2025 Recipient:
Martin TullRead Bio ▾
Martin Tull is Chief Impact Officer at the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), where he leads strategy, partnerships, and community engagement to accelerate the adoption of lifestyle medicine across healthcare systems, payers, employers, and communities. Since joining ACLM in 2015, he has played a central role in strengthening the organization’s national influence, building cross-sector collaborations, and advancing scalable models that integrate lifestyle medicine into mainstream care.
A systems thinker and skilled convenor, Martin has helped develop key ACLM initiatives, including its Health Systems Council, Platinum Partner Program, and Innovators Council, fostering innovation and real-world implementation of evidence-based lifestyle medicine. He is a respected speaker and thought leader on transforming healthcare toward prevention, equity, and whole-person health.
Prior to ACLM, Martin served as Founding Executive Director of the Green Sports Alliance, where he built a nationwide coalition of professional and collegiate sports organizations to advance sustainability and collective impact. His career reflects a longstanding commitment to aligning health, environment, and community for lasting social benefit.
2024 Recipient:
David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLMRead Bio ▾
David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM, has championed the convergence of lifestyle IN and lifestyle AS medicine for most of his career, with this being the intersection of clinical practice in community settings. He often says, “If lifestyle is the medicine, then culture is the spoon.” He’s been a foremost voice in the urgent need for our nation and world to make the healthy choice the easy choice. He emphasizes that lifestyle medicine is the best medicine we have—one with only positive side effects—addressing conditions rooted in unhealthful lifestyle behaviors for which 80% of our nation’s healthcare dollars are expended.
Dr. Katz is the founding director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center and past president of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. He is also the founder of the non-profit True Health Initiative, Diet ID, and the Chief Medical Officer for the leading food-as-medicine company Tangelo. He is also a senior science advisor to Blue Zones. He holds multiple US patents, including for advances in dietary assessment.
He has decades of experience in internal medicine, preventative medicine, public health, lifestyle medicine, and nutrition. He has published roughly 250 peer-reviewed publications, authored and co-authored 19 books, and spent his career focusing on translating science into action to add “years to life and life to years.” His accomplishments reached the globe, and his work is not yet finished.
2023 Recipient:
Sami Bég, MD, MPA, MPH, FACLMRead Bio ▾
Guided by compassion and a commitment to cultivating connection, trust, and shared purpose, Dr. Sami Bég has focused his work at the intersection of Preventive Medicine, population health, and digital innovation. Known for fostering collaboration among diverse stakeholders, he has led transformative initiatives across healthcare organizations, startups, and government—an approach grounded as much in relationships as in results.
This values-driven leadership has also shaped his nearly two decades of service with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM). Dr. Bég was elected to the ACLM Board of Directors in 2012 and served as an early board member during the organization’s formative years, playing a sustained role in guiding ACLM’s growth and governance. His service includes founding chair roles for both the Business Development Committee and the Awards Committee, the latter of which he continues to chair. In addition, Dr. Bég has served on the ACLM Fellow Review Panel and Conference Planning Committee, including two years as chair, and helped establish the ACLM Corporate Roundtable and the Donald A. Pegg Student Leadership Award in support of Lifestyle Medicine Interest Groups and emerging leaders nationwide.
Earlier in his career, Dr. Bég played a pivotal role at U.S. Preventive Medicine as a key innovator behind an early digital wellness platform, architecting the product, clinical model, and gameful design that drove market differentiation and national recognition. He built and oversaw a pioneering, distributed network of independent physicians, creating one of the earliest scalable digital models for physician participation in employer-based wellness and preventive care. Dr. Bég also helped launch a first-of-its-kind direct-to-consumer corporate wellness product through Sam’s Club and an award-winning mobile App. Dr. Bég’s groundbreaking work on an innovative kids' program earned him an invitation to the White House, where he engaged with the Office of the First Lady and staff from the Let’s Move! initiative to discuss the program’s impact and potential.
Building on this foundation, Dr. Bég later served as the first full-time Medical Director at Life Time, where he led the development of employer-based population health strategies and supported the expansion of onsite health clinics. Most recently, Dr. Bég served as a Digital Health Subject Matter Expert to the Chief Medical Officer and Associate Director for Medical Affairs at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, advising on diagnostic data interoperability and national digital health infrastructure. At the FDA, he led the 2023 FDA TOPx Innovation Sprint, in collaboration with the U.S. Census Bureau, focused on improving the quality and utility of diagnostic data through cross-functional digital innovation.
