Honorary Degree Recipient
Doctor of Science
Medical School, May 10, 2002
Louis J. Ignarro is a 1966 graduate of the University of Minnesota Medical School. He has made immense contributions to the body of evidence that culminated in the important discovery that vascular endothelial cells produce nitric oxide, a substance that is critical to the regulation of local vasodilatation of blood vessels and which exerts important roles in the cardiovascular, immune and nervous systems. He is the first person to have earned a Ph.D. in a University of Minnesota Academic Health Center discipline, viz., pharmacology, and to later be awarded a Nobel Prize.
Biographies are as-of time of award presentation.