May 28, 2002
Cigarroa, M.D., president of the University of Texas Health Science Center
at San Antonio, have been elected as new members of the St. Mary’s
University Board of Trustees, John W. Dewey, chairman, announced May 29.
Barrett and Cigarroa will serve two-year terms beginning June 1 and ending
May 31, 2004. St. Mary’s, a ministry of the Society of Mary, is celebrating
the Sesquicentennial anniversary of the founding of Marianist education in
Texas in 1852.
Barrett, a 1962 a graduate of St. Mary’s with a bachelor’s degree in
business administration, received the Paul C. Goelz Business Leadership
Award in 2001, named for Brother Paul Goelz, S.M., director emeritus of the
Algur H. Meadows Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, School of Business and
Administration. The award is presented to an alumnus who has excelled in
entrepreneurship. In addition, Barrett, who owns Barrett Motor Cars, a
dealership of Jaguar and other premium cars in San Antonio, was Fiesta San
Antonio’s own Rey Feo (the people’s king) for 2001-2002 in recognition of
his charitable work. Barrett earned the title by raising more than $300,000
for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) Council
No. 2 Rey Feo Scholarship Committee.
Cigarroa, an acclaimed pediatric and transplant surgeon, is the first
Hispanic to lead a health science university in the U.S.
The Laredo native earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1979 and received
his medical degree with highest honors from the University of Texas
Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in 1983. In addition, Cigarroa, who
completed 12 years of postgraduate training, was chief resident at
Harvard’s teaching hospital, Massachusetts General in Boston, and completed
a fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Cigarroa is a tenured
professor in the Division of General Surgery and Organ Transplantation at
the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. In 1997, he was among the
surgeons who split a donor liver for transplantation into two recipients,
the first such operation of the its type in Texas. Then in 2000, Cigarroa
headed the surgical team that performed South Texas’ first successful
pediatric small bowel transplant. His wife, Graciela, an attorney, is a
dual graduate of St. Mary’s (B.A. ’80, J.D. ’83).
St. Mary’s is the oldest and largest Catholic university in Texas and the
Southwest. Educating in community and working to build community are among
the most distinctive features of St. Mary’s, which is nationally recognized
for academic excellence. For 150 years, St. Mary’s has maintained liberal
arts traditions of personal attention and powerful programs.
St. Mary’s is a premier federally designated independent Hispanic Serving
Institution that has a diverse student body of 4,100, including an
undergraduate enrollment that is 65 percent Hispanic and 58 percent female.
The average class size is only 20 students and the student-to-faculty ratio
is a low 14 to 1.