A commitment to public service

Montgomery attended medical school at the University of Pittsburgh (U.S.), and his first brush with the hematology field

came working in a clinical hematology lab at night during medical school.

Early in his medical training, Montgomery envisioned a career serving disadvantaged populations in inner-city communities. As a fourth-year medical student, he was to work on a project studying  malnutrition in the U.S., but delays in federal funding shifted his path.

He instead completed a project that led to his inaugural first-author publication—an investigation into the recovery of Cytomegalovirus from the cervix of 30% of pregnant primigravida Navajo women.

“We found that the women carried the virus, but the newborns were not born with it,” Montgomery said. “It wasn’t something I ultimately pursued as a pediatrician, but it was my first real experience in research, and it helped launch my scientific career.”

After earning his medical degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969, Montgomery interned at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and followed a path inspired by public service. He helped set up a Black Panther Clinic in Philadelphia.  The Vietnam War was in full force at that time, and many young men just like Montgomery were drafted to serve.

“I actually had an Air Force deferment, which was extremely sought after, but I turned it down to join the Indian Health Service,” he said. “I saw it as an opportunity to serve indigent populations in a non-military but uniformed service.”  

In the early 1970s, Montgomery served as a general pediatrician with the U.S. Public Health Service on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona, caring for local communities.

Montgomery recalled a particular experience with a young Navajo patient who needed a kidney transplant—an unprecedented case in that community. Coordinating the transplant through the Public Health Service revealed deeper cultural complexities.

“The Navajo treated disease through the ‘Night Way’ ceremony, which is a ritual that spans several days and nights to restore balance,” Montgomery said.

When the patient ultimately rejected the transplant after not taking the medication, it led to serious consequences, including financial loss.

“It was a powerful lesson for me as a clinician. I learned that sometimes you must look at the big picture rather than what is most expedient,” he shared.

A research career takes shape

After his time with the Public Health Service, Montgomery completed a residency at Johns Hopkins University, followed by a fellowship at the University of Colorado with Bill Hathaway.

“Bill was my lifetime mentor. He taught me to use clinical variation into research discovery,” Montgomery remarked.

Later, he completed a fellowship with Ted Zimmerman at Scripps Clinic in California. While at Scripps, Montgomery also got to know about John Griffin’s work with Protein C, a regulator of FVIII and FV.

One patient with severe protein C deficiency left a lasting impression on Montgomery. After being diagnosed with purpura fulminans the patient was transferred from New York to Milwaukee.  The patient had severe and recurrent necrotic skin lesions and found to be protein C deficient, a rare but fatal clotting condition.

“Protein C has a very short half-life, so sustaining treatment was difficult,” he recalled. Using a hemophilia treatment (FIX concentrate) product that also contained protein C, they were able to stabilize the patient—though not without risk.

“It was a drug that could potentially cause thrombosis, but in this case, it corrected the protein C deficiency,” he explained.

The patient, diagnosed in the early 1980s, was the first living person confirmed with the condition, and Montgomery noted that that this patient is still alive today.

In 1980, Dick Aster recruited Montgomery to the Versiti Blood Research Institute and the Medical College of Wisconsin that have been his research and clinical home for more than four decades.

Montgomery is known for his extensive research on von Willebrand disease (VWD) and hemophilia. He and his team identified a polymorphism that affected VWF function and developed a more accurate functional test for VWD diagnosis. He also led research on gene therapy for hemophilia, including a strategy for genetically delivering Factor VIII (FVIII) to platelets that released FVIII and VWF with clotting. 

His research also identified the reduced risk of HIV in hemophilia patients treated with volunteer donor cryoprecipitate and the reduced seroconversion using heat-treated FVIII concentrates that inactivated  the HIV virus.  He also defined variants with independent deficiencies of VWF’s multiple functions at a protein and molecular level. 

 “The best thing about the Versiti Blood Center is that not only could you do research, but you could take research studies and translate them into clinical and diagnostic tests that are made available to patients through Versiti’s diagnostic labs,” he said.

“Testing new products or new treatments can be done and implemented much more quickly. It’s also a way of having the laboratory tests done by a laboratory, as opposed to using research funds to make the same diagnosis,” he continued.

Leadership through the ISTH and the SSC

Montgomery’s relationship with the ISTH SSC began with a walk—literally.

“At an ISTH Congress, Dr. Gil White approached me. He encouraged me to consider being co-chair of the von Willebrand subcommittee within the SSC. I still have the visual picture of him walking toward me,” he said with a grin. “It was a major step and opportunity that I was grateful to be part of through the years.”

Montgomery has held many leadership roles within the ISTH, including VWF Subcommittee Chair, SSC Chair, ISTH Council member and President of the ISTH 2014 SSC Meeting in Milwaukee.

“We applied once for the SSC Meeting and got turned down, but we were funded the second time. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun—talking to people with varied approaches to studying blood coagulation,” he recalled.

Montgomery received the ISTH Investigator Recognition Biennial Award (2001) and the ISTH Distinguished Career Award (2011) for his research discoveries.

Under Montgomery’s leadership, the ISTH SSC’s work on VWD diagnostics took significant strides. In collaboration with international colleagues like Reinhard Schneppenheim in Germany, Montgomery’s and Schneppenheim’s groups helped standardize assays and developed a now widely used test that measures VWF activity, not just concentration.

“That means you could diagnose variant von Willebrand Disease. It opened the door to new ways of thinking about the disease,” he noted.

More recently, Montgomery helped lead a groundbreaking 15-year NIH program project grant to study VWF across more than 35 centers in the U.S., Canada and the British Isles.

“It’s not so much what I did, but that we were able to assemble both clinicians and researchers that together could focus on the various roles of VWF and standardize it more extensively within the U.S. and Canada.  Bringing that group together is something I’m proud of,” he said.

A career rooted in people and progress

Receiving the Harold R. Roberts Award is a deeply personal honor for Montgomery. He knew Harold Roberts and was proud to collaborate with him.

“I not only knew Harold Roberts through interactions, but at one point I even looked at a job in Chapel Hill with him,” he said. “Dr. Roberts was efficient and was the one who got things moving.”

But true to form, Montgomery emphasized collective progress over personal accolades.

“I would like to think that this award is not just focused on me, but rather what we have done to direct the field,” he said.  “The researchers not only made breakthrough discoveries, but had fun doing it together. The NIH PPG project continues today under the leadership of Jorge Di Paola.”

With his retirement in February 2025, Montgomery closed a formal chapter in a career that spans decades, but his influence endures.

He lives in a retirement complex with his wife, Janet. Together they have six children and 11 grandchildren. He enjoys lively scientific discussions over meals with other retired medical professionals who live in their community.

Montgomery also enjoys staying active and can often be found “chasing a ball on some kind of court,” including playing platform tennis in subzero temperatures—Wisconsin winters will not stop him.

At the closing of a Zoom interview with Montgomery, he points to an intricate Navajo sand painting shown behind him on the screen. He had it commissioned decades ago from a former patient.

“It’s ‘Sun and Eagle’, which is for healing a sick child and used in the Navajo Night Way healing ceremony. I thought as a pediatrician it would be fitting. Turns out it this actually represents bringing in a good crop,” he said with grin. “But either way, it deals with children and growth, which I still think is very fitting.”

As the field continues to evolve, it does so on the shoulders of pioneers like Montgomery—scientists who build bridges from bench to bedside, and tradition to innovation.