Dr. Vera Hauptfeld-Dolejsek is recognized for her recent promotion at the 2018 Women in Science and Medicine Promotion Reception at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The Division of Transplantation’s Vera Hauptfeld-Dolejsek, Ph.D., was recognized for her recent promotion to the rank of professor at the Nov. 15 Women in Science and Medicine Promotion Reception in the Partridge Atrium at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Dr. Vera Hauptfeld-Dolejsek
Since 2015, this annual event, hosted by the UAB School of Medicine Office for Diversity and Inclusion and SOM Dean Selwyn Vickers, M.D., has given UAB the opportunity to celebrate its female faculty members who are excelling in their fields.
Of the women being honored at the event, eight were recently promoted to professor, and 19 were recently promoted to assistant professor.
Hauptfeld-Dolejsek said she was touched to be included among the reception’s honorees and attributed much of her professional success to her family.
"I have to mention my parents, especially my father whose life influenced mine, making me a stubborn old lady who wants to do good and wants everyone else to do the same,” she said.
Born in what used to be Czechoslovakia, Hauptfeld-Dolejsek described her father who she said was nominated for a Nobel Prize for his work in nuclear physics before joining the underground resistance movement during Nazi Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. She explained that her father, who died in a concentration camp during World War II, refused to take his research to a Czech-turned-German university during the occupation and gave up academia to work in an armament factory where he passed information about Nazi weapons shipments to London during the war.
“He was a patriot,” Hauptfeld-Dolejsek said. “Because of the sacrifice of people like him throughout Europe and the U.S.A., I tried to live my life to cherish the freedom they gave us, and I will always remember that freedom and democracy are easy to lose.”
Department of Surgery Chair Herbert Chen, M.D., introduced Hauptfeld-Dolejsek at the reception and shared why he believed she was especially deserving of this new distinction.
"Vera’s desire to be a part of the education of her lab members in addition to life-saving transplantation procedures is exemplary of her excellence as a director of the HLA Laboratory,” Chen said. “Her dedication to education, research and service makes it easy to give Vera my full support in her promotion from associate professor to professor.”
View photos of the reception here.
Marina Moody contributed to this report.