Paul Kimmelstiel Graduate Student Award
Established 2000
Dr. Paul Kimmelstiel was a native of Hamburg, Germany, and came to the United States in 1933 after having been trained in Germany by Theodore Fahr, one of the first and finest renal pathologists. In 1936, Dr. Kimmelstiel and Clifford Wilson published a paper entitled "Intercapillary Lesions in the Glomeruli of the Kidney" (American Journal of Pathology 12:99-105) about the glomerular morphologic findings in diabetes mellitus. Subsequently, the eponym "Kimmelstiel-Wilson nodules" was applied to these lesions. During his career at the Memorial Hospital in Charlotte, North Carolina (1940-1958) and at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1958-1966), he became one of the leading and most respected world authorities on pathology of the kidney. From 1966 to 1970 as Professor of Pathology at the University of Oklahoma, he continued to work on experimental diabetes, but was also very active in teaching. In a 1966 letter, he wrote that a pathology department "should render teaching, research, and service, not emphasizing either of them at the expense of the others" and "the student learns more from quizzing, discussing, and correcting of false concepts than from listening to a lecturer." Dr. Kimmelstiel's general contributions to medicine came from meticulous observations combined with objectivity, which provided the sound foundation upon which scientific medicine evolved. Many believe that his best work was done while a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma. In his honor, this award annually recognizes the outstanding graduate student in the University of Oklahoma Department of Pathology.