College of Medicine Peoria Presents 2026 Alumni Awards
Introduction
The University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria presented its annual alumni awards during the annual student awards ceremony held in May at the Gateway Building in Peoria. Honored were Shanu N. Kothari, MD '95, with the 2026 Distinguished Alumni Award and C. Charles Jain, MD '14, recipient of the 2026 Early Career Achievement Award (presented to a graduate who has earned the medical degree in the past 15 years).
Distinguished Alumni Award
Shanu N. Kothari, MD, FACS, FASMBS, serves as the Jean and H. Harlan Stone Chair of Surgery and is a practicing minimally invasive bariatric surgeon at Prisma Health in Greenville, SC. Before joining Prisma Health, he spent many years at Gundersen Health System in La Crosse, WI, where he established the institution’s bariatric surgery program and founded its minimally invasive bariatric surgery and advanced GI fellowship.
Dr. Kothari earned his bachelor’s degree in biology, graduating magna cum laude from Anderson University and received his medical degree from the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria. He completed his surgical residency at the Gundersen Lutheran Medical Foundation in Wisconsin, followed by a fellowship in advanced laparoscopic surgery at the Medical College of Virginia.
Professor of surgery at the USC School of Medicine Greenville, Dr. Kothari is a past president of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, the Southwestern Surgical Congress, the Fellowship Council and the Wisconsin Surgical Society. His commitment to research and surgical quality is reflected in more than 300 national presentations and lectures and over 150 peer reviewed publications.
Early Career Achievement Award
This year’s winner of the Early Career Achievement Award is Dr. C. Charles Jain who grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago and completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Jain earned his Doctor of Medicine (MD) from the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria. He completed his internal medicine residency at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2017, followed by Cardiology and Adult Congenital Heart Disease fellowships at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science in Rochester in 2020 and 2022. He then stayed on as faculty at Mayo for three years.
In 2025, he moved back to Illinois and now is an assistant professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He practices with the Northwestern Medical Group and is part of the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at Northwestern Medicine, where he serves as the director of the Adult Congenital Heart Disease Program at Northwestern Medicine and Lurie Children’s and provides comprehensive cardiovascular care, specializing in adult congenital heart disease and advanced echocardiography.
Dr. Jain has authored several journal publications, including studies on pulmonary hypertension in adult congenital heart disease and pacing therapies in heart failure, contributing significantly to the field of cardiology. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his wife and their four children.