Nanette Wenger was born September 3, 1930, in New York City to parents who had emigrated from Russia to the United States and settled in New York.[2][3] Her early education was in the New York City public schools. In 1951 she graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College in New York.[4] She received her doctor of medicine degree from Harvard Medical School in 1954 as one of their first female graduates,[5] and began her postgraduate work at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, where she became the first woman to be chief resident in the cardiology department.[5] After her residency, she moved to Emory University, where she started as an instructor and eventually was named full professor of medicine in 1971.[4]
Contributions to medicine
Wenger has been a leader in the cardiology field as she has authored and co-authored more than 1,300 scientific and review articles and book chapters.[6] Over the course of her career, Wenger became one of the first doctors to focus on heart disease in women, since this disease was initially thought to primarily affect men.[7][8] In 1993 Wenger co-wrote a landmark review article[9] that demonstrated that cardiovascular disease does similarly affect women since, at the time, women were more likely than men to die from the disease.[10] She also helped write the 2007 Guidelines for Preventing Cardiovascular Disease in Women.[6] She has devoted the rest of her career to understand how heart disease, specifically coronary artery disease, affects women as well as advocating for the need to disaggregate study results and report gender-specific analyses from clinical trials. [7][10]
She is married to Dr. Julius Wenger, a gastroenterologist; she has three daughters. In 1979, she founded the Atlanta Women’s Network, which continues to promote and enhance the success of professional women.[11]
Selected awards and honors
Some of the awards/honors Wenger has acquired include:
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