Washington University engaged in age discrimination against surgeon and lung transplant pioneer Joel Cooper, a St. Louis Circuit Court jury ruled Tuesday.

Cooper, tenured professor of surgery at the School of Medicine from 1988 to 2005 and head of the cardiothoracic surgery division from 1997 to 2004, won $525,000 in legal and punitive damages from the University.

The 70-year-old surgeon, who performed the world’s first successful lung transplant in 1983, sued the University and Chairman of the Surgery Department Timothy Eberlein in 2005. Cooper alleged that the University and Eberlein forced him out of his job because he was 65 and that the school reduced his pay and power when he refused to step down.

“The truth is that I am thrilled, because the mere fact that they were found liable for age discrimination and liable for retaliation is a very powerful message,” Cooper said after the jury handed down its ruling.

The plaintiff originally sought $1.75 million in legal damages and $12 million in punitive damages.

Cooper now serves as the chief of thoracic surgery at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he makes $875,000 a year. While at Washington University, he made more than $550,000 a year with additional bonuses.

Cooper told reporters that “the fact that the jury even gave a dollar of punitive damages sends a message.”

The jury also found Eberlein not guilty of any charges.

A School of Medicine spokesperson issued a statement Tuesday afternoon saying that the claims made against the University in the case are “without merit.”

“We are disappointed that the jury made any award to the plaintiff,” the statement said. “We are pleased that Dr. Timothy Eberlein, a renowned surgeon and a national leader in medicine, was exonerated, and that the $525,000 award was so small in comparison to the nearly $14 million that Dr. Cooper was seeking.”

The jury also ruled that the University did not breach its contract with Cooper.

Cooper and lead plaintiff attorney Jerry Dobson said that the lawsuit intended to ensure that the University does not engage in future discrimination.

“This is about their employment practices,” Cooper said. “They are a great institution, but their employment practices can be very abusive, intimidating and arrogant.”

“This wasn’t a money issue. Spend four years of my life, anxiety on the part of my family and diversions of my time? They wanted to get rid of me. I was 65, and they thought that I would roll over and play dead,” he said.

Cooper added that “punitive damages are not to enrich the plaintiff, they are to punish the institution.”

The University plans to appeal the ruling, which called the defendants’ actions “outrageous” and “conduct for which punitive damages are warranted.”

Attorneys for the defense are optimistic about their chances of getting the ruling reversed on appeal.

“[This decision] appears to be a compromise verdict where the jury awarded $525,000 on a claim that the plaintiffs believed was worth an excess of $14 million,” said Joe Conran, the lead trial counsel for the University. “We believe that we have a very excellent chance to reverse the verdicts on appeal.”

Conran said that University’s actions toward Cooper were just.

“Our view is that any issues related to Dr. Cooper were totally a result of the fact that [his] division was not performing well financially and that Dr. Cooper’s personal productivity was not at all near the productivity that would have been expected of a surgeon of his caliber,” Conran said.

The suit argued that the University initially tried to force Cooper to step down from his cardiothoracic surgery chief position. When he refused, the plaintiffs said Eberlein and the school made gradual cuts to Cooper’s pay and authority in retaliation.

“They took away my financial authority, then cut my bonus, then cut it again, then took away my division head and after they had done that, then they sent the letter that we call ‘retire or else,’” Cooper said.

The University denied the allegations. In trial, attorneys for the defendants argued that Cooper knew that he  and his department underperformed financially.

“It was clear from the witnesses that Dr. Cooper was often in attendance at meetings where the operational deficits of the division and himself personally were discussed at length,” Conran said. “The evidence was clear that the decisions with regard to Dr. Cooper had nothing to do with his age.”

Cooper asserted that his division was consistently one of the leading divisions financially in the medical school.

“They based their whole trial on our division not making as much money as they wanted it to, and I felt that we were ahead of the curve,” Cooper said. “Only two divisions, ours and another division, had a positive bottom line every year; I was division chief.”

Dobson said financial issues were the premise of the University’s case, not Cooper’s medical ability.

“In no way did anyone criticize Dr. Cooper for the medical accomplishments of his division. Washington University reduced it to a question of how many surgeries have you done, how much money have you produced,” Dobson said.

With additional reporting by Ben Sales