Faculty Service Achievement Award
This award is presented to an ASU faculty member whose innovative efforts and service to ASU and/or the community have made an impact and enhanced the world.
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Dr. Carolyn Compton, an Arizona State University professor of life sciences, medical director of the Biodesign Clinical Testing Laboratory at ASU and professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine, is the recipient of the 2023 Faculty Service Achievement Award.
Compton was named a top female scientist in the world in 2022 and one of the world's top 100 pathologists in 2016. In 2022, she was on sabbatical as an honorary professor at Queen Mary University of London - Barts Hospital.
Under her leadership, the ASU Biodesign Institute converted its research infrastructure to focus on testing, tracking and mitigating the coronavirus. The institute’s achievements include developing the first saliva-based coronavirus test in the western U.S., receiving accreditation from the College of American Pathologists and administering over 1 million COVID tests.
She followed her work with COVID-19 testing by inventing a year-long large project with undergraduates called “The Making of a COVID Lab,” and offered an honors course. Forty students signed up, requiring Compton to recruit and coordinate seven additional faculty mentors and leaders.
The Mayo Clinic School of Medicine where Compton teaches represents a partnership formalized in 2017 between ASU’s Alliance for Health Care and Mayo Clinic, a collaboration aimed at transforming medical education and health care in the U.S.
Compton also teaches a highly popular course exploring cancer and heart disease. This course serves 300-400 students each year, and she has now developed an online version, which provides a service for a much wider community of online students scattered around the world.
Compton is also the chief medical officer of the National Biomarkers Development Alliance, a member of the Biodesign Institute at ASU and the chief medical officer of the Complex Adaptive Systems Institute.She is a former professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, chief of Gastrointestinal Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and pathologist-in-chief of the Boston Shriners Children’s Hospital.
She designed and launched national programs for biobanking and biospecimen science that became foundational for the Cancer Human Biobank, and she was involved with the first team to use an engineered human organ (skin) in a life-saving setting to successfully treat patients with massive burn wounds.