Dr. Marianne Legato

Marianne J. Legato, M.D., F.A.C.P. is an internationally known academic physician, author, and lecturer. Dr. Marianne Legato is a specialist in the new science of gender-specific medicine, the science of how normal human function and the experience of the same disease vary as a function of gender/biological sex. Dr. Marianne Legato is Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and Adjunct Professor of Medicine, Johns Hopkins. Dr. Marianne Legato is the Founder and Director of the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia and more recently, of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, Inc., which collaborates with scholars around the world to advance the science of the differences between men and women.

Widely sought after by professional and lay groups alike, Dr. Legato has been featured on the national ABC program "20/20" in a segment dealing with gender prejudice in women's health care. She has made multiple appearances on local and national television and radio programs, including ABC's Good Morning America, Good Day New York, The Joan Hamburg Show, The Today Show, Lifetime TV, and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Dr. Marianne Legato has been an invited speaker at hundreds of lectures and conferences throughout the world for over a decade. Most recently, she was the president of the First International Congress on Gender-Specific Medicine in Berlin, Germany (February, 2006) and is the honorary president of the next two International Congresses on Gender-Specific Medicine in Vienna (2007) and Stockholm (2008).

Dr. Marianne Legato has received many awards for her leadership role in women's health. Among these are: she was one of 300 American women included in the National Library of Medicine's exhibit, "Changing the Face of Medicine" in 2004. The Ladies' Home Journal established the annual Marianne J. Legato Award in Gender-Specific Medicine In 2006. In 2005, she received the National Council on Women's Health Award for distinguished service in gender-specific medicine. In 2002, she delivered the keynote address at the inaugural kickoff event of the Intramural Program for Research on Women's Health of the National Institutes of Health. She received the "Woman in Science" award from the American Medical Women's Association in February of 2002. In the Fall of 2000, Ladies Home Journal honored Dr. Marianne Legato as a "Heroine of Women's Health." She has been consecutively cited as one of New York's best doctors by New York Magazine, and America's Top Doctors for the past eleven years, most recently in 2008. She has been listed in the June, 1994 issue of Mirabella magazine's "1,000 Women for the Nineties", and inclusion in the New York Times list of twelve health care professionals accomplished in the area of women's health in June, 1997. She was named an "American Health Hero" by American Health for Women in 1997 and received the Women's Medical Society of New York's annual Woman in Science Award in 1997.

Dr. Marianne Legato spent her early research career doing research on the structure and function of the cardiac cell. Her work was supported by the American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health. She won the J. Murray Steele Award, the Martha Lyon Slater Fellowship and a four year Senior Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, New York Affiliate. She won a coveted Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and sat on the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute's study section on cardiovascular disease, as well as, on the Basic Science Council of the American Heart Association. Most recently, she has served as a charter member of the Advisory Board of the Office of Research on Women's Health of the National Institutes of Health. She is co-chair of a task force that authored the 1999-2000 report from that Office, "An Agenda For Research On Women's Health For The 21st Century."

In 1992, Dr. Marianne Legato won the American Heart Association's Blakeslee Award for the best book written for the lay public on cardiovascular disease with her publication of The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Heart Disease, published by Simon and Schuster. Her film, "Shattering the Myths: Women and Heart Disease" won a "Freddy," a first prize in the category of Women's Health at The 1995 International Health and Medical Film Festival. She published What Women Need to Know, (Simon & Schuster) in 1997. Her book for the lay public on gender-specific medicine, is Eve's Rib, published by Harmony Books. Dr. Marianne Legato has just published her new book, Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget, published by Rodale and translated into 28 languages since its publication in the Fall of 2005. She has just published a ground breaking analysis of men's health, Why Men Die First, published by Palgrave MacMillan. She is the editor of the first medical text about gender-based medicine, The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine, published by Academic Press in 200 A new, second edition of her textbook is in preparation and scheduled to appear in 2008.

Dr. Marianne Legato is the founder and editor of The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine published for the scientific community and selected in 2001 by the National Library of Medicine and Elsevier Science to be indexed and included in their worldwide databases, MEDLINE and EMBASE. She founded the official scientific journal of the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine, Gender Medicine, in 2004. This journal has also been indexed for inclusion in Medline by the National Library of Medicine. She is on the editorial board of Cardiovascular Risk Factors and Prevention Magazine. She writes continuously for both the scientific and lay communities, and is a the health advisor for the Ladies Home Journal. She is a member of several groups of accomplished professionals, including the prestigious Women's Forum, and has been consistently included for a decade in various collections of notables in the "Who's Who..." series.