Currently, Dr. Bég is the co-founder and CEO of Proactively, an AI-enabled SaaS ecosystem that equips healthcare providers with integrated tools to operationalize Lifestyle Medicine and wellbeing across individual and population health. In this role, he is architecting next-generation, systems-level innovations that translate Lifestyle Medicine into scalable, sustainable health impact—enabling diverse providers to deliver more connected, effective care while empowering individuals to actively engage in their health.
2022 Recipient:
George Guthrie, MD, MPH, DipABLMRead Bio ▾
Dr. George E. Guthrie is a board-certified family medicine physician and a member of the academic program at AdventHealth’s Centre for Family Medicine in Winter Park, Florida, where he trains medical residents with a focus on community and lifestyle medicine.
For seven years early in his medical career, Dr. Guthrie served on the island of Guam, where he saw a high incidence of type 2 diabetes in the population there. His experience triggered a keen interest in the effective treatment of chronic disease through lifestyle change. In order to deepen his knowledge in that area and be more effective in his practice, he returned to school and earned a master’s degree in public health with a focus on nutrition from Loma Linda University.
Dr. Guthrie has helped to develop several lifestyle-change programs, including the Complete Health Improvement Project (CHIP), the Wellspring Diabetes Program, and AdventHealth’s CREATION Health program. He is active in the American College of Lifestyle Medicine and has served there as secretary-treasurer, president-elect, and president.
One of Dr. Guthrie’s greatest joys is seeing his patients and community members embrace the principles of whole-food, plant-based eating and watching their health transformations.
Dr. Guthrie is married to the love of his life, Dena. Although they have no children of their own, they were privileged to guide a Marshallese islander, Heidi, through her teenage years. They enjoy making music together, and Dr. Guthrie is skilled at interpreting gospel songs and hymns on keyboard instruments.
2018 Recipient:
Susan BenigasRead Bio ▾
As the executive director of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), a position she has held since 2014, Susan is helping to lead the effort to transform health and redefine health care, not only in the United States but around the world through her work with the Lifestyle Medicine Global Alliance. During her tenure, ACLM has experienced extraordinary growth—from fewer than 400 members to what is now more than 10,000. Susan leads a staff of 40, dedicated to executing and operationalizing the visionary strategy of ACLM’s Board of Directors. ACLM’s foremost priority is to help fill the gaping void of lifestyle medicine, including food as medicine, in medical education—across the entire education continuum from UME and GME to CME.
Prior to joining ACLM, she co-founded the not-for-profit The Plantrician Project and the CME-accredited International Plant-based Nutrition Healthcare Conference, showcasing the science that supports the efficacy of whole-food, plant-based nutrition for disease treatment, reversal, and prevention. With exponential impact as the goal, The Plantrician Project was born from Susan’s passion for reaching medical professionals with the evidence that supports the efficacy of prescribing “food as medicine,” knowing that patients often look to their physicians and healthcare providers as the gatekeepers of dietary and lifestyle recommendations.
Susan’s work has spanned the gamut, from running political campaigns to serving in executive, senior management, and consultant roles for organizations ranging from professional sports and media to healthcare technology and worksite health promotion.
An author and international speaker, Susan serves—or has served—on the boards of directors for the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine, The Plantrician Project, True Health Initiative, T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies, Shape Up US, the State Center Community College Foundation, Hope Now for Youth, Athletes International Ministries, and the AZ chapter of the American Heart Association. She also serves as a member of the Blue Zones Well-Being Institute Luminary Leadership Advisory Committee and the NCCIH Whole Person Health Stakeholder Advisory Panel.
Her extensive volunteer service, which began as a teen when serving as the American Heart Association WV State Youth Chairman and Chair of the WV March of Dimes Teen Action Program, was recognized by Kentucky Governor John Y. Brown in naming her, at the time, as the youngest Kentucky Colonel in the state’s history and by West Virginia Governor John D. Rockefeller naming her as an Outstanding West Virginian. She was honored to receive ACLM’s inaugural President’s Award in the fall of 2019. Her life motto: Fearlessly, faithfully moving forward, leaving no stone unturned.