Emory Report

October 5, 1998

 Volume 51, No. 7

Trustees vote to create urology department, Hopkins MD to head

Emory's new Department of Urology will be guided by a veteran urologic oncologist recruited from Johns Hopkins University, Fray Marshall. A urology leader at Hopkins for nearly 25 years and one of the nation's top urologic surgeons and clinical researchers into urologic cancers, Marshall will arrive at Emory in late December.

"The Division of Urology at Emory, under the leadership of Dr. Sam Graham, attained a national reputation for clinical excellence," said medical school Dean Thomas Lawley. "Following Dr. Graham's recent departure to join his brother in private practice, we began searching for a replacement of top rank. It soon became evident we would not be able to attract such a person until the division was granted full departmental status."

That request was granted by the Board of Trustees' executive committee in early September, allowing Lawley to finalize efforts to bring Marshall into the Emory fold by the end of the fall semester.

"I consider Fray--as does most of the medical community--to be this country's outstanding scholar-physician in academic urology," Lawley said. "He was our first choice by far as someone who could build upon the excellence of our existing clinical programs within the pediatric, adult and elder populations, who could strengthen the successful programs we have already established in areas such as prostate cancer, incontinence and cyrosurgery, and who could at the same time develop first-rate programs in teaching and basic scientific research."

David Blake, associate director of the Health Sciences Center, was a colleague of Marshall's at Hopkins for more than 20 years. "The Department of Urology that Fray Marshall and Department Chair Patrick Walsh built at Hopkins is the most successful and well-respected one in the country," said Blake. "A clear benchmark of departmental excellence is to look at the number of physicians who have gone through a particular program and now head departments at other health care centers. In the field of urology, Drs. Walsh and Marshall have been most successful in that regard."

Marshall earned his medical degree at the University of Virginia in 1969. He completed an internship and assistant residency in surgery at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a residency in urology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the Hopkins faculty in 1975, rising to the rank of professor of urology in 1986 and professor of oncology in 1995. He is the incumbent holder of Hopkins' Bernard L. Schwartz Distinguished Professorship in Urologic Oncology.

--Darryl Gossett



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