Council on Children with Disabilities:
Arnold J. Capute Award

2001 Capute Award Recipient

Lawrence T. Taft, MD, MPH, FAAP (1924-2008)

Lawrence (Larry) Taft graduated CCNY in 1943. After a three-year stint as an army infantryman, he enrolled as a medical student in the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY and received his MD degree in 1950. His Pediatric residency included two years at Bellevue Hospital and one year at New York Hospital.

Dr. Taft was awarded a two-year NIH Fellowship in Pediatric Neurology at Boston Children's Hospital. Following this he trained for one year in Pediatric Rehabilitation at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (1955-1956). While there he began one of the earliest multidisciplinary clinics for the evaluation and treatment of children with developmental problems, with a mandatory rotation of one month for pediatric residents.

In 1973, Dr. Taft left the Albert Einstein College of Medicine to become the chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the newly-established Rutgers Medical School, now called Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Dr. Taft was one of the early advocates to have Developmental Disabilities recognized as a subspecialty of Pediatrics