Dr. Marilyn J. Bull, Morris Green Professor Emerita of Pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, was awarded the 2021 Gerald L. Bepko IUPUI Community Medallion. Her career in academic medicine spans half a century, with expertise and board certification in three specialties—pediatrics, medical genetics, and neurodevelopmental disabilities.
She was selected to receive the award not only for her extraordinary impact on campus but also for the critical role in advancing legislation regarding infant and child car seats and seat belt safety that has had lasting impact in Indiana and around the world.
The selection committee was especially impressed by Dr. Bull’s unwavering commitment to championing society’s most precious and vulnerable citizens—children with devastating illnesses and difficult medical challenges—by creating and implementing multiple innovative initiatives that set standards and improved their care often with multi-disciplinary, family-centered treatment. That approach has been far reaching, in large part because she has mentored hundreds of physicians, nurses, and other health care providers who have trained and worked at Riley Hospital for Children and who emulated her and her work and applied the programs she developed well beyond Indiana and the United States.
Dr. Bull’s many publications and the number of prestigious awards by the medical profession and also by the public listed in her curriculum vitae document only imperfectly the enormous influence her life’s work has had locally and globally, especially on children and their families and communities.
The Bepko Medallion will be given to Dr. Bull in 2022, a year late because of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions that upended the ways the award was selected and conferred.