Matthew Williams, assistant professor of surgery, received the Richard E. Clark Award from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons for his study titled “Aortic Dissection as a Complication of Cardiac Surgery: Report from the STS Database.” The award recognizes the best use of the STS Database for the year and was presented at the annual Society of Thoracic Surgeons meeting in Ft. Lauderdale on Monday, Jan. 25. The award is named after Dr. Richard Clark, who was instrumental in the development of the database. Database information accumulated over the years has served as a resource for clinical studies, as a source of national benchmarks, and as material for the development of risk models used throughout the field of medicine. Since 1994, more than 40 publications have come from the STS National Databases. These studies have been published in a variety of professional journals and textbooks.