Patient Privacy Rights, a leading health privacy advocacy organization, will award one of its two annual Louis D. Brandeis Privacy Awards to University of Louisville professor Mark A. Rothstein on June 5 in conjunction with the Third International Summit on the Future of Health Privacy at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington.

Established in 2012, the award is given with the approval of the Brandeis family and recognizes significant intellectual, cultural, legal, scholarly, and technical contributions to the field of health information privacy.

Rothstein holds the Herbert F. Boehl Chair of Law and Medicine at the UofL School of Medicine, and he also teaches at UofL’s Brandeis School of Law. The award’s ties to Brandeis make it especially meaningful to him, he said.

“Brandeis was born in Louisville, and his influence still permeates the city where I live and the university where I work,” Rothstein said. “I am deeply honored to receive an award named after the person whose name is synonymous with privacy.”

Rothstein concentrates his research on bioethics, genetics, health privacy, public health law and employment law and is founding director of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law at the medical school. He joined the UofL faculty in 2001. He received his B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh and his J.D. from Georgetown University.

From 1999-2008, Rothstein served as chair of the Subcommittee on Privacy and Confidentiality of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, the statutory advisory committee to the Secretary of Health and Human Services on health information policy. He is past president of the American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics. He serves as public health ethics editor for the American Journal of Public Health, and he writes a regular column on bioethics for the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics.

The other 2013 recipient of the Brandeis Privacy Award is Peter Hustinx of the Netherlands, Data Protections Supervisor of the European Union. The 2012 recipients were Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and the late Professor Alan Westin of Columbia University.