William (bill) Francis Crowley Jr MD

William F. Crowley, Jr., M.D., is the Daniel K. Podolsky Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School; Director of the Harvard Medical School’s Reproductive Endocrine Sciences Center, one of NICHD’s 12 competitively-funded Centers of Excellence; Director of Clinical Research at the Mass General Hospital (MGH); and Founder and Past Chairman of the Clinical Research Forum. During his 42-years at the MGH, Dr. Crowley and his colleagues have pioneered the use of GnRH analogs in humans, establishing them as the first treatment of children with central precocious puberty. This finding established a principle of therapy using GnRH agonist-induced pituitary desensitization that is now used in men with prostate cancer and women with endometriosis and uterine fibroids, currently a combined $3.9B annual pharmaceutical market.

In addition, Dr. Crowley developed the use of pulsatile GnRH to induce ovulation in infertile women and complete sexual maturation in men with absent or delayed puberty. Most recently, he and his colleagues have identified several new genes that underlie human puberty using genetic and molecular approaches in various human disease models for these genetic studies. Dr. Crowley has received both the NIH’s and the Endocrine Society Award for Excellence in Clinical Research and was the first male to be awarded Mentor of the Year by Women in Endocrinology in 2001. In 2005, Dr. Crowley received the Fred Conrad Koch Award, the Endocrine Society’s highest scientific honor, and in 2004 he received the IPSEN Foundation International Juried Prize for Endocrine Research. Dr. Crowley is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (Ire) (1999) and served as President of the Endocrine Society (2000-2002).