Jack L. Cronenwett

Honorary Chairman MD Darmouth University

Dr. Cronenwett is Professor of Surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. He ran a Vascular Surgery fellowship for many years and was one of the first program directors to initiate an integrated vascular residency where residents are recruited to spend five years in vascular residency just after graduation from medical school. He also served as President of the Association of Program Directors in Vascular Surgery and was responsible for putting together the modern curriculum in the specialty.

Dr. Cronenwett's mentorship to medical students, general surgery residents,and Vascular Surgery residents and fellows is legendary. His fellows now occupy highly regarded academic positions. He served as President of the Society for Vascular Surgery, among others, in 2003 and led the merger of the two national societies. His foresight led to changing this national society from an annual meeting focused society to an around the year vibrant organization that has been changing the face of the specialty.

He has gone far beyond the field to organize a regional consortium to improve the quality of vascular care in New England. Dr. Cronenwett is now working with the regional and national societies to try to make this effort at improving quality a national one. As a result, vascular care has greatly benefited from the efforts Dr. Cronenwett has made to improve our understanding of the outcomes of vascular interventions.

He is Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Vascular Surgery and the Editor of Rutherford's Vascular Surgery Textbook, 7th Edition. His research interests involve abdominal aortic aneurysms, outcome analysis, and quality improvement in vascular surgery. Since 2002 he has served as Medical Director of the Vascular Study Group of New England, a regional cooperative quality improvement project involving 25 hospitals in CT, MA, ME, NH, RI and VT. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters, and delivered more than 250 scientific presentations.

Jack L. Cronenwett, MD, right, accepts award for his work in training vascular surgeons.

Pioneering vascular surgeon and Dartmouth medical educator Jack L. Cronenwett, MD, received the prestigious Julius H. Jacobson II Award for Physician Excellence on September 20, during the annual meeting of the Vascular Disease Foundation (VDF).

The VDF praised Cronenwett, a professor of surgery at Dartmouth Medical School (DMS) and a practicing surgeon at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), for training "an entire generation of vascular surgery fellows" through the fellowship program he directed for many years. He initiated the first five-year residency program for vascular surgery training in the United States at DHMC.

In 2002, Cronenwett organized the Vascular Study Group of New England (VSGNE), a regional consortium now consisting of 22 hospitals, which shares data about procedures and outcomes with the aim of improving the quality of vascular care in the six states. The group has now collected data on 15,000 procedures in New England, and demonstrated improvement in key processes of care and outcome.

"This award is particularly meaningful to me because it recognizes the development of the new training paradigm for vascular surgeons, where medical student directly enter vascular residency without prior general surgery training," Cronenwett says. "I was fortunate to be able to have an instrumental role in the development of this training paradigm, and to received support to start the first program here at DHMC."

Cronenwett is editor emeritus of the Journal of Vascular Surgery and the editor of the seventh edition of Rutherford's Vascular Surgery Textbook. His research interests include aortic aneurysms and outcome analysis. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed articles, books, and book chapters, and delivered more than 250 scientific presentations.

After earning his medical degree from the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1973, Cronenwett did his residency in general surgery at the University of Michigan Medical Center. He then did his fellowship in vascular surgery at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center .