Alumni Award Recipients

Alumni Achievement Award

M. Victoria Marx ’81 MD, ’86 Res

Victoria MarxAfter Victoria Marx completed medical school, a general surgery internship and diagnostic radiology residency at Ohio State, she became the first interventional radiology (IR) fellow at Washington University in 1987. Two years later, she joined the Department of Radiology at the University of Michigan, becoming section head of interventional radiology and director of the IR fellowship program.

In 1999, Marx joined the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and served as the department’s diagnostic radiology program director for 10 years.

She’s had numerous leadership roles in multiple national medical organizations, including serving as president of the Association of Program Directors in Radiology.

A longtime member of the Society of Interventional Radiology Executive Council, Marx served as the society’s president from 2018 to 2019. She’s a member of the ACGME Radiology Review Committee, and in 2018 became a trustee of the American Board of Radiology.

Among her most important contributions to the field is her leadership in implementing a new residency training module for interventional radiology after the American Board of Medical Specialties recognized IR as primary specialty in 2016. In recognition of her contributions to the field of residency training, the Society of Interventional Radiology awarded her a Gold Medal in 2022.

Manoj Sharma, MBBS, ’97 PhD

Manoj SharmaManoj Sharma, MBBS, PhD, MCHES® is a public health physician and educator with a medical degree from the University of Delhi and a doctorate in preventive medicine from The Ohio State University School of Public Health. A Master Certified Health Education Specialist, Sharma is a professor and chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Health and an adjunct professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In his 35-year career, Sharma has trained and taught more than 6,000 health professionals, and designed and taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in health behavior, health education and health promotion.

A public health leader, Sharma has worked extensively with local, state and federal health agencies and departments, non-profit agencies and international organizations around issues of evidence-based behavior change. A prolific researcher, he’s been recognized for his research in this area, particularly with regard to obesity prevention, stress-coping, community-based participatory research and evaluation and integrative health interventions.

He's won numerous awards and honors for this work, including several American Public Health Association awards: the Lyndon Haviland Public Health Mentoring Award; the Integrative, Complementary, and Traditional Health Practices IMPACT Award; and the J. Mayhew Derryberry Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to health education research theory.

Alumni Service Award

Jack Kopechek ’84 MD, ’87 Res

Jack KopechekJack Kopechek is a member of the Section of Primary Care Pediatrics at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and a clinical professor of Pediatrics in The Ohio State University College of Medicine. He’s proudly provided primary care for children and adolescents at Nationwide’s Linden Primary Care Center for 36 years.

Kopechek has a distinguished career in Ohio State medical student education, beginning in 1992 when he started teaching third-year medical students in his clinic. His teaching has set an example for all who know and work with him. When the Lead.Serve.Inspire. curriculum was implemented in 2012, he was selected to develop the Personal and Professional Coaching Program, for which he recruits, trains and supports 100 faculty to provide ongoing coaching to approximately 800 medical students. He continues to improve and lead this program.

Selected also to serve as chair of the Executive Curriculum Committee from 2020 to 2025, Kopechek has led this committee as they addressed challenges from the pandemic and maintained full accreditation subsequent to their 2022 LCME review. In the past 12 years, he’s also served as director of Competency for Practice-Based Learning and Improvement, and as a Longitudinal Group facilitator and Longitudinal Practice preceptor.

Community Practice Alumni Award

William N. Ginn ’81 MD

William GinnWilliam Ginn has practiced family medicine for more than 40 years in his hometown of West Milton, Ohio. After attending Butler University on a football scholarship, he attended The Ohio State University College of Medicine from 1978 to 1981. He completed his residency at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton and joined the practice of Kenneth Faze, another Ohio State College of Medicine alumnus, in West Milton. Ginn has been the sole independent practicing family medicine physician in his town of 4,600 people for 25 years, and has mentored numerous medical students and physician extenders in his office.

In 2015, Ginn was appointed coroner of Miami County and has been re-elected twice. He currently serves as medical director for the West Central Juvenile Detention Center in Troy for more than 20 years. Ginn has given so much to his community, including coaching volleyball at his alma mater, Milton-Union High School, winning two league championships in the process. In addition, as a member of Milton-Union’s Athletic Hall of Fame as a player and physician, he chaired a committee that resulted in a new K-12 school building for the district. He’s also served as a historian and statistician for Milton-Union sports since 1984.

Early Career Achievement Award 

Peggy Williams ’12 MD

Margaret Peggy WilliamsPeggy Williams is an internal medicine physician at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and a clinical associate professor of Internal Medicine in the Ohio State College of Medicine. After her residency at the University of Michigan in 2015, she went on to complete a global health fellowship in Botswana and Boston through the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

In 2016, Williams joined the Ohio State Division of Hospital Medicine, where she was struck by the number of patients with acute illnesses related to substance use disorders. Soon after, Williams and a group of her colleagues started a voluntary team of providers to treat hospitalized patients suffering from opioid use disorder. By 2019, this group became a formal consult team, and today includes social workers, advanced practice providers, peer recovery supporters and about 30 rotating hospitalists with additional addiction medicine training. The team also hosts trainees who want to gain experience in addiction medicine, and provides education about stigma to the medical center.

Since its start, the team has seen 5,500 inpatient consults at University Hospital and helps patients transition to outpatient care. For Williams, the reward for this hard work is meeting patients and collaborating with them, their families and the hospital staff.

Faculty Teaching Award

Nicholas E. Kman ’04 MD

Nicholas KmanNick Kman is a clinical professor of Emergency Medicine in The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Board certified in emergency medicine and a Fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians, Kman completed his medical degree at the Ohio State College of Medicine in 2004 and his residency at Wake Forest University, where he served as chief resident.

Nationally recognized for his innovations in medical education, Kman was the Med 4 academic program director at Ohio State from 2015 to 2024 and served as president of clerkship directors in Emergency Medicine. His clinical interest is in disaster response and emergency preparedness, which led him to create and now instruct an elective course in disaster medicine for senior medical students. He’s also a frequent instructor of the American College of Surgeons’ Stop the Bleed program.

Kman serves as one of the medical managers for Ohio Task Force 1, Ohio’s FEMA Urban Search and Rescue team, and has deployed to numerous emergencies, including hurricanes Harvey (2017), Dorian (2019), Laura (2020), Ida (2021) and Ian (2022). Most recently, he received a grant to teach mass casualty triage to first responders in virtual reality and is now working on a mass casualty triage project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s In the Moment program.

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