Alumni Excellence Awards: Legacy Award Recipent Dorothy Weinstein ’84

The granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, Dorothy Weinstein ’84 learned from an early the age the importance of transcending challenges to rise to her potential. That journey, and the personal mission borne of it, has always involved helping others.

“My father was a physician, and my mother was a teacher who at 63 got her Ph.D.,” Weinstein says. “They really had a purpose to live a meaningful life, and it instilled in me the idea of giving back.”

Weinstein, of Bethesda, Maryland, has worked for decades in Washington, D.C., to help shape local, state and national health policy. Notably, she collaborated with the American Diabetes Association to influence Congress to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The legislation protects people with disabilities from discrimination.

The exercise played to Weinstein’s self-proclaimed humble streak.

“One of the good things about the D.C. advocacy area is that you work in coalitions, and that’s among the things I love about it,” says Weinstein, who currently teaches at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “It’s a cooperative world, so we’re holding hands. I’ve always looked at working in the healthcare arena as a pie, and you decide what’s important, and how big your slice is going to be.”

Complementing her career in health care policy, children’s health continues to figure prominently into her volunteer efforts, shaped in part by her son, who was born with a rare eye defect. Weinstein serves on the boards of the Prevention of Blindness Society of Metropolitan Washington, the American Association of Pediatric Ophthalmologists and Strabismus, and the Children’s Eye Foundation. She works on behalf of the Children’s National Health System, so that all children have access to essential vision services.

Weinstein isn’t the only person in her family to make a difference in health and wellbeing. Her late cousin, the geneticist and virologist Howard Martin Temin, shared the 1975 Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering reverse transcriptase, an enzyme that viruses need to replicate. His efforts created new understandings of diseases such as Hepatitis B and HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and Covid.

Like her cousin, Weinstein has written and published her own research, in areas such as fetal tissue/stem cell research, environmental policy on sound and noise abatement, and personalized medicine/genome sequencing.

Weinstein’s life of service dates back to her days as a Maryland undergraduate, when she was feted with the Wilson H. Elkins Citizenship Award, presented annually to a senior who displays outstanding involvement and leadership in campus activities.

The university continued to figure into her life after graduation. Weinstein is a former chair and board member of the University of Maryland’s Adele’s Circle of Women, a leadership and mentorship group that helps alumnae “combine their energy and expertise to achieve maximum success in their personal and professional lives.”

“I am awed by other individuals,” Weinstein says. “At the end of the day, I want to believe that my legacy is to have left something meaningful, that I have sown some important relationships and maybe affected someone.”