Dear Legacy Scholarship Committee:
It is with the greatest pleasure that I accept your invitation to receive the Jackie Robinson Award from the UCLA Black Alumni Association which will be conferred upon me at the Winston Doby Legacy Scholarship Dinner Gala on Saturday, March 17, 2018 at the Westin LAX Hotel in Los Angeles, CA. This is one of the highest honors of my life, and I will enthusiastically recruit family, friends, and colleagues to attend the event and to contribute to the scholarship fund.
I am attaching my Response Form, a headshot, and a bio. I look forward to receiving further details from you regarding the event. Again, thank you for this signal honor of allowing me to join the ranks of such famous UCLA alumni as Dr. Ralph Bunche, Mayor Tom Bradley, Civil Rights Activist Angela Davis, tennis legend Arthur Ashe, and Jackie Robinson himself.
P.S.: I am notifying those who wish to purchase tickets to this event to contact the Dinner Committee via email at 2018dobyubaascholarshipdinner@gmail.com. They may also call 310-631-8222 for further information, or go online to the website at www.uclablackalumni.org.
Sincerely,
Richard Allen Williams, MD, FACC, FAHA, FACP, DHL (Hon)
Clinical Professor of Medicine, UCLA School of Medicine
117th President, National Medical Association
Founder, Association of Black Cardiologists
Founder, President, and CEO, Minority Health Institute
Lifetime Achievement Awardee, Harvard Medical School
Honoree Response Form
Sponsorship Opportunities
Dr. Richard Allen Williams, the new President of the National Medical Association, is currently Clinical Professor of Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine and President/CEO of the Minority Health Institute, Inc. in Los Angeles, California. He was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, the youngest of eight children. Upon graduating from Howard High School at the top of his class with a 4.0 grade-point average, he was awarded a full scholarship to Harvard University from which he graduated with honors as the first African American student at Harvard from Delaware. He received the M.D. degree from the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, performed his internship at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, Internal Medicine residency at the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, and Cardiology fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He was an instructor in Cardiology at Harvard Medical School, and while in this position he founded and directed the Central Recruitment Council of Boston Hospitals, which recruited significant numbers of Black medical trainees to Boston hospitals for the first time in their history. He then served for three years as the Assistant Medical Director at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Hospital in Watts, California. During this time he wrote the grant proposal which was awarded $2.5 million by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health to establish the King-Drew Sickle Cell Center, of which he became the Director. Following this appointment, he took a position as Chief of the Heart Station and Coronary Care Unit at the West Los Angeles VA Hospital, eventually becoming head of Cardiology at that institution as well as the first Black full Professor in the Department of Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine.
Dr. Williams has numerous publications and awards to his credit and is the author of The Textbook of Black-related Diseases published by McGraw-Hill in 1975. This is a 900-page book which detailed medical conditions peculiar to African Americans; no other book of its kind has been written before or since, and it is widely considered the classic seminal work on the medical status of Blacks. It is on the shelves of libraries and in medical schools around the world, including the Library of Congress. Among his nine books are The Athlete and Heart Disease: Diagnosis, Evaluation and Management, and Humane Medicine: A New Paradigm in Medical Education and Health Care Delivery. Both of these books were published in 1999 by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Two other books by Dr. Williams are Blacks in Medicine: Clinical, Demographic, and Socioeconomic Correlations (Springer) which is due for publication in October 2016, and The Textbook of Ethnic Medicine. In 2000 he also published volume II of Humane Medicine. He wrote a book on healthcare disparities, a topic on which he is one of the nation’s leading experts. It was published in 2006 under the title, Eliminating Healthcare Disparities in America: Beyond the IOM Report. In addition, his book, Healthcare Disparities at the Crossroads of Healthcare Reform (Springer, 2011) has been cited as an extremely influential work regarding the Affordable Care Act.
Dr. Williams founded the Association of Black Cardiologists (ABC) in 1974 and served as its president for 10 years. He also became the first chairman of the Board of Directors and started the ABC Newsletter. The ABC established the endowed Dr. Richard Allen Williams Scholarship for Black Medical Students in his honor in 1980. Dr. Williams then founded the Minority Health Institute (MHI) in 1987; he is President and CEO of the latter organization. Recently, he served as President of the Charles R. Drew Medical Society in Los Angeles, and was previously a member of the Board of Directors of the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science.
