Dr. Norman E. Shumway, renowned heart transplant surgeon and a 1949 graduate of the Vanderbilt School of Medicine, will be honored with the Alumni Association Distinguished Alumnus Award Friday, Oct. 17, as part of the annual Homecoming celebration.

A professor emeritus of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford University and associate chief of external affairs at Stanford Hospital, Shumway is considered by many to be the preeminent pioneer and world authority on human heart transplantation. He performed the first successful heart transplant on an adult in the United States in 1968 and the first heart-lung transplant in 1981. He also pioneered a procedure for correcting birth defects through bypass surgery and developed techniques for total surgical correction of "blue baby" heart defects.

A native of Michigan, Shumway planned to study law before World War II interrupted his studies at the University of Michigan. After enlisting in the Army in 1943, he was given the choice of becoming a physician or a dentist. He chose to study medicine and enrolled at Vanderbilt after completing a nine-month premed course at Baylor.

After the war Shumway resumed his studies at the University of Minnesota, where he earned the Ph.D. degree in 1956. He launched the clinical heart transplantation program at Stanford in 1967 and devoted the following two decades to studying the clinical, physiological and pathological events following heart transplantation.

He has published more than 450 scholarly papers in the field of cardiothoracic surgery and recently co-authored a book on thoracic transplantation with his daughter Sara, a 1979 graduate of the Vanderbilt School of Medicine who runs the transplant program at the University of Minnesota.

Shumway has been recognized with many national and international awards, including the Modern Medicine Award for Distinguished Achievement, the Renee Leriche Prize from the International Society of Surgery and the First Texas Heart Institute Medal.

In 1983 he was honored by the Vanderbilt Medical School as its Distinguished Alumnus, and the Vanderbilt Transplant Center presents an annual lecture that is named in his honor.

This year's Shumway Lecture in Transplantation will be presented Thursday, Oct. 16, at 4 p.m. in 108 Light Hall. Vaughn A. Starnes, the Hastings Professor of Surgery and chief of cardiothoracic surgery and cardiopulmonary transplantation at the University of Southern California, will discuss "Indications and Outcomes for Living Related Lung Transplantation."