SIR Today salutes the 2023 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 the award recipients' full bios.
SIR Foundation 2023 Frederick S. Keller, MD, Philanthropy Award
SIR Foundation’s Frederick S. Keller, MD, Philanthropy Award highlights an individual’s generosity and exceptional commitment to SIR Foundation. The award honors an individual who has contributed a significant donation, frequently participates in fundraising efforts and encourages others to give as well.
Erik N.K. Cressman, MD, PhD, FSIR
Erik N.K. Cressman, MD, PhD, FSIR
Who inspired his spirit of philanthropy: The who part is really easy for me. It’s my dad, without question. I grew up with more than the usual amount of mobility and lack of security. Whenever life did settle down a little bit, when we got to a point where his immediate focus wasn’t paying the bills right at hand, his mindset was, “How else can we help? How do we make things better?”
He regularly donated time and funds to organizations like his alma mater. And the message I got was, it doesn’t take much to have enough. And if you do have enough, then how do you make things better for others?
What: To get inspired, all I have to do is pick up a journal and start thinking. My bigger problem is there are so many opportunities when you mesh interdisciplinary fields. In my case, half of my brain and much of my education was in chemistry, and the interface between chemistry and interventional radiology is absolutely huge. If somebody were to give me $50 million, I could do all kinds of things with it to impact patient care. But at the same time, I also want to pay it forward and see other people have an opportunity because you never know where the next ray of sunshine is going to break through. Suresh Vedantham hit the nail on the head in a recent IRQ issue, saying “We don’t come up through training in the scientific knowledge of a particular disease process, so the way we get to NIH funding is different.” We’re trained in how to apply our techniques to everything, while most of what the NIH funds and the world that everyone else besides us is so narrowly focused. That is a big part of why it’s so important to contribute to fundings efforts ourselves, however we can, to help propel IR research forward.
