Ronald A. DePinho, M.D., FCRH ’77, will receive the Brien McMahon Memorial Award for Distinguished Public Service in recognition of his many contributions to the fight against cancer.

DePinho is an internationally recognized researcher who served as a scientific director at Dana-Farber Cancer Center; as a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and at Harvard; and as president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where today he is a professor in the cancer biology department.

He is also the son of a Portuguese immigrant who, while living across the street from the Rose Hill campus, swore that one day he would send his son to Fordham. “It was an emotional day for us when I graduated from medical school,” given his parents’ minimal formal education, DePinho said in a 2003 profile in FORDHAM magazine.

DePinho graduated from Fordham as salutatorian and earned his medical degree in microbiology and immunology with distinction from Albert Einstein.

His father, Alvaro DePinho, came to America as a ship’s stowaway and had only a fourth-grade education, but through drive and hard work became owner of a real estate and construction company and raised a family in the Bronx.

His father’s death from colon cancer had a “profound impact” on DePinho’s career, fueling his desire to not only study cancer but also make sure the resulting knowledge was converted into cures, he said in a video produced by MD Anderson.

“My father, who was my hero, taught me that you should try to give back and help,” he said.

Under DePinho’s leadership, MD Anderson launched its Moon Shots Program in 2012 to accelerate the conversion of scientific research into lifesaving treatments.

“History has taught us that if we put our minds and will to a task, the human spirit will prevail,” he said in a video announcement of the initiative. “We must act now, act decisively. Today’s patients and future generations are counting on us.”

The Brien McMahon Memorial Award was established by Fordham’s Washington, D.C., alumni chapter in 1962 in honor of the late U.S. senator, a 1924 Fordham alumnus, and his work to cultivate peaceful uses for atomic energy. Other recipients include former news anchor Katie Couric, Mother Teresa, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Sonia Sotomayor, and Walter Cronkite.

Register to attend the October 4 event.

Sandra Day O’Connor, former associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Judith S. Kaye, former chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, weighed in on everything from the integrity of appointed vs. elected judges, to women in the law.
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Barrier Breakers; Sandra Day O’Connor, left, and Judith Kaye, right, spoke at Fordham Law School. O’Connor was the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court; Kaye was the first woman to be named chief judge in New York state. Photo by Chris Taggart

The hourlong conversation was moderated by John D. Feerick, LAW ’61, the Sydney C. Norris Professor of Law, whose own work on judicial selection in New York state served as a point of departure for a discussion of a legal conundrum: does appointing, rather than electing, judges make for a less corrupt judiciary?

Feerick chaired a 2006 report by the state’s Commission to Promote Public Confidence in Judicial Elections, offering reforms for judicial elections in the areas of candidate selection, campaign conduct and campaign finance.

But, as a judge who has “been in the trenches and seen it up close,” O’Connor, who ran for a judgeship in her home state of Arizona, called any electoral judicial system “a very poor way to pick judges.”

“An election that involves campaign contributions and money flowing into the courtroom? I cannot believe that is an equivalent to an appointive system,” said O’Connor, who retired from the Supreme Court in 2006 after more than 25 years on the bench. “No other nation in the world elects its judges.”

Kaye, who set up the commission, and who served on one of New York state’s few appointed courts – the Court of Appeals—expressed confidence in the commission’s recommendations to improve the judicial election process.

But she said she is not “proud” of what is happening elsewhere.

“In other parts of the country, 31 percent of high courts are elected,” she said. “I see millions of dollars being poured into those campaigns and I am worried.”

One answer to improving accountability in the nation’s judiciary, said the speakers, was to educate the public. Today, one-third of the people in the country don’t know that there are three branches of government, said Feerick.

O’Connor said that half of the states in the nation no longer require public schools to teach a course in civics. To offset this trend, O’Connor has started iCivics.org, a non-profit educational website that helps students to understand their branches of government, and the responsibilities attached to being a citizen.

Both women were judicial pioneers: O’Connor became the first female Supreme Court justice in 1980, breaking ground for the subsequent appointments of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Kaye was New York’s first female chief judge.

Although women make up roughly half of the nation’s law students, said Kaye, there is still unequal representation at the senior levels of the legal and judicial institutions.

“We need to keep our attention focused on . . .the woeful rise of women in the legal profession,” she said.

Fielding audience questions, O’Connor judiciously sidestepped commenting on the most conspicuous case currently before the Supreme Court: the legality of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

“I didn’t read the briefs,” said O’Connor. “I don’t even think the people who passed it read the legislation.”

The event was part of the Robert L. Levine Distinguished Lecture series, ongoing since 1992 and endowed by the Levine family in memory of Robert L. Levine (LAW ’26).