For the second consecutive year, Emory University will bestow its prestigious Marion V. Creekmore Award for Internationalization on a Florence native, and both winners have a common thread back in their hometown they initially didn’t know about.

Today, Emory professor Lynn Middleton Sibley will receive the award for her work developing an innovative midwife program. The initiative so impressed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that the Atlanta university received $8.1 million to help put it in action.

In 2010, Alfred Brann, also a Florence native, won the Creekmore award for his work in maternal and early childhood health issues.

What Sibley and Brann have in common, in addition to their hometown, is retired Florence pediatrician Dr. James Middleton — Lynn Sibley’s father.

“It really is a small world,” Sibley said.

Sibley joined the Emory faculty eight years ago. She and Brann finally met and began talking one day about their mutual fields of study.

“He didn’t know my maiden name at the time. He picked up on my accent and asked where I was from,” Sibley said. “There was a dead silence when I told him I’m from Florence. It turned out he knows my father.”

Middleton, now retired, was a pediatrician in Florence for many years.

“I’m fascinated how the small town of Florence, Alabama, could have two people that had this experience and work in the same university,” Brann said. “It speaks a lot to our parents, our upbringing and the various life experiences each of us has had.”

Sibley was exposed to the medical profession at an early age, growing up in a pediatrician’s house when doctors still made house calls.

“Back when doctors made house calls, I went with him on some of those calls,” she said. “I was little, under the age of 10. Dad had a huge influence on me. I’ve always admired what he does.”

Middleton’s influence on Brann was no less significant.

“He influenced me to go into pediatrics,” Brann said. “He did his training at Vanderbilt in pediatrics, where I did mine.”

Middleton recalled a young Al Brann, a senior at Coffee High School, shadowing him one day as part of a student job program.

“He tailed me around all day and watched me do a spinal tap on a baby and what-not,” Middleton said. “Now, I think he’s chief of pediatrics at Emory.”

Like Sibley, Brann is keenly interested in reducing infant mortality. It’s a subject dear to him.

“My mother died in my birth, and her sister and her husband raised me,” he said. “Before I was born, my aunt — whom I called my mother — had two premature babies that died.

“I used to not think about why I was so driven in this area of study until I started talking about (mother’s death in child birth),” Brann said. “My first job was in Mississippi, and instead of taking a job offer to be on the Harvard faculty, I wanted to stay and work on the issue of infant mortality. In those six years at the University of Mississippi in Jackson, I began to think about it. I realized this (mother’s death) must have had an influence, and the aunt who raised me losing two premature babies.”

Sibley said her work focuses on training midwife skills in developing countries where access to health care is, at best, limited. The training includes working with local, established midwives and teaching practical skills that lead to good outcomes.

“The cultural norm in Ethiopia is to have babies at home,” she said. “We are transferring skills to pregnant women and whoever their caregiver may be. They are embracing it because it is so practical.”

And how does Middleton see his daughter and a student today?

“I’m proud of both of them,” he said. “I just kind of makes you feel good inside. I’m proud of Lynn. She always had a missionary spirit.”

Robert Palmer can be reached at 256-740-5720 or robert.palmer@TimesDaily.com.