The below is a message from Bradley Dixon, MD, Chief of Medicine, Iowa City VA Health Care System (ICVA).
It is with enormous pleasure that I announce that the Awards Committee has selected William M. Nauseef, MD, a 26-year veteran staff physician at the ICVA, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Microbiology in the Division of Infectious Diseases and founder of the multidisciplinary Iowa Inflammation Program at the Carver College of Medicine as the recipient of the fourth DiBona Academics in Service of ICVA Veterans Award. Dr. Nauseef truly embodies the tenets upon which this award was predicated, a physician who primarily worked at the ICVA holding a joint academic appointment with the University of Iowa and demonstrating a sustained, outstanding commitment to clinical care, education and research in the service of veterans at the ICVA. Dr. Jack Stapleton in his nomination letter called him the “proverbial triple-threat academic physician-scientist who contributed immensely to the clinical and research work and prestige of the Iowa City VA.”
Dr. Nauseef received his BA in Chemistry from Hamilton College and his MD degree from SUNY Upstate Medical Center, both in New York. He moved on to Wisconsin, completing a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Wisconsin followed by a fellowship in Infectious Diseases from Yale University. He remained at Yale as Assistant Professor for a year before being recruited in 1983 by Dr. Robert Clark and Dr. François Abboud to the University of Iowa Department of Internal Medicine as Assistant Professor in Infectious Disease, where he rapidly rose through the ranks to full professor in 1992. When he came to Iowa in 1983 he also joined the medical staff at the Iowa City VA and remained as an active staff physician there for 26 years until 2019. His assigned lab at the VA was near Dr. DiBona’s in Building 3, and there are rumors he learned Swedish from Ulla and Jerry so as to read the playwright, poet, and novelist Johan Strindberg in his native language. In 1998, he founded the multidisciplinary and highly successful Iowa Inflammation Program and was Director of that Program until 2021. He was also awarded Professor of Microbiology in 2002 and served as the Associate Director of the Center for Immunology and Immune-based Disease from 2011 to 2012. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Microbiology and still stays active with the Inflammation Program.
Dr. Nauseef’s academic interest has primarily focused on the human neutrophil and how neutrophil-mediated antimicrobial activity in phagosomes and the innate response to infection kill pathogens such as Staphylococcus aureus or Neisseria gonorrhoeae. As a post-doctoral fellow he discovered p47phox and p67phox, two cytoplasmic proteins required for the activity of phagocyte NADPH oxidase. Mutations in these NADPH oxidases were the basis for some patients with chronic granulomatous disease (CGD). He also led research studying another neutrophil oxidase, Myleoperoxidase (MPO) identifying the synthesis, processing and targeting of normal MPO and identified the pathways disrupted in patients with inherited MPO deficiency. Work with MPO resulted in another discovery of other endoplasmic reticulum (ER) proteins, such as calreticulin that interact with MPO and are molecular chaperones for MPO working as quality control for MPO biosynthesis. Certain mutations in MPO leading to acquired MPO deficiency can bind these chaperones more tightly leading to prolonged ER retention and proteosomal degradation. He and his co-investigators also have studied the processes whereby neutrophils undergo apoptosis after phagocytosis and bacterial killing and how these neutrophil processes can be modulated differently by different bacteria.
Dr. Nauseef’s creative and highly productive research has been funded continuously by numerous grants from the VA, including a VA Clinician Investigator Award, RO1 grants from the NIH, five PPG awards, a career award from the March of Dimes and the CGD Trust fund among many other granting organizations. He has published at least 196 peer-reviewed papers in high impact journals including Science, Nature, JCI, and NEJM. His work is highly cited with an H-factor being 67, earning him a place on the UI Hall of Impact Scholars. He has edited an entire book volume of the Immunological Reviews, authored or co-authored 4 additional books and 30 book chapters. He has trained and mentored many physician scientists, several who have gone on to very distinguished careers of their own. He is widely sought both nationally and internationally as a speaker and been awarded numerous honors. He was elected into the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI), the American Association of Physicians (AAP), and the American Association of Immunologists. He served as an Associate Editor and Section Editor for the Journal of Immunology and the Journal of Leukocyte Biology (JLB) before serving as Deputy Editor for JLB. He has been a leader in the field of leukocyte biology and chair or vice-chaired several Gordon Conferences as well as having been President of the Society of Leukocyte Biology. He created the multidisciplinary Iowa Inflammation Program in 1998, which has grown to at least 14 faculty members and numerous post-doctoral fellows, research scientists and trainees.
In addition to his enormous research prowess, Dr. Nauseef is an outstanding clinician and teacher. He is sought after by his colleagues for his clinical acumen. He has always been generous of his time for teaching and has been nominated numerous times for many different teaching awards including twice for “Best Teacher of the Year.”
In short, Dr. Nauseef is an outstanding and exemplary awardee for the fourth DiBona award. His career truly embodies the high standards exemplified by Dr. DiBona and continues the high bar set for this award.
We wish to also recognize the work of the Awards Committee and the nominations of other very distinguished and deserving candidates, and we look forward to recognizing the many contributions of these other deserving VA-based academic physicians with the DiBona Award in the future.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Nauseef on this well-deserved award!
Dr Nauseef will present the annual DiBona Award Lecture at Internal Medicine Grand Rounds on Thursday, May 23. The title of the lecture is “A tale of curious clinicians & discovery of the neutrophil oxidase.”