Announcement

Abstract

ANNOUNCEMENTSAnnouncementPublished Online:01 May 2006https://doi.org/10.1152/ajprenal.00018.2006MoreSectionsPDF (37 KB)Download PDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesGet permissionsTrack citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInEmailWeChat Dr. Kenneth R. Spring has been named the 2006 recipient of the Robert W. Berliner Award for Excellence in Renal Physiology, sponsored by Abbott Laboratories and presented by the Renal Section of the American Physiological Society. Dr. Spring will receive the award at the Renal Dinner on Tuesday, April 4, 2006.Dr. Spring attended Tufts University as both an undergraduate in Biology and for dental school, earning his DMD cum laude in 1966. He worked at the Veterans Affairs (VA) Hospital in Long Beach, California, from 1966 to 1967 and at the VA Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from 1967 to 1968, where he was a Chief Investigator. He then attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he completed his PhD in the Department of Physiology in 1971 under the supervision of Dr. Charles Paganelli. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Gerhard Giebisch in the Department of Physiology, Yale University College of Medicine, from 1971 to 1975, he accepted a position as a Senior Staff Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Laboratory of Kidney and Electrolyte Metabolism. He became a Research Physiologist at the NIH in 1978. He received the NIH Director’s Award in 1988 and was also made Chief, Section on Transport Physiology, at the Laboratory of Kidney and Electrolyte Metabolism in 1988, a position he held until he retired in 2002. In 2001 he received an NIH Merit Award.Dr. Spring is a world-recognized expert on microscopy applications to biological systems, as well as being an inventor of many ingenious devices used worldwide for biological research. He has published over a 130 peer-reviewed manuscripts on the use and application of these techniques to the study of transport physiology. His research focused on the study of salt and water transport in “leaky epithelia,” such as the renal proximal tubule; then, he switched his emphasis to applying optical methods to the regulation of cell volume, and finally, before he retired, demonstrated the functional role of the central cilium as a flow sensor in epithelial cells by performing experiments that demonstrated how bending the cilium increased intracellular calcium. During these years of research, he has trained numerous young scientists who have become leaders in the field of ion transport physiology and was always willing to share his expertise in microscopy with investigators from across the world.Dr. Spring was also a faculty member at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, from 1980 until he retired, teaching courses on quantitative light microscopy and advanced quantitative light microscopy. Dr. Spring served on several study sections, advisory committees, and editorial boards, including those of the Journal of Membrane Biology and Cytology (formerly Bioimaging), of which he was also associate editor from 1992 to 2002, the NIH Shared Instrumentation Study Section, and the National Science Foundation Biological Instrumentation and Instrument Development Study Section. Finally, in 2001 he authored a very funny book of autobiographical short stories, What Were You Thinking, which detailed his escapades growing up in a fishing village in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Following retirement he went back to his first love of fishing and boat-building; he is now the part-owner and founder of Small Open Boats in Solomons, Maryland, where he builds wooden boats and provides tools, materials, and expertise for others to do the same.The APS Renal Section’s Berliner Award Committee was composed of Heddwen L. Brooks (Renal Section Awards Chair); Pamela K. Carmines (Renal Section Chair), Jeff M. Sands (Editor, American Journal of Physiology-Renal Physiology), and Glenn Reinhart (Abbott Laboratories). Download figureDownload PowerPointThis article has no references to display. Download PDF Previous Back to Top FiguresReferencesRelatedInformation More from this issue > Volume 290Issue 5May 2006Pages F1278-F1278 Copyright & PermissionsCopyright © 2006 the American Physiological Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1152/ajprenal.00018.2006History Published online 1 May 2006 Published in print 1 May 2006 Metrics