Retired Dean Receives American Heart Association Award for Influential Work at University of Maryland School of Medicine – Baltimore Sun

Donald E. Wilson, dean emeritus of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, received the 2022 Watkins-Saunders Award from the American Heart Association this spring.

The award, given annually since 2012, recognizes individuals or organizations in Maryland who have been champions in the fight against health disparities and inequities. The award is named in memory of two physicians who volunteered for the American Heart Association, the late Drs. Levi Watkins and Elijah Saunders, pioneers in the field of cardiology who were committed to equality in health care, according to the association.

Saunders was Wilson’s mentor and friend. He encouraged Wilson to apply for the position at the University of Maryland and went to the school’s president demanding that Wilson be interviewed for the position, according to a spokesman for the American Heart Association.

Wilson, a retired gastroenterologist, said being named this year’s Watkins-Saunders honoree was surprising, but a great honor.

The award “goes beyond the discipline of heart disease and stroke, and speaks to a topic that is universal in health care in our country right now,” Wilson said. “And that is the problem of health disparities, which is in part due to the lack of diversity of health care providers and decision makers in our country today.”

Wilson has had great success in American medicine. “I experienced many firsts in my career,” he said.

Wilson became the first black dean of a non-minority-focused medical school in the United States in 1991, when he was appointed dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine. During his 15-year tenure, he not only improved diversity at the school, but also transformed it into one of the best research medical schools in the country.

“In my first meeting with my presidents and program directors, I was in a room with 25 people, 20 of whom thought they should be the dean…who thought they could do the job better than me. So it was an interesting start,” Wilson said. “To say there was racial bias would be an understatement.”

I knew I was going to be a doctor since I was about 9 years old. Growing up in Worcester, Massachusetts, he got sick and his family called a doctor to the house who helped heal him.

“I was blown away,” Wilson, 86, recalled. “I said, ‘I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,’ especially after noticing the lack of people of color in medicine.”

“I realized, in my youth, that we had a representation deficiency in terms of who you could go see, not that white doctors wouldn’t see you, but if you felt more comfortable going to a person of color, you just had an option throughout Worcester, Massachusetts,” Wilson said.

This has a huge impact on research and medical knowledge of patients of color about themselves. He experienced the same thing in medical school, with seven of the 1,172 class members who were black. He graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1962.

“I never saw a black professor,” Wilson said.

He has spent much of his career trying to change that and addressing other health disparities and inequities. Under her leadership at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the number of women faculty increased by 75% and the number of minority members tripled.

“I felt like I had to do something with what I saw because I can’t just walk around knowing there’s something wrong with this world. I see a problem and I face it.” Wilson said.

His presence encouraged more students of color to come to the University of Maryland and he became a role model for people of color who wanted to practice medicine or enter medical academia, such as Dr. William Ashley. Ashley, a neurosurgeon at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, is chair of the board of directors of the American Heart Association of Greater Maryland and chairs the selection committee for the Watkins-Saunders Award.

He was a teenager when he met Wilson, who was a colleague and friend of Ashley’s father. Wilson was the youngest person to achieve full professor status at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. When Ashley was graduating from high school, Wilson offered her advice about her future. Her paths crossed again some 20 years later, when Ashley came to Maryland.

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Ashley, 49, said Wilson left an indelible mark on her career and has been a role model for other people of color like him who wanted to pursue a career in medicine.

“When I got to Baltimore, he was so happy to see me and remembered our conversation,” Ashley said. “I really feel very proud to have known him all these years and that he is part of my construction to where I am today.”

Wilson also implemented changes to the curriculum at UM that included more hands-on, hands-on instruction, and increased research funding from $77 million to $341 million, among the highest of any American medical institution at the time. Wilson said the medical school moved from the fourth quintile in outside research funding to the top quintile when he retired in 2006.

“I didn’t come to Maryland to increase diversity; I came to Maryland to improve medical school,” Wilson said. “I think you can’t reach your best chances unless you have a diverse group of people working with you and advising you. So increasing diversity would help the medical school no matter what happened.”

Wilson, who lives in Baltimore County, is still active in several organizations that promote the advancement of people of color in health care and academic medicine, including serving as president of the Association of Academic Minority Physicians, which he himself founded.

He believes that greater impact can be achieved by ensuring diversity in research and leadership roles.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in medicine, but the world is going backwards,” Wilson said. “I was hoping to live to see the world end racial disparities, but sadly, that won’t happen in my lifetime. Structural racism is a big part of our downfall. There is a lot of work for us.”