Professor Kaye Husbands Fealing was awarded the 2017 National Medical Association Council on Concerns of Women Physicians’ (CCWP) Trailblazer Award on July 30, 2017 in Philadelphia, PA.  This award is given to an individual who has made significant achievements in medicine science, and/or to issues of women's health. 

At the Annual Muriel Petioni, MD Awards Luncheon at the NMA National Convention, the CCWP honors female physicians and others who through research, community service and activism, strive to eliminate health care disparities and provide people of color with quality health care.  Husbands Fealing received the award in recognition of her work on broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medical sciences (STEMM). 

Her Academic Medicine 2012 paper with coauthor Professor Samuel Myers, Jr. showed that the representation ratio for African American medical doctors rose from 0.48 to 0.62 between 1968-1989 (Affirmative Action period) to the 1990-2009 (diversity period).  Although representation of African Americans in medical sciences increased during the forty-year period, it remains well below 1.  Parity would mean that the probability of African Americans being in medicine is the same as the probability of anyone being in medicine. 

Husbands Fealing and colleagues Dr. Paul Baker (Georgia Tech), Professor Connie McNeely (George Mason), and graduate student Andrew Hanus (Georgia Tech) recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to launch a new project where they will be setting up an observatory, networks and tools for better understanding practical means of broadening participation in STEMM for people with disabilities.  This project addresses the evidence-basis and scalability strategy of the grand challenges of diversity and inclusion, and is inspired by the “Hubs of Innovation” conceptual framework developed by Dr. Hannah Valantine at the National Institutes of Health.