Four outstanding alumni will be honored during the annual Alumni Awards Dinner August 22, at the Memphis Westin Beale Street. The 2019 honorees are William Mariencheck, MD; Eugene C. Mangiante, Jr., MD; Peter Whitington, MD; and Donald Barker, MD.
Dr. Mariencheck, a former division chief and clinical associate professor of Pulmonary Medicine at UTHSC, has practiced medicine for more than 50 years. Specializing in critical care medicine and pulmonary disease, he has been involved in many professional organizations, including the American Lung Association of Tennessee, the Tennessee Thoracic Society, the Memphis Academy of Internal Medicine, the Sarcoidosis Research Institute, and the Will Rogers Memorial Foundation. He is an internist at Mid-South Pulmonary Specialists, PC, in Memphis.
Dr. Mangiante has practiced medicine for more than 40 years. He is a professor of General and Acute Care Surgery at UTHSC and chief of Surgery at the Memphis VA Medical Center. He has been involved in organizations, including the American College of Surgeons, the Harwell Wilson Surgical Society, Alpha Omega Alpha, Memphis Surgical Society, the Society of Critical Care Medicine, and many more.
Dr. Whitington has been Professor Emeritus of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University since his retirement in 2017. An accomplished transplant surgeon and scientist specializing in pediatric hepatology, Dr. Whitington served as director of Organ Transplantation at the Siragusa Transplantation Center at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, where he launched the pediatric transplant program. His research focuses on the clinical, complex mechanism of liver injury and preventive treatment of gestational alloimmune liver disease. He has received numerous awards and has written more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, over 100 chapters, and has lectured in 17 countries.
Dr. Barker is an accomplished surgeon who specializes in trauma and critical care. He is a professor in the Department of Surgery at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Chattanooga and medical director of the Level 1 trauma center at Erlanger Medical Center and the Life Force Air Medical Service. Dr. Barker is also an instructor and scholar, giving numerous lectures and teaching basic and advanced trauma life support courses to health care professionals. He has authored or co-authored more than 150 scholarly articles.