The Gold Medal, SIR’s highest honor, is awarded not only for extraordinary service to the society but to those who have dedicated their past and present talents to advancing the quality of medicine and patient care through the practice of interventional radiology. The Gold Medal presentations will take place on Sunday, March 30, at 10:30 a.m., during the Opening Plenary Session.
SIR Today salutes the 2025 recipients of the most prestigious SIR awards with a personal look at their outstanding careers, asking them for a person, place and thing that has particularly inspired or influenced them. Watch for more articles about award winners during the annual meeting. View these award recipients' full bios.
Arina van Breda, MD, FSIR, was SIR president from 1992-1993, and the first woman to hold the position. After fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, in 1983 she joined Barry Katzen, MD, FSIR, in Alexandria, Virginia, in one of the first full-time dedicated IR private practices in the country, and which also offered an opportunity to continue teaching via its own interventional fellowship. Following Dr. Katzen’s departure, Dr. van Breda continued to develop the practice and fellowship. Dr. van Breda has authored over 50 articles and book chapters, and since retiring from medicine in 2019 has dedicated her time to voter rights and voter registration as a volunteer in Northern Virginia.
WHO: The person who had the biggest effect on my life, who I patterned my practice on, and who was the reason I went into medicine, is my mother. She started her nursing training in the early days of WWII in Europe, and I originally thought I would become a nurse like her and two of my sisters, only later deciding to become a physician instead.
My mother was highly professional and very committed, and she showed me what dedicated care looked like. The patient always came first. She taught me that a caring profession like healthcare was something worth aspiring to and was rewarding in its own right—and that it wasn’t just a career, but a calling.
WHAT: Again, I contribute a lot of my drive to my mother, who challenged me to investigate what I can do to make the world a little bit better. I was driven by the question of how I can be of service. My career in IR was incredibly rewarding and enjoyable, but you do it for the patients that you serve. I hope that was the primary thing I taught my many former fellows.
These days, much of what I do is volunteer work, but the reason I am a stickler about details is because of my medical career. You can’t just offer good enough; you have to give your best at all times—because that’s what the patient deserves.
WHERE: When I was a young child, my parents immigrated from Europe by boat. On the day we arrived, my father woke us up very early as we sailed into the harbor at New York to come see the Statue of Liberty. It is one of my first memories. We were taught that our lives would be different because of the opportunities that statue represented.
Arriving in the United States as an immigrant at a time when the world was just recovering from the horrors of WWII—and being acutely aware of what the war had done to my parents’ and grandparents’ generations—we knew how important the promise of the United States was as a beacon of hope to the world. That experience made me feel that I had to do a little bit more to repay the debt that was owed to a country that could give us such opportunities.
