McCabe named to March of Dimes Foundation post

McCabe

Edward R.B. McCabe, a professor of pediatrics in clinical genetics and metabolism at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and an internationally recognized expert in pediatrics and genetics, has been named senior vice president and medical director of the March of Dimes Foundation. McCabe will oversee the medical and clinical initiatives of the March of Dimes, one of the nation’s leaders in maternal and infant health. He will assume his responsibilities in November.

McCabe served as executive director of the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome, the Anna and John J. Sie Endowed Chair in Down Syndrome Research and Clinical Care from 2010-2012. Prior to that, he was at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), as executive chairman of the Department of Pediatrics and Physician-in-Chief of the Mattel Children’s Hospital, an institution that he established with a Mattel gift of $25 million. He also held the Mattel Endowed Chair of Pediatrics, and was professor of genetics as well as professor of bio-engineering. He founded and served as co-director of the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics and established the first program in nano-pediatrics. With his wife, Linda McCabe, he wrote “How to Succeed in Academics” and “DNA: Promise and Peril,” to support the courses they taught at UCLA.

McCabe identified the first patients with glycerol kinase deficiency, part of a genetic syndrome contiguous with congenital adrenal hypoplasia and he cloned the genes for these disorders. He also developed genetic strategies to confirm the diagnosis of sickle cell disease when it has been identified through newborn screening.

He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He was president of the American Board of Medical Genetics, the American College of Medical Genetics, the American Society of Human Genetics, the American Pediatric Society and the 11th International Congress of Inborn Errors of Metabolism.