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Creed/Patton/Steele Invitational Dinner Celebrates Completion of Scholarship Campaign and Honors First RecipientThe Creed/Patton/Steele Invitational Dinner was held on November 24 to celebrate Yale’s endowment of the Creed/Patton/Steele Scholarship and to honor the scholarship’s first recipient, Akinluwa Andrew Demehin, a Master’s of Public Health student in the class of 2005.
The Creed/Patton/Steele Scholarship was established to recognize the importance of diversity in graduate and professional education, acknowledge the contributions of underrepresented minorities to the field of public health, and honor the achievements of Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed, M.D. 1857, the first African American graduate of the Yale School of Medicine, Curtis L. Patton, Ph.D., Professor of Public Health and Head of the Division of Global Health, who has devoted much of his career to the advancement of minority initiatives, and Robert E. Steele, ’71 MPH, ’75 PH.D., who conceived of the scholarship and is its principal benefactor. Steele was supported in his efforts by a special campaign committee, composed of EPH alumni and chaired by Reid Davis, ’86 MPH, which made countless phone calls and held numerous dinners to generate interest in and contributions to the campaign. Ultimately, in excess of $100,000 was raised, enough for a named, endowed scholarship. The endowment of the scholarship, which will be awarded each year to an outstanding incoming student in the MPH or Ph.D. program, is important for several reasons. Patton noted that “minorities are woefully underrepresented at faculty and student levels.” In addition, the scholarship is “an incentive for students who would otherwise not have the means to study public health at Yale,” says Elaine Anderson, ’76 MPH and Director of Alumni and Community Affairs, noting that “the amount of scholarship assistance the school is able to offer students… affects the school’s ability to recruit students to the program and also affects the career choices students make when they graduate.”
This year’s recipient, Akinluwa Andrew Demehin, was born in Minnesota and graduated from Edina High School. He graduated from Harvard University with a concentration in history, focusing on the history of medicine in Africa, and with a science focus in Biochemistry. During his college years, he served on the steering committee for a program in which Harvard students teach science to elementary school classes in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 1997 to 2003, Demehin worked at Living Challenge, Inc., a Minneapolis-area organization that operates group homes for developmentally disabled adults. In addition, he volunteered in the Let’s Get Ready Program, which helps disadvantaged high school students in Minneapolis to prