William F. Crowley Jr., MD, is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Chief of the Harvard Medical School’s NICHD Center of Excellence in Reproductive Endocrinology, one of 13 competitive NIH funded Centers in the United States. He is also the Director of Clinical Research at the MGH.

A graduate in the Honors Curriculum of Holy Cross College and Tufts University School of Medicine, Dr. Crowley trained in Internal Medicine and Endocrinology at MGH from 1969 and has remained there ever since. He subsequently established a broad-based translational research program in the Reproductive Endocrine Unit of the Department of Medicine which was established around his research program in 1984.

During his 36-year tenure at the MGH, Dr. Crowley and his colleagues pioneered the use of GnRH analogues in the treatment of children with central precocious puberty, establishing a principle of therapy that is now used in men with prostate cancer and women with endometriosis and uterine fibroids that is currently a $2B annual pharmaceutical market. In addition, he developed the use of pulsatile GnRH to induce ovulation in infertile women and complete sexual maturation and fertility 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.

For these accomplishments Dr. Crowley received the NIH’s Annual General Clinical Research Center Award for Clinical Research, the Endocrine Society’s Award for Clinical Investigation, and was named an Honorary Fellow in the Royal Society of Medicine (Ire). He was the first male to receive the Mentor of the Year Award from Women in Endocrinology and served as the President of the Endocrine Society from 2001-02. In 2005, he received the Fred Conrad Koch Award, the Endocrine Society’s highest scientific honor.