, or assistant professors and can be scientists at any site. Faculty should demonstrate outstanding teaching skills, research knowledge, trainee support, and professionalism in the research environment.
Research faculty members may be a current mentor or have provided outstanding, impactful support towards trainee(s). An example would be if a research faculty member volunteered to review and comment on a grant for a trainee outside of his/her lab or helped a trainee write a first author publication which was published nationally.
Research fellows will be asked to nominate three faculty members, with the goal of awarding a single winner based on the response.
Past recipients
2023 Mauricio Dorfman
2023 Farah Khan
2019 Abe DeSantis
2018 Jenny Kanter
2017 Jing Chao
Alan Chait Biography
Dr. Alan Chait received his medical training at the University of Cape Town, and trained as a resident and fellow at Hammersmith Hospital in London, before becoming a fellow at the University of Washington Division of Metabolism, Endocrinology and Nutrition under the mentorship of Dr. Edwin L. Bierman.
Dr. Chait joined the Division as an assistant professor in 1977, was named as Head of the Section of Clinical Nutrition in 1983, and was Head of the Division for over twenty years between 1996 and 2016. He was named the Edwin L. Bierman Professor of Medicine in 2000.
Dr. Chait’s clinical interests include disorders of lipid metabolism, prevention of cardiovascular disease in individuals with lipid disorders and diabetes, and general endocrinology. His research interests include studying the role of diabetes in the pathogenesis of macrovascular disease, understanding links amongst obesity, inflammation, insulin resistance and atherosclerosis, and researching lipoprotein-proteoglycan interactions in atherogenesis.
Dr. Chait is internationally known as a leader in lipid research and has received many honors and awards including the RH Williams/Rachmiel Levine Award, the American Diabetes Association Edwin L Bierman Lectureship Award, the American Heart Association Special Recognition Award in Vascular Biology, the Outstanding Foreign Investigator Award from the Japan Society of Diabetes Complications and the Mayo Soley Award from the Western Society for Clinical Investigation.
He was a member of and chaired the U.S.-Japan Nutrition and Metabolism Panel, was President of the Western Society for Clinical investigation, and was a member of and chaired the American Heart Association Nutrition Committee.
In support his research, Dr. Chait was awarded a Clinical Associate Physician Award to the Clinical Research Center (now part of ITHS), an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, a NIH R01, was Co-Director of the Clinical Nutrition Research Unit from 1985-1992 and was Director from 1992-2012, and was a Project Director on a Diabetes Program Project Grant and Principal Investigator of that same PPG from 1995 to 2012, and continues to have a project on that same PPG.
Dr. Chait was previously the PI on a Nutrition Training Grant and continues as a Co-Director. He has mentored over 30 postdoctoral fellows in the Division.