Three faculty members in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine have been selected to receive awards from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), the professional organization of all 151 accredited medical schools in the United States and nearly 400 major teaching hospitals and health systems nationwide. The winners of the awards will be honored at the AAMC annual meeting, in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, November 4.

David A. Asch, executive director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation, the John Morgan Professor of Medicine and Medical Ethics and Health Policy at PSOM, and professor of health-care management and operations, information and decisions at Wharton, will receive the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation David E. Rogers Award, given for “major contributions to improving the health and health care of the American people.” He is a pioneer in combining economic analysis with moral and psychological theory and marketing in behavioral economics.

 Gail Morrison, the William Maul Measey President’s Distinguished Professor in Medical Education and former long-time senior vice dean for medical education, is one of four recipients of the Alpha Omega Alpha Robert J. Glaser Distinguished Teacher Award. For decades she has led research, development and implementation of medical school curriculum changes at Penn and across the nation.

Stanley Plotkin, emeritus professor of pediatrics at Penn, will receive the  Award for Distinguished Research in the Biomedical Sciences. Among his notable advances in the field of vaccine research and development is the attenuated RA27/3 rubella virus vaccine, licensed in the United States in 1979 and now used worldwide.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, his vaccine led to the eradication of rubella in the US and the Western Hemisphere. Today’s well- known MMR vaccine comprises the RA27/3 vaccineand vaccines for measles and mumps.