OU Board Member Receives Award

Dr. David R. Williams, member of the Oakwood University Board of Trustees, is 2011 winner of the Leo G. Reed¬er Award, which is given each year to a deserving sociologist who has had an outstanding and distinguished career in medical sociology. It is one of the most prestigious awards given to a medical sociologist who has made important contributions to scholarship, teaching, mentorship, professional and community service. Williams is the Florence and Laura Norman Professor of Public Health at the Harvard School of Public Health and Profes¬sor of African and African-American Studies and of Sociology at Harvard University. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty/david-williams/

The first six years of Williams career in academia were at Yale University, where he was an assistant to associate professor of Sociology and an assistant to associ¬ate professor of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine. The next 14 years were at the University of Michigan, where he was the Harold Cruse Collegiate Professor of Sociology, a senior research scientist at the Institute of Social Research, and a professor of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health. Since entering academia, Williams has distinguished himself as a researcher who has received national and international recognition for his scholarship; an accomplished and award-winning teacher and mentor who has enhanced the lives of undergraduate and graduate stu¬dents, not only at the institutions at which he has worked, but across the nation; and an engaged scholar who has worked tirelessly in the community and for the discipline and profession of sociology.

Williams is the author of more than 200 scholarly papers in scientific journals and edited collections, and his research has appeared in leading journals in sociology, psychology, medicine, public health and epidemiology. He has served on the editorial board of 11 scientific journals. According to ISI Essential Science Indi¬cators, Williams was one of the Top 10 Most Cited Researchers in the Social Sciences during the decade 1995 to 2005. The Journal of Black Issues in Higher Education ranked him as the Most Cited Black Scholar in the Social Sciences in 2008.
Williams’ article with Chiquita Collins in the Annual Review of Sociology published in 1995 (21:349-386), “US Socioeconomic and Racial Differences in Health: Patterns and Expla¬nations,” was one of the most cited in Annual Review of Sociology during a ten-year span.