Wilbur Lam Elected to National Academy of Medicine

The list of titles following Wilbur Lam’s name is long, given his appointments at Georgia Tech, Emory University, and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Now he has a new one: member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).

Lam is one of 100 newly elected members of the Academy for 2023, an honor reserved for people who’ve made major contributions to medicine, healthcare, and public health. He joins a roster of just 2,400 or so individuals. Membership is considered one of the highest recognitions in health and medicine.

“This honor is extremely humbling because it’s given to me as one person. But it really reflects the team effort that’s surrounded me all these years,” said Lam, W. Paul Bowers Research Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“If you look at all the work that they’re recognizing me for, it starts with my laboratory, then goes beyond — into the centers that we’ve developed related to diagnostic technologies, and then, all the work that we’ve done for the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic.”

New NAM members are nominated and elected by current members, and they’re expected to contribute to National Academies activities providing independent analysis and advice to help the nation tackle complex problems.

Lam, who is a pediatric hematologist/oncologist at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta in addition to a researcher, was cited “for outstanding contributions in point-of-care, home-based, and/or smartphone-enabled diagnostics that are changing the management of pediatric and hematologic diseases as well as development of microsystems technologies as research-enabling platforms to investigate blood biophysics.”

Read the full article on the College of Engineering website