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Miller-Lawrence Society awards scholarships

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The Miller-Lawrence Medical and Dental Society held their ninth annual Scholarship and Recognition dinner this past Saturday evening at The Grand in Long Beach.

Each year the society awards scholarships to current medical and dental students. This year the recipients were Alexandra S. Banks, Charles Drew University of Science and Medicine/Urban Public Heath; Cory A. Johnson, Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California; Jeremy V. Laney, Aida Z. Scrubb, and Barbara M. Strong of the Charles Drew University/David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA; and Yvette Osei-Akosa, Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California;

“As health care providers get grayer and grayer, we must remember to inform and encourage our younger colleagues to champion providing excellent health care to the poor and under-served,” said Dr. Clifford Hancock, president of the Miller-Lawrence Medical and Dental Society. “Tonight we are awarding six of these young people with scholarship funds to further their endeavors.”

The master of ceremony for the event was Rodney D. Franks, who is the vice president for the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, one of the country’s leading nonprofit independent biomedical research institutes, located on the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center campus in Torrance.

In addition to awarding scholarships, each year the society honors two physicians in the medicine and dental field. This year’s Trailblazer Award recipient was Dr. Wilbert C. Jordan, MPH.  He received his degree from Case Western Reserve in 1971, where his medical student project was “A comparison between Black Christian and Black Muslim Children: School performance and level of self-esteem.”

The 2014 President’s Award honoree is Dr. Richard S. Baker, executive director for the Center of Health Services Research, and professor and chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science. He holds a joint faculty appointment at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and serves as associate director of the Jules Stein Center for Eye Epidemiology. He received his undergraduate degree in physics from Stanford University and his masters degree from Harvard Medical School.

“Tonight we are honoring two accomplished physicians who practice what they preach,” Hancock said. “They have spent their careers working with under-served and high-risk populations.”

The society is the only medical and dental society within the National Medical Association. The society was established in 2005 to address the health care disparities in medicine and dentistry in south Los Angeles County.

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