Dr. Mark Litwin, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Urology, has been awarded the Barringer Medal from the American Association of Genitourinary Surgeons for 2016. The medal is presented by the association to an individual doing outstanding work in the field of genitourinary cancer surgery. In making the award presentation, Dr. David Penson, chair of urology at Vanderbilt, cited Litwin's foundational work focusing on quality of life in prostate cancer survivors and motivating a generation of urologists to pursue careers as surgeon-scientists in health services research.
Litwin is the 35th recipient of the award, which is named for the first chief of urology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. It was first given in 1955 to Nobel Laureate Dr. Charles Huggins. Previous recipients of the Barringer Medal include three former UCLA chiefs of urology: Dr. Willard Goodwin (1978), Dr. Joseph J. Kaufman (1986) and Dr. Jean deKernion (2000).
Litwin graduated magna cum laude from Duke University with a bachelor's degree in economics and attended medical school at Emory University. He completed his training in urological surgery at Harvard Medical School's Brigham and Women's Hospital, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at RAND and UCLA, where he also earned his master’s in public health. Litwin specializes in testicular, bladder, prostate and kidney cancer.
His research focuses on improving quality of care and quality of life in urologic oncology. He leads Urologic Diseases in America, the National Institutes of Health’s largest effort at documenting the burden of urologic diseases on the American people. He also created and directs IMProving Access,Counseling & Treatment for Californians with Prostate Cancer (IMPACT), a state-funded program that provides free medical care statewide for low-income, uninsured men with prostate cancer.