He has been active as a long-time member of the American Heart Association (AHA) and served for over 25 years on the Board of Directors of the Greater Los Angeles Affiliate (AHA-GLAA), the West Los Angeles branch. Beginning in 1974, he has been called on as a consultant to the AHA on matters concerning cardiovascular health in the black community, and he suggested the creation of the Women and Minorities Committee of the AHA, on which he also served. Dr. Williams helped the AHA to organize the first scientific sessions at the annual AHA conventions dealing with issues in minorities. He is an internationally-recognized authority on hypertension and sudden cardiac death, and his new book cited above on the latter topic contains a Foreward written by the President of the AHA and has been hailed as the most authoritative work on this topic.
Dr. Williams was recently selected as one of the 15 African American “Pioneers in Cardiology” (along with Dr. Charles R. Drew, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and others), and his portrait and biography are featured on a special annual calendar denoting this distinction. He was also the only Black cardiologist cited for his accomplishments and contributions in the historical book, American Cardiology. He has served as a Visiting Professor at a number of institutions including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, the University of North Carolina, and the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. In recognition of his dedicated efforts at improving heart health in the African American community, he was named the recipient of the coveted Louis B. Russell Award for 2001 by the American Heart Association. He was also selected by Aetna for a special calendar honoring outstanding African American doctors in 2002.
Other activities in which Dr. Williams has been involved include service with LA Care where he was a volunteer reviewer of client complaints and grievances and helped to develop policy for HMOs in managing a diverse population of patients regarding language barriers, cultural issues, and problems of access to care for minorities. He is a founding Board member of the Institute for the Advancement of Multicultural and Minority Medicine (IAMMM) for which he also served as Chair. He is a consultant to Pfizer Pharmaceuticals regarding minority health issues such as the proper application of the principles of evidence-based medicine in the selection of medications for preferred drug lists (PDL) in various states, including California. He is also a member of the AstraZeneca lecture bureau and frequently presents lectures on hypertension, heart failure, dyslipidemia, and other cardiovascular topics. He has also been a lecturer and expert consultant for Pfizer, Nitromed, Abbott, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, Novartis, and DuPont.
Currently, Dr. Williams is promoting his new concept called Humane Medicine which is designed to restructure the way in which medicine is taught and practiced in the United States. This concept is a forerunner of cultural competence. His aim is to revise medical school curriculum to include subjects dealing with infrequently taught topics such as women’s health, issues pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, and religion, biomedical ethics, stress and violence in society, nutrition, molecular biology and genetics, geriatrics, nutrition, and the management of death and dying. He also hopes to have an impact on practicing clinicians by teaching them to utilize a more patient-centered, culturally competent approach to health care delivery rather than a disease-oriented methodology. This effort is under way through several Humane Medicine symposia which he has organized throughout the United States. He also focuses on health care disparities and was a consultant and reviewer for the landmark report of the Institute of Medicine published in 2002 on racial and ethnic disparities in health.
Dr. Williams relaxes by running (he has run eight marathons including the famous Boston Marathon, and more than 100 10K races), and by playing jazz professionally on the trumpet. He travels frequently to foreign countries where he is able to use the six languages that he speaks. He was chosen by the National Medical Association to receive the prestigious Dr. John Beauregard Johnson Award for 1999 and was honored with a testimonial dinner by the Association of Black Cardiologists in August, 2000 in Washington, D.C. in recognition of his lifetime accomplishments. In 2001, his life and career were profiled in the prestigious Harvard Magazine, and he was presented with the Scroll of Merit, the highest award given by the National Medical Association. He also received the National Leadership Award from the Consortium on Southeastern Hypertension Control (COSEHC) and was named as one of the 100 best doctors in America by Black Enterprise Magazine. He delivered the Ebert Distinguished Lecture at Harvard Medical School in April 2004 and was presented with Harvard’s Lifetime Achievement Award, which no other African American has ever received. In 2005, he was given the International Achievement Award by the LINKS, Inc., and was selected to matriculate at the Oxford Round Table, University of Oxford, England in 2006. His most recent accolade is being elected as the President of the National Medical Association, the world’s largest Black medical group with 40,000 adherents.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Email mhinst@aol.com
Phone 310-991-8027 (mobile)