2023 Ashbel Smith Distinguished Alumni (ASDA) Award Recipient
This is the highest alumni honor bestowed to a medical school graduate by the university's John Sealy School of Medicine Alumni Association. This award, recognizing outstanding service to the medical profession and to humanity, honors the memory of Dr. Ashbel Smith. A prominent figure in Texas medicine, politics and education, Dr. Smith was considered the driving force behind establishing the University of Texas at Austin in 1881, and a medical department that would later be known as the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston in 1891.
About Dr. Lerman
Dr. Mark Lerman graduated from The University of Texas at Austin in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors
and special honors in Psychology. During his time at UT Austin, he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
During his junior year in medical school at UTMB in Galveston, he was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical
Honor Society and served as a non-voting member of the UTMB School of Medicine selection committee. He graduated
from the UTMB School of Medicine in 1973 with high honors.
By 1978, he completed his internship, a residency in internal medicine, and a fellowship in nephrology at the University
of Texas Southwestern Health Science Center in Dallas. He became a diplomat of the American Board of Internal
Medicine (1975) and a diplomat in Nephrology (1978).
He joined the Dallas Nephrology Associates from 1978 to 2019 and practiced clinical nephrology and transplant
nephrology.
He participated in the training of medical students, house staff, and
fellows in Nephrology. Dr. Lerman started the HCA Medical City Dallas
(MCD) kidney and pancreas transplant program in 1997. In preparation for
intensive care and post-transplant medical/surgical nursing care to potential kidney transplant donors and recipients,
he provided lectures to the hospital nursing staff. The first kidney transplant was in 1998 from a sibling living donor into
a young woman (sister) with end-stage renal disease due to adult-onset polycystic kidney disease.
Dr. Lerman and his transplant team performed the first successful live donor ABO incompatible kidney transplant in
North Texas in 2014 and established one of the few such programs in Texas.
He established a test center in collaboration with the nuclear medicine department at MCD hospital using Glofil-125 for
directly measuring glomerular filtration rate to better assess the suitability of potential live kidney donors.
Dr. Lerman served as the program’s medical director and chairman of the program’s transplant selection committee
until his retirement in 2019. The MCD program transplant volume progressively increased from 1998-2019 performing
more
than 150 kidney and/or kidney-pancreas transplants per year. The
program is one of the largest transplant programs in Dallas, with more
than 200 kidney and/or kidney-pancreas transplants in 2022.
Dr. Lerman is an active member and Fellow of the American Society of Nephrology and continues to serve as a community leader in transplantation and platinum’s most valuable member for the American Society of Nephrology online communities.
He continues to be a member and Fellow of the American Society of Transplantation (AST). He served as co-chairman
and
chairman of the AST Conflict of Interest Committee and is an at-large
member of the AST Kidney-Pancreas Community of Practice (KPCOP)
Executive Committee. He is leading a work group for the AST KPCOP
executive committee on the role of molecular diagnostics in kidney
transplantation.
Dr. Lerman has authored or co-authored many articles in peer review journals and has served as a reviewer.
Dr. Lerman was invited by the American Transplant Congress in Boston to review and score abstracts on the topic of
kidney,
cardiovascular and metabolic complications. He also co-moderated an
Impact session on kidney paired donation at the American Transplant
Congress.
Dr. Lerman volunteers his expertise in transplant medicine and nephrology. He gives online lectures to nephrology
fellows in training at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas and shares his expertise with the MCD kidney-pancreas
transplant program.