2019 Outstanding Alumnus Award Winner
Dr. Whitington has been Professor Emeritus of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University since his retirement in 2017. An accomplished pediatrician, hepatologist, and transplant physician, his career focused on the care of children with complex liver disease and those needing liver transplantation.
Dr. Whitington served as director of Organ Transplantation and the Siragusa Transplantation Center at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where he launched the pediatric liver transplant program. His research focused on the complex mechanisms of liver injury in children. Among his many accomplishments in this area, he determined the mechanism of fetal liver injury resulting in neonatal hemochromatosis, the leading cause of liver failure in newborns. He found that it results from maternal alloimmunity and coined the term “gestational alloimmune liver disease” to describe it. He designed a highly effective antenatal therapy to prevent its recurrence and a useful treatment for affected infants, which are used worldwide.
Dr. Whitington’s honors include receiving the Shwachman Award from the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition; being elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Study of Liver Disease; and receiving the Andrew Sass-Kortsak Award for sustained excellence in research related to pediatric liver disease from the Canadian Liver Foundation and the Canadian Association for Study of the Liver. He has written more than 200 peer-reviewed papers and over 100 chapters and has lectured in 17 countries. He trained over 20 fellows, several of whom are today’s leaders in pediatric liver disease and transplantation.
He received a BA in economics from Tulane University in New Orleans. After graduating and completing his residency at UTHSC, Dr. Whitington completed a research fellowship in gastroenterology at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
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