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Dr. Marianne Legato

legato Dr. Legato is the founder and director of The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University.

Marianne J. Legato, M.D., F.A.C.P., is an internationally known academic physician, author, lecturer, and specialist in gender-specific medicine. She is Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School.

Dr. Legato founded the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University in 1997. It is the first collaboration between academic medicine and the private sector focused solely on gender-specific medicine: the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and of how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. Dr. Legato is the editor of the first textbook on gender medicine, Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine, published for the scientific community by Elsevier in 2004. The second edition appeared in 2010. She is the founding editor of Gender Medicine, published for the scientific community and selected in 2001 by the National Library of Medicine and Elsevier Science to be indexed and included in their worldwide databases, MEDLINE and EMBASE.

Dr. Legato spent her research career doing cardiovascular research on the structure and function of the cardiac cell. The American Heart Association and the National Institutes of Health supported her work. She won the Murray Steele Award, the Martha Lyon Slater Fellowship, and a four-year Senior Investigator Award from the American Heart Association, New York Affiliate. She won a coveted Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and sat on the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute’s study section on cardiovascular disease as well as the Basic Science Council of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Legato has received many awards for her leadership role in gender-specific medicine, among them inclusion in the 2003 National Library of Medicine’s exhibit, “Changing the Face of Medicine”, which honored the lives and accomplishments of women who enhanced the practice of medicine in the United States. She received the President’s Award from Women in Health Management in 2006.
The Ladies’ Home Journal created the Marianne J. Legato award in Gender-Specific Medicine in 2006, awarded annually to a physician who has made an outstanding contribution to gender-specific science and clinical care. In 2005 Dr. Legato won the Shirley Sacks Women’s Health Award for Distinguished Service in Gender-Specific Medicine from the National Council on Women’s Health, Inc. She was named the 2005 Lila A. Wallis Distinguished Visiting Professor in Women’s Health at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY. She delivered the keynote address at the inaugural kickoff of the Gender-Specific Scientific Interest Group of the Intramural Program for Research on Women’s Health of the National Institutes of Health in 2002. She received the “Woman in Science” award from the American Medical Women’s Association in February of 2002. In the fall of 2000, the Ladies Home Journal honored Dr. Legato as a “Heroine of Women’s Health.”

She writes extensively for the lay public. In 1992, Dr. Legato won the American Heart Association’s Blakeslee Award for the best book written for the lay public on cardiovascular disease with her publication of The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Heart Disease, published by Simon & Schuster. She published What Women Need to Know, (Simon & Schuster) in 1997. Her book for the lay public on gender-specific medicine, Eve’s Rib: The Groundbreaking Guide to Women’s Health, was published in 2002 by Harmony Books; her book, Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget, was published in 2005 by Rodale and is now translated into 24 languages. Her latest book, Why Men Die First: How to Lengthen Your Lifespan (Palgrave), appeared in 2008. Her forthcoming book The Unfaithful Gene: How Our Brains Lead Us to Risk it All for Sex is a discussion of the biological substrate that makes human infidelity and promiscuity more likely and enumerates what can be done to counteract them in susceptible individuals. The book offers advice and suggestions for resolution of conflicts that arise as a consequence of infidelity. Dr. Legato is also currently working on a book about sleep that discusses the neurological mechanisms that produce sleep, the factors that disrupt and fragment it, and remedies for insomnia and the most common sleep disorders.

She is a practicing internist in New York City and has been listed each year in New York Magazine’s Best Doctors since the feature’s inception in 1993 through 2010.

Learn more about Dr. Legato’s feature in the National Library of Medicine’s Exhibit “Changing the Face of Medicine”.

Dr. Legato’s Curriculum Vitae