The GORDON AND LLURA GUND LEADERSHIP AWARD honors volunteer leaders whose significant contributions have made an extraordinary impact on the level of advocacy for medical, public health or other health-related research in their communities or on the local, state, or national level.

Gary K. Michelson, MD, is a board certified orthopedic spinal surgeon, an inventor who holds nearly 1,000 patents throughout the world, and the founder and co-chair of Michelson Philanthropies. Dr. Michelson is one of the most prolific inventors in the history of medicine and the sole named inventor of more than 950 issued patents throughout the world and is one of the very few people inducted into both the National Inventors Hall of Fame as well as the National Academy of Inventors.

He has been a leading advocate for increasing the annual budget of the NIH and other research agencies, efforts that contributed to a multi-billion increase in NIH funding and the establishment of ARPA-H. He successfully advocated for a $500 million appropriation by the state of California to establish the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, which aims to be the world’s leading center for harnessing the human immune system to develop next generation vaccines and therapies to prevent, treat, and cure cancer, infectious, and chronic diseases.