Surgeon-Scientist Honored with 2026 Tripartite Prize
Daniela Ladner, MD, MPH, the John Benjamin Murphy Professor of Surgery and vice chair of research and innovation in the Department of Surgery, has been named the winner of the 2026 Tripartite Legacy Faculty Prize in Translational Science and Education.
“To be named the 2026 Tripartite Award winner is an incredible honor,” Ladner said. “It’s an honor I did not expect. It’s an award that really recognizes so many different parts of what is near and dear to me, and it makes me feel very seen. All of this is not possible without amazing people around me, and an award like this is never received without such an environment.”
During her tenure as vice chair of research and innovation, the Department of Surgery has nearly doubled the number of extramurally funded faculty. Ladner performs liver and kidney transplants, hepatobiliary surgery and related surgeries and serves as the associate director of the Liver Surgery Program. As the founding director of the Northwestern University Transplant Outcomes Research Collaborative (NUTORC), she has brought together expertise from across the Northwestern community to answer pertinent questions in transplantation and end-organ disease in a transdisciplinary fashion.
Ladner has been funded by the NIH for the past 15 years, receiving more than $25 million in grant funding and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed manuscripts. She presently has four NIH awards studying the epidemiology and cost of cirrhosis as well as epidemiological risk and translational markers of disease progression – each with doctoral candidates across different schools at Northwestern. She has created multiple research training programs, directs the postdoctoral T32 Transplant Surgery Scientist Training Program and is the founding director of the predoctoral T35 Northwestern Summer Research Program for Medical Students—the first program of its kind at Northwestern for over 30 years.
Ladner was also a recipient of the Feinberg Medical Faculty Council’s Mentor of the Year award in 2023, which recognizes faculty for their mentoring of students, trainees and peers, and the 2025 American Society for Transplant Surgeons Pipeline Award.
“Northwestern has been a place that has allowed me to try many different things, and there’s an openness here to just let people try and see if it works,” Ladner said. “That’s an incredible environment. It’s an environment of curiosity. It’s an environment of striving to do better, of growth, of supporting the next generation, and that is a very fortunate place to be.”
Hasan Alam, MD, the chair and Loyal and Edith Davis Professor of Surgery, nominated Ladner for the prize because of her commitment to translational research, education, mentoring and leadership in her field.
“I nominated Dr. Ladner for this award because she embodies the ethos of what the award stands for,” Alam said. “If you look for somebody who is a master surgeon, a dedicated educator, a very respected investigator at a national and international level, you can check all those boxes for her.”
The Tripartite Legacy Faculty Prize is given annually to a faculty member who has demonstrated excellence in research that emphasizes translational approaches, teaching and mentoring, and leadership. Sponsored and supported by the Office of the Dean, this award is made possible through the generous support of family members and friends of Geoffrey Kent, MD, PhD.
The prize was established to commemorate the medical teaching legacies of Abraham Albert Hijmans van den Bergh, MD; Isadore Snapper, MD; Hans Popper, MD; Fenton Schaffner, MD; and Kent. European-born and educated, their lives were forever changed by the Holocaust and World War II, and all but Hijmans van den Bergh reached the U.S. to continue their careers and briefly worked together at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Through their prolific collaborations and publications, Snapper, Popper, Schaffner and Kent emerged as international leaders in the study of liver disease.
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