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 24, at 10:30 a.m. MT, during the Opening Plenary Session.
SIR Today salutes the 2024 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.
Fred T. Lee Jr., MD, is a professor of radiology, biomedical engineering and urology as well as the Robert A. Turrell Professor of Imaging Science at the University of Wisconsin department of radiology. Dr. Lee has a special interest in cancer imaging and intervention with an emphasis on percutaneous tumor ablation. As an early pioneer in the field, he established the tumor ablation laboratory at Wisconsin in 1995, one of the first of its type in the world. He is an inventor of two of the world’s most widely applied tumor ablation devices and is also the founder of two venture-backed medical device companies: NeuWave Medical Inc. and Elucent Medical.
Who: The one and only secret to any success I have had in life was to have the good fortune to be born into an incredible family. My grandparents were Chinese immigrants who settled in Buffalo, New York, in the 1920s with virtually nothing. A “friend” of my grandfather told him that the weather was great there! The only thing that my grandparents wanted was a better life for their family, and they knew that education was the ticket. They lived at the Chinese laundry that put all seven children through college, pharmacy school, dental school, engineering school and medical school. My father would go on to graduate at the top of his medical school class. During his surgery internship at the University of Chicago, he was told that patients would not accept an Asian surgeon, so he would need to transfer to a “behind-the-scenes” specialty. He chose radiology and did his residency at Peter Bent Brigham where he became the chief resident in 1959. In 1985, he diagnosed his own advanced prostate cancer and for the next 30 years dedicated himself to researching and treating the disease. Some of his accomplishments include describing the zonal anatomy of the prostate and the imaging appearance of prostate cancer, performing the first clinical trial of PSA, discovering PSA density, describing neoadjuvant therapy, and eventually cryoablation of prostate cancer. As you might have guessed, we are a medical family. Our physician roll call includes: four in my father’s generation (three physicians, one dentist), three in my generation, my wife Marjorie, and even my daughter Mary Bridget is an emergency medicine resident after refusing to be a third-generation radiologist. My son Nick avoided the family profession and works at a housing nonprofit.
What: After I joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin in 1991, my father would work with me in our large animal laboratory. He was primarily interested in the radiology–pathology correlation of prostate cryoablation but suggested that there was a major opportunity to treat liver and kidney tumors with percutaneous ablation. My friend (and my father’s ex-fellow) Peter Littrup, MD, came to UW, and together we figured out in our pig lab that it was possible to puncture the liver and kidney with cryoprobes (3 mm diameter in those days), create an ice ball and withdraw the probe without fatal bleeding. Eventually, our focus shifted to thermal ablation (primarily microwave), and currently we focus on histotripsy. Along the way, I met a brilliant engineering professor named Dan van der Weide; an ethical venture capitalist, Scott Button; and Laura King. The four of us went on to form NeuWave Medical and then Elucent Medical.
Where: Working at the University of Wisconsin has been a dream for someone like me. The university and our department somehow had faith in me and I ended up with lab space, time and startup funding to do exploratory work. Amazingly, I didn’t even get fired that time I lost a rat in the CT scanner, or after Dan and I, literally, blew up the first MW ablation prototype cobbled from a microwave oven and a military surplus wave guide! The UW technology transfer office (WARF) even jumped in to help form NeuWave and Elucent. However, the most important thing that happened at UW was that I met incredible people who helped me along the way.
From brilliant colleagues like Louis Hinshaw, Tim Ziemlewicz, Meg Lubner, Orhan Ozkan and Michael Brunner to the students who are now colleagues like Erica Knavel-Koepsel, Paul Laeseke, Chris Brace, Amanda Smolock, Sailen Naidu, Katie Longo and John Swietlik, and most importantly, the unbelievable trainees! They are an inspiration and a constant source of pride. I often find myself wondering: how can they be so good? If you see Emily Knott, Annie Zlevor, Meridith and Adrienne Kisting, Allison Couillard, Katrina Falk, Anna Sorensen, Erik Winterholler, or Maddie Jentink, hire them immediately and don’t look back.
