Michelle P.Winn, MD, Associate Professor of Nephrology in the Department of Medicine, passed away July 23, 2014, after battling pancreatic cancer for more than a year. The Duke University Division of Nephrology will hold a memorial service to honor Dr. Winn’s life and work on September 2, at 3 p.m. in the Duke Chapel.
Dr. Winn grew up in a military family in North Carolina, attending the North Carolina School of Science and Math, and graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill and East Carolina Medical School. She first came to Duke in 1992 as an intern, and undertook residencies in Psychiatry and Medicine before focusing her career on Nephrology and joining the faculty.
Dr. Winn was a wonderful clinician respected and loved by her colleagues. She was a generous mentor and an esteemed physician-scientist who studied familial focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) and other inherited kidney diseases. In 2005, in a landmark Science paper, she reported that mutations in the TRPC6 gene caused FSGS, and she became an internationally recognized leader in her field.
She received many awards and honors including the Blue Ribbon Diversity Award from Duke in 2004. She was the first minority scientist to receive the American Society of Nephrology Young Investigator Award. In 2007, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, which is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. In 2011, Michelle was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation (ASCI) and had the special honor of giving an invited talk at the ASCI/AAP meeting that year.