UMB recognizes Dr. Leah Millstein, Dr. Ramsay Koury, Professor Natalie Ram, Dr. Graeme Woodworth, and medical student Anum Zehra for their outstanding achievements and contributions to the University.
Photo: Top row, from left: Leah Millstein, Ramsay Koury, and Natalie Ram. Bottom row, from left: Graeme Woodworth and Anum Zehra.
Every fall, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) dedicates one week to commemorate our rich history and celebrate the future we’re building together. Among the highlights of Founders Week is recognizing the extraordinary work of our faculty, staff, and students with awards that signify outstanding accomplishment in education, public service, research/scholarship, entrepreneurship, and academics. Here are our 2026 Founders Week Awards recipients, who will be honored during the week of Oct. 19-22.
EDUCATOR OF THE YEAR
Leah S. Millstein, MD
Associate Professor, Department of Medicine
School of Medicine
Dr. Millstein has been an educator at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) since 2008 and has been actively involved in leadership for multiple residency programs and clinical resident training. Passionate about medical student education, she is director of the Rural-MD Scholars Program, including the Rural Health Equity and Access Longitudinal Elective, and director of the Ambulatory course for fourth-year medical students.
Millstein, who holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Pediatrics, was assistant program director, Internal Medicine and Pediatrics Residency, from 2010 to 2024 and was associate program director, Pediatric Residency Program, from 2011 to 2024.
Millstein has experience caring for patients of all ages in inpatient and outpatient settings and currently focuses her clinical time on patients with complex medical conditions in outpatient internal medicine. She is board-certified in internal medicine and pediatrics.
For her work in education, Millstein was selected as a fellow of the Pass and Susel Academy of Educational Excellence at UMSOM. She also has received UMSOM’s Ambulatory Medicine Teacher of the Year Award twice for her work with internal medicine residents.
Millstein became director of the Rural-MD Scholars Program in 2024. The program aims to educate medical students to gain a deeper understanding of rural medicine and train physicians who will practice in underserved areas of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
She has received external grant funding and been awarded multiple interprofessional education (IPE) seed grants for her work developing an IPE curriculum on advance care planning. Millstein’s research interest is medical education, including learner assessment and curricular development.
She has been a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics since 2006 and is a member of the Medicine-Pediatrics Program Directors Association, Association of Pediatric Program Directors, Maryland Rural Health Association, and National Rural Health Association.
She earned her medical degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and completed an internal medicine and pediatrics residency at Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and University Hospitals of Cleveland at Case Western Reserve. She served as a fifth-year chief resident for internal medicine and pediatrics at Rainbow Babies/Case before accepting a pediatric hospitalist position at Baltimore-Washington Medical Center.
PUBLIC SERVANT OF THE YEAR
Ramsay Koury, DMD
Clinical Assistant Professor and Director, Division of General Practice, Department of Comprehensive Dentistry
School of Dentistry
Dr. Koury has dedicated his career to expanding access to oral health care for underserved populations while fostering a culture of service among future health care professionals.
Since 2016, he has led the University of Maryland School of Dentistry’s (UMSOD) participation in Mission of Mercy programs throughout Maryland, organizing and coordinating student, faculty, resident, and staff involvement in events across Baltimore, the Eastern Shore, College Park, Southern Maryland, Western Maryland, and Montgomery County.
Working alongside organizations such as United Way, Catholic Charities, the Universities at Shady Grove, and community partners, Koury has helped expand access to care for Maryland residents facing significant barriers to treatment. Through these efforts, nearly 4,000 patients have received essential oral health care services, including extractions, restorative treatment, and diagnostic radiographs. Under his leadership, underserved and uninsured Maryland residents have received care that alleviates pain, restores function, and improves quality of life.
Koury has exhibited a longstanding dedication to public service. Before joining UMSOD, he participated in numerous mission trips to Honduras, experiences that drew him to Mission of Mercy when UMSOD sought leadership for the Baltimore event in 2016.
He devotes countless hours to recruiting volunteers, mentoring students, and ensuring that patients receive compassionate, high-quality care. His commitment extends beyond his professional responsibilities, including occasional personal financial contributions to support the program’s mission.
Through Koury’s leadership and mentorship, UMSOD students gain valuable clinical experience and develop a deeper understanding of the difficulties many individuals face in accessing oral health care. Mission of Mercy exposes students to the realities of financial hardship, language barriers, and other social determinants of health, fostering empathy and a deeper commitment to serving vulnerable populations.
On the academic side, Koury’s abilities as a professor have been recognized twice by UMSOD, which honored him with the Frank J. Sinnreich Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2016 and 2023.
Koury earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Juniata College and his Doctor of Medicine in Dentistry degree from the University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine. He practiced general dentistry in the Harrisburg, Pa., area from 1987 to 2013 before joining UMSOD.
RESEARCHER/SCHOLAR OF THE YEAR
Natalie Ram, JD
Professor of Law
Francis King Carey School of Law
Professor Ram is a leading scholar on the intersection of genetic privacy and the law whose research on genetic privacy, biospecimen use, and government access to sensitive biological data has fundamentally advanced understanding in legal and scientific communities and reshaped national conversations.
She is the author of more than 20 book chapters and law review articles, 17 peer-reviewed publications, and 23 shorter scholarly pieces. Examples of her work include “America’s Hidden National DNA Database” (Texas Law Review, 2022) and “Legal and Ethical Issues of Wastewater SARS-CoV-2 Monitoring for COVID-19 Surveillance” (Journal of Law and the Biosciences, 2020). In 2026, Ram was recognized by the Privacy Law Scholars Conference with the Ian Kerr Best Paper Award for her work, “Surveilling the Sewer.”
Ram has received multiple external grants to support her research, including two grants from The Greenwall Foundation for her work on forensic biobanking as a faculty scholar in bioethics (2018-2021) and as a fellow in bioethics and health policy (2009-2010).
She was a member of the Maryland Genetic Genealogy Working Group, which helped inform first-in-the-nation legislation regulating law enforcement use of consumer genetic data, and continues to serve on the Maryland Forensic Genetic Genealogical DNA Analysis and Search Panel, which was created under that legislation. Her research on newborn screening has also informed policy changes in multiple states.
Ram, who came to Maryland Carey Law in 2019, teaches advanced bioethics courses in the Law and Health Care Program. She is also adjunct faculty with the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.
Ram is an elected member of the American Law Institute. She also holds positions on numerous boards and committees, including the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Before joining Maryland Carey Law, she clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, U.S. Supreme Court. She then worked at Morrison & Foerster in Washington, D.C.
Ram earned her JD from Yale Law School and a bachelor’s degree in public and international affairs from Princeton University.
DAVID J. RAMSAY ENTREPRENEUR OF THE YEAR
Graeme F. Woodworth, MD, FAANS, FACS
Howard M. Eisenberg, MD Distinguished Professor of Neurosurgery and Chair, Department of Neurosurgery
School of Medicine
Dr. Woodworth joined the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) faculty in 2012 and has built an exemplary career as a clinician-scientist through his transformative application of novel technologies, expansive scholarship, scientific leadership, and groundbreaking research.
In addition to leading UMSOM’s Department of Neurosurgery, he is director of the Brain Tumor Treatment and Research Center at the University of Maryland Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center and founder and co-director of the University of Maryland Medical System’s Neuroscience Network.
The goal of Woodworth’s research is to improve the outcomes of patients with brain tumors by developing innovative therapies and therapeutic delivery approaches in neuro-oncology that ultimately will be applied to human malignancies in other organs.
He designed and led the first U.S. clinical trials to test the safety and feasibility of using focused ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier to treat brain tumors. This work set the foundation for Lotus Neuro, a new company that is advancing focused ultrasound plus drug combination therapies for brain diseases such as glioblastoma and Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2025, Woodworth co-led a team of four faculty members that competed in the National Institutes of Health’s Targeted Genome Editor Delivery Challenge, emerging as one of four teams in the country to advance to Phase 3. The UMSOM team combined focused ultrasound and nanoparticle delivery with precision gene editing tools across the blood-brain barrier, with the goal to eventually treat devastating neurological conditions such as Huntington’s disease and epilepsy.
Woodworth has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications in leading journals such as Science Translational Medicine, Lancet Oncology, PNAS, JAMA Oncology, and Science Advances, and his work has been cited more than 10,000 times. He is the co-inventor on five awarded patents, including those covering Decreased-Adhesivity Receptor-Targeted (DART) therapeutics, which recently were licensed to Lumigen Biotech, a Maryland company that will develop the DART technology for metastatic brain and other cancers.
Among his many accolades, Woodworth won the American Cancer Society’s 2016 Research Scholar Award and the Focused Ultrasound Foundation’s 2018 Lockhart Memorial Prize and 2022 Ferenc Jolesz Memorial Award, the latter two recognizing researchers who are advancing the field of focused ultrasound.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Tufts University and his medical degree from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
STUDENT OF THE YEAR
Anum Zehra
MD Student, Class of 2027
School of Medicine
Ms. Zehra is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) who has made an impact on the school and her class through outstanding achievement in scholarship, leadership, and service to UMSOM and the Baltimore City community.
Zehra has co-authored more than 20 articles, expert analyses, and abstracts, including numerous first-author manuscripts in leading journals such as Nature Communications and the Journal of the American Heart Association. In recognition of her research excellence, she received UMSOM’s Certificate of Outstanding Achievement, which is awarded to the top 10 percent of the Class of 2027.
Her work has earned national recognition, as well, with two publications that were selected among the “Top Ten Articles of 2025” by the American College of Cardiology. She also has served as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) research fellow and a peer reviewer for the American Journal of Preventive Cardiology.
Zehra has channeled her exposure to an abundance of cardiovascular disease in the South Asian population to effect meaningful change at UMSOM, founding the school’s first Cardiology Interest Group and expanding opportunities for student mentorship, research engagement, and clinical exposure. After her preclinical training, she became a peer advisor for the group and helped introduce a Women in Cardiology wing.
She won first-place for her oral presentation at UMSOM’s annual Medical Student Research Day (MSRD) and was selected as MSRD chair after induction into the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. She also is a member of the American Medical Student Association, American Heart Association, and American Academy of Physicians.
Zehra was recognized among the top 15 percent of the UMSOM Class of 2027 for community service. In addition to leading campus blood drives as president of the Red Cross Interest Group, she founded KindKin, a student-led initiative that supports caregivers of hospitalized children by addressing unmet daily needs.
She also volunteers as a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit “cuddler” at the University of Maryland Medical Center, counsels patients at free clinics, and teaches English to low-income students in Pakistan.
Zehra, who grew up in Howard County, Md., earned her bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.