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Louis Sullivan, M.D. |
The Alliance provides a multitude of academic and research opportunities for minority undergraduate students and faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Virginia and a leading Virginia community college.
The five HBCUs and community college are: Hampton University, Hampton, Va., Norfolk State University, Norfolk, Va., St. Paul’s College, Lawrenceville, Va., Virginia State University, Petersburg, Va., Virginia Union University, Richmond, Va., and J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Richmond, Va.
The ultimate goal of the unique partnership is to increase the number of minority health professionals and researchers nationwide, with the hope of promoting better health outcomes for underrepresented minorities. Currently, there are six students from Virginia HBCUs at UNMC for 12 weeks participating in the Summer Minority Research Internship Program.
Dr. Sullivan, president and chairman of the board of the Virginia-Nebraska Alliance, is accompanied by Virginia State Sen. Benjamin J. Lambert III, vice president of the board, and Terone Green, chief executive officer of the Virginia-Nebraska Alliance.
UNMC hosted a dinner Wednesday for the Virginia delegation. UNMC attendees included Chancellor Harold M. Maurer, M.D.; Rubens J. Pamies, vice chancellor for academic affairs and dean for graduate studies; Bob Bartee, executive assistant to the chancellor; Don Leuenberger, vice chancellor for business and finance; Denise Maybank, Ph.D., associate to the president of the University of Nebraska; John McClain, Ph.D., associate vice chancellor for academic affairs and graduate studies; Mary McNamee, Ph.D., associate director for student equity and the Office of Student Equity and Multicultural Affairs, and Valda Ford, director of community and multicultural affairs.
Today, the Virginia delegation will tour the UNMC campus. Some of the key programs and areas they will review include the $77 million Durham Research Center and student labs, the Biocontainment Unit (one of only three in the United States of its kind), the DaVinci computer assisted surgery technology, Community Partnership programs, Community Academy programs and UNMC biomedical education programs.
Following today’s news conference, a business lunch meeting will be held and then the delegation will go off campus and visit the Baker Place Clinic in North Omaha and the South Omaha Neighborhood Clinic, two community clinics sponsored by UNMC, The Nebraska Medical Center and University Medical Associates. UNMC will host a reception tonight that will feature an induction ceremony for Dr. Sullivan and Sen. Lambert as Admirals in the Nebraska Navy and other honors for all three Alliance visitors.
“This alliance provides an opportunity to address the widespread issue of health disparities in our nation today,” said Dr. Pamies, one of the alliance’s architects. “By increasing the pool of minority students in medicine or research, we ultimately hope to make minority patients feel more comfortable when they seek treatment for the many diseases that disproportionally affect the minority population. We also know that we need many more minorities to participate in research studies on these same widespread diseases – diabetes, cancer, asthma and so on – and studies show minorities are more likely to engage in research studies when the people conducting those studies are also minorities.”
Dr. Sullivan is an icon in the twentieth century history of the education of the African American people. He received his undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in 1954. He graduated from Boston University Medical School in 1954, third in his class and the only African American member. He is currently president emeritus of Morehouse School of Medicine after serving as founding dean and president of the medical school for more than 20 years.
Dr. Sullivan served as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the George H.W. Bush administration. He became active in the Virginia-Nebraska Alliance through his work as chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on HBCUs and as chairman of the Sullivan Commission, an organization that looks at the status of health professionals in terms of diversity. Dr. Sullivan has forcefully promoted this new collaboration as a template for the type of program that can significantly help increase diversity in America’s health care system. Today, African Americans, Native Americans and Hispanic Americans make up more than 25 percent of the U.S. population, but represent only 9 percent of nurses, 6 percent of doctors and 5 percent of dentists.
“Our history up until now shows that everybody has been competing for the top minority students, but there are only so many top students to go around,” Dr. Sullivan said. “There is a great need to develop the students below that top tier – the B students, the C-plus students – and elevate their aspirations and achievement levels to be able to compete on the national boards that lead to admittance to the advanced medical and health graduate programs.”
Sen. Lambert is a graduate of the Virginia Union University and the Massachusetts College of Optometry. He was elected to the Virginia House of Representatives in 1978 and to the Virginia Senate in 1986 – making him one of the longest serving state legislators in Virginia history.
During his years of service, Sen. Lambert has served on the Commission on Higher Education and led the legislature’s finance committee. He was instrumental in reducing Virginia college tuition by 20 percent and reimbursing state institutions for the full cost of that reduction. He helped create the Commonwealth Technology Research Fund to enable Virginia colleges and universities to leverage funds for federal and private research grants.
He also helped increase annual spending on higher education operating funds by $500 million, or 53 percent, and made Virginia State University the only fully funded historically black land grant university in the United States. In part due to his efforts, Virginia has become the sixth best-educated state in the nation and the best-educated state in the South.
Green is a former City of Richmond official and civic activist. He is vice president for business development and community relations for Virginia Premier Health Plan, Inc., a health care subsidiary of VCU and chair of the Florence Neal Cooper Smith Sickle Cell Initiative at VCU. The Sickle Cell Initiative is an ongoing effort to raise money to establish and endow a professorship and for aggressive research directed at finding a cure for sickle cell disease.
Green also is an executive on the Virginia Board of Health Professions Education Committee and a member of the National Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities (along with Dr. Sullivan). He has played a pivotal role in the creation of the Virginia-Nebraska Alliance.