James D. Mills Outstanding Contribution to Emergency Medicine Award
David P. Sklar, MD, FACEP
Dr. Sklar has led emergency medicine with excellence for more than three decades. He is distinguished professor emeritus and retired associate dean for graduate medical education at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque. Retired in name only, he continues to care for patients, teach, conduct research, and provide guidance on health policy. He is also editor-in-chief for Academic Medicine, the journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges. Dr. Sklar’s contributions to emergency medicine and health care span every sphere. As residency director, Dr. Sklar helped design an innovative program that emphasizes public health and injury prevention as fundamentals. A prolific researcher whose interests include quality improvement and injury prevention, Dr. Sklar’s work on migraine headache treatment has also contributed to emergency medicine clinical care.

John A. Rupke Legacy Award
Arlo F. Weltge, MD, MPH, FACEP
Dr. Weltge is an exemplary leader whose contributions have strengthened emergency medicine and ACEP in Texas and across the nation. Dr. Weltge is clinical professor of emergency medicine at UTHealth, the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. He also serves as medical director for AMR’s Houston EMS operations and the EMS program at Houston Community College. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Dr. Weltge spent his childhood in Waco, Texas. After undergraduate studies at MIT in life sciences, he headed to Houston for medical school at the University of Texas and a rotating internship at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Three months before the specialty was recognized, he launched his career in emergency medicine. He joined Houston Emergency Physicians and went on to be a cofounder of Southeast Texas Emergency Physicians.

Disaster Medical Sciences Award
Frederick “Skip” M. Burkle, Jr., MD, MPH, DTM, PhD (Hon.), FAAP, FACEP
Dr. Burkle is a senior fellow and scientist at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and senior international public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He is a former senior scholar and now senior associate faculty in the department of international health and the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. Dr. Burkle has supported and represented ACEP for years at federal meetings and in the Disaster Medicine Section. He is the recipient of the prestigious William Crawford Gorgas Medal for distinguished work in preventive medicine, groundbreaking work in disaster management and humanitarian assistance, and the training of an entire generation of U.S. and international personnel. Dr. Burkle has published more than 200 scientific articles, 53 book chapters, and four books—three on disaster management, including the sentinel text Disaster Medicine.