Senator Jim King Leadership Award

FL CURED is in large part about ideals: striving to make Florida a leader in biomedical research, expediting cures, working towards improved coordination of efforts, improving communication amongst researchers and institutions, encouraging collaboration, improving translation of findings into clinical practice, and aligning resources -- all to reduce human suffering from the deadly and disabling diseases that affect Floridians. Such high callings take leadership, and leadership begins with vision. Because FL CURED is about ideals, the Jim King Leadership Award was established to honor individuals who exemplify its high calling through leadership, vision, and a lifetime of commitment.

Senator Jim King has shown immense leadership, particularly in championing the life sciences and biomedical research in Florida. FL CURED emerged in 2004 following an Interim Report on State Funded Medical Research authorized by then Senate President Jim King. As a freshman Senator in 1999, King introduced Senate Bill 2558 that led to the creation of the Florida Biomedical Research Program; later renamed in honor of his parents as the James and Esther King Biomedical Research Program. Thus it is fitting the first FL CURED award be named the Senator Jim King Leadership Award.

Dr. Clyde B. McCoy of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami is the recipient of the inaugural Senator Jim King Leadership Award.

Dr. McCoy's curriculum vita reveals that over a lifetime of achievement, his name and leadership are synonymous. He came to Florida in 1974 when he accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Miami. That year he became Director of the Drug Research Center; in 1976 President of the Computer College of Technology; and jumping ahead to 1985, Dr. McCoy became Associate Director of Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. By 1991 he was Division Director of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and then later Chairman. In 2001 he was named Director of the Executive Office of Research Leadership, and the list goes on. Two things that exemplify Dr. McCoy are his accomplishments as a researcher who has focused on the vexing public health problems deeply rooted in South Florida, and his renown for winning federal grants, perhaps most notably with larger center grants.

One of Dr. McCoy's earliest forays into state-wide leadership was with the Cancer Control Research Advisory Board. In 2000, he was named by Governor Jeb Bush to the Biomedical Research Advisory Council, overseeing the James and Esther King Biomedical Research Program and served as chair from 2002-2005. His effective leadership in the early years of that program helped to establish the King program as a preeminent model for competitive, peer-reviewed, merit-based state funding. With the advent of FL CURED in 2004, Dr. McCoy agreed to serve as the first chairman of the FL CURED Advisory Council through 2007, helping to guide its successful implementation.

Not so many years ago, the huge investments in Florida's life sciences sector like those seen in recent years were literally unimaginable. If not for the persistent efforts of Dr. McCoy and others cut from the same cloth who care passionately about medical research and the development of new diagnostic tools for early detection of disease, strategies for prevention, treatments to alleviate suffering, and even cures that could reduce the burden of Florida's public health issues, the Florida research enterprise would look quite different today.