Dr. Pugh to Receive AWS Braunwald Award
August 7, 2025
Dr. Carla Pugh has been selected as the Association of Women Surgeons' (AWS) 2025 Nina Starr Braunwald Award recipient. This award recognizes a surgeon for their sustained, outstanding contributions to the advancement of women in surgery.
Dr. Crystal Johnson-Mann, an MIS/bariatric surgeon at the University of Florida, submitted Pugh's nomination. Johnson-Mann says she first met Pugh when Pugh visited the Medical University of South Carolina in 2017, where Johnson-Mann was a student.
"It was not lost on me at the time that she was also the first Black female surgeon that had visited our institution as a visiting professor during my entire residency and only the 2nd Black female attending surgeon I had encountered up to that point,” wrote Johnson-Mann in her nomination letter to the AWS.
Johnson-Mann was able to deepen her relationship with Pugh through their work with the Society of Black Academic Surgeons (SBAS). "She is a staunch supporter of women in medicine and beyond. This is manifested in her demands for equitable treatment of women in surgery and her long history of mentoring women as high school students, pre-medical students, medical students, post-docs, residents, and female faculty,” she wrote.
Dr. John Stewart IV, the current president of SBAS, also wrote a letter of support for Pugh. He wrote, “Dr. Pugh is not only an innovator in the science of surgery, but she is also a role model of resilience, brilliance, and generosity. In honoring her, the AWS would be uplifting the very ideals that Nina Starr Braunwald embodied: vision, courage, mentorship, and transformational leadership in surgery.”
The award will be presented at the AWS's annual Gala on October 5, 2025 in Chicago.
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