Raymond and Beverly Sackler Award for Sustained National Leadership
WASHINGTON—March 21, 2007—Former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, MD, PhD, received Research!America's 2007 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Award for Sustained National Leadership. The award recognizes Satcher's achievements including his work to reduce racial disparities in health, to advance mental health research and to have public health policies based on solid research.
Satcher was honored March 20, 2007, at the 11th Annual Research!America Advocacy Awards gala at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC. George Stephanopoulos of ABC News served as master of ceremonies for the event.
Satcher is the Poussaint-Satcher-Cosby Chair in Mental Health, director of the Center for Excellence on Health Disparities and former president, Morehouse School of Medicine; and former director of the National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School of Medicine. He was the 16th Surgeon General of the United States (1998-2002) and the Assistant Secretary for Health-only the second person in history to hold both positions simultaneously. Satcher led the development of a new set of national health goals, Healthy People 2010, which included the elimination of racial and ethnic health disparities. He was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1993 to 1998.
Satcher has received more than 40 honorary degrees and awards, including the American Cancer Society's 2005 Humanitarian Award and Aetna's 2004 Voice of Conscience Award. In 2005, he was appointed to the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Determinants of Health in 2005 and became co-chair of the Ad Council's Advisory Committee on Public Issues. He is a former Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and Macy Faculty Fellow. He received his MD and PhD from Case Western Reserve University.
Award benefactors Beverly and Raymond R. Sackler, MD, are long-standing Research!America supporters. Raymond Sackler is a Research!America emeritus director.
Recipients of Research!America's Advocacy Awards are individuals and organizations that have helped create policies that support research to improve health and bring America's scientists the resources they need, and helped millions of Americans understand the returns of medical and health research in new preventions, treatments and cures.
Previous recipients of this award include Linda Aiken, PhD, RN, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing; Judah Folkman, MD, Harvard Medical School; and Nobel Laureate Paul Berg, PhD, Stanford University Medical Center.
The other 2007 Research!America Advocacy Award winners are Utah Senator Orrin G. Hatch; Mike Wallace, mental health research advocate and CBS News correspondent emeritus; the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research; Susan Axelrod, president, Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy; and Nobel Laureates Michael S. Brown, MD, and Joseph L. Goldstein, MD, regental professors, and Donald W. Seldin, MD, chair in internal medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
About Research!America
Research!America is the nation's largest not-for-profit public education and advocacy alliance working to make research to improve health a higher national priority. The 2007 Advocacy Awards represent Research!America's 11th year of recognizing the accomplishments of leading advocates for medical and health research.
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