The award will be presented at the society’s annual meeting in 2014.
Throughout his 60-year career as a scientist, teacher, clinician and administrator, De Groot has had an enormous impact on the field of endocrinology. He has authored influential textbooks, and his research in thyroidology has touched almost every aspect of the discipline, including thyroid hormone synthesis and action, mechanisms of autoimmune thyroid disease, and thyroid cancer.
A resident of Nonquitt, Mass., De Groot trained at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed his medical residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. He served in the Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health and in Afghanistan, and spent 12 years at Mass General and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago. He joined the Endocrine Division at Brown University in January 2005 and moved to URI in 2009.
Based at URI’s Institute for Immunology and Informatics at the Providence Campus, De Groot’s research centers on viral mediated gene therapy for thyroid cancer and genetic mechanisms promoting autoimmune thyroid disease. He has more that 400 publications to his name and received the Endocrine Society award as Distinguished Educator in 2004. Perhaps his best-known publication is the three-volume textbook Endocrinology, which he edited through six editions over the past 30 years. He also is the editor of two Web books, www.endotext.org and www.thyroidmanager.org, which receive over 80,000 hits each day from 6000 visitors around the world.
The Endocrine Society is the world’s oldest, largest and most active organization devoted to research on hormones and the clinical practice of endocrinology. The society’s membership consists of about 16,000 scientists, physicians, educators, nurses and students in more than 100 countries. Society members represent all basic, applied and clinical interests in endocrinology.