Accepting the HACU Award of Excellence for Outstanding HACU Member Institution was University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) President Francisco Cigarroa, the nationally acclaimed pediatric and transplant surgeon, and first Hispanic American to lead a comprehensive U.S. health science university.

The award was presented at a special session of HACU’s 16th Annual Conference, “Hispanic Empowerment: America’s Key to Prosperity,” a national meeting in Denver, Colorado, of Hispanic higher education leaders, advocates, public policy makers and students from throughout the United States. The conference ends Tuesday.

“Dr. Cigarroa has established a legacy of excellence and innovation at a health science university that is making dramatic gains in efforts to best address the health care needs of the nation’s youngest and largest ethnic population, while also training a new generation of diverse higher education and health-care service leaders,” HACU President and CEO Antonio Flores said.

“We celebrate his inspiring leadership, and the extraordinary impact of this outstanding university health science center on the health and higher education needs of our Hispanic communities throughout the United States,” Flores said. “It is indeed an honor and a privilege to count the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio as a member of HACU.”

HACU represents more than 335 colleges and universities that collectively serve more than two-thirds of all Hispanic higher education students. UTHSCSA is a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, with a student enrollment that is more than 25 percent Hispanic.

More than 3,000 students a year train at UTHSCSA, its satellite campuses and more than 100 affiliated hospitals, clinics and health care facilities serving a 50,000 square-mile, predominantly Hispanic region of South Texas that extends from San Antonio to the Texas-Mexico border.

UTHSCSA is a national leader in Hispanic health care outreach and breakthrough research, also offering urgently needed environmental health care training programs at extension campuses that provide medical students and residents the opportunity to live and train in largely impoverished border communities of Texas.

Educated at Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins, Dr. Cigarroa is a native of Laredo, Texas, who served as chief resident at Harvard University’s teaching hospital, Massachusetts General in Boston, before completing a fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. At Harvard, he was the recipient of the prestigious Marshall K. Bartlett Surgical Research Award.

In 1995, he joined the UTHSCSA faculty. He was on the surgical team that in 1997 split a donor liver for transplant into two recipients – the first operation of its type in Texas. In 2000, he headed the team that performed the first successful pediatric small bowel transplant in South Texas.

Most recently, Dr. Cigarroa was appointed to a two-year term on the Secretary’s Council on Public Health Preparedness. The new advisory panel of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was created in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to advise on emergency response planning and appropriate actions to the potential threat of bioterrorism and other public health emergency scenarios.

For more information, contact HACU national headquarters in San Antonio, Texas, at (210) 692-3805. Ext. 3214. Or visit www.hacu.net.