Awards honoring outstanding leadership and service to the College will be presented May 31, 2014, during Reunion Convocation. Read about the other award recipients.
Donald Krogstad ’65
Dr. Donald Krogstad, a member of the Bowdoin College Class of 1965 who has devoted his career as a physician and researcher to finding ways to contain and fight malaria, has been selected by the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees to receive one of two 2015 Common Good Awards.
Established in 1994 on the occasion of the Bowdoin College Bicentennial, the Common Good Award honors those alumni who have demonstrated an extraordinary, profound and sustained commitment to the common good, in the interest of society, with conspicuous disregard for personal gain in wealth or status.
Graduating magna cum laude with highest honors in biology, and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Krogstad, who lives in Gretna, Louisiana, went on to earn his medical degree at Harvard Medical School cum laude before residency and internship in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and joining the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, where he worked on parasitic diseases.
Krogstad entered the Peace Corps in 1973 to work as a volunteer physician in Lilongwe, Malawi, and then joined the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine.
In 1992, Krogstad took a position with the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine as chair of Tropical Medicine, later becoming the William Henderson Professor of Tropical Medicine, and was named director of the Tulane Center for Infectious Diseases in 1998.
In 2009, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year in Mali to conduct studies of the anti-malarial drug he developed.
“The most satisfying aspect of our work is the opportunity to help develop leaders for the future, by continuing to advise and guide our former trainees as they mature to become professors and deans themselves at universities in the U.S. and overseas, and investigators and public health leaders at the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization,” said Krogstad.
Krogstad’s lifelong commitment to serving others had roots at Bowdoin, where then-President LeRoy Greason cited him as the person most responsible for establishing the Big Brother program at the College, a program still active today.
The Common Good Awards will be presented Saturday, May 30, 2015, during Reunion Convocation.
Registration for Reunion 2015 (May 28-31) opens in March.
