https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2971-0199
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Dedee F. Murrell, Jay Cheesborough, David T. Woodley, Obituary: Vale Robert Alan Briggaman MD 1934–2020, British Journal of Dermatology, Volume 184, Issue 2, 1 February 2021, Pages 379–380, https://doi.org/10.1111/bjd.19404
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They say that to be a great dermatologist you need to be talented in medicine, science, surgery and art; being a polymath would be even better.1 Robert Alan Briggaman, or ‘Al’, as he preferred to be known, was just that – a true ‘Renaissance man’.
Al was the Dr Clayton E. Wheeler Distinguished Chair of Dermatology at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill from 1987 until his retirement in 1999, following his mentor Dr Clayton Wheeler. He nurtured a generation of household names in academic dermatology such as Steven Feldman, Alan Fleischer, Joe Jorizzo, Dedee Murrell, Amy Paller, David Rubenstein, Nancy Thomas, Fenella Wojnarowska and David Woodley, in addition to a host of excellent clinical dermatologists. He was well loved by colleagues, trainees and patients.
Beyond these mentorship achievements, he made pivotal discoveries about the basement membrane structures of the skin,2, 3 the pathogenesis of dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa4 and the antigenic target in epidermolysis bullosa acquisita, collagen VII, with colleagues Ray Gammon and David Woodley.5–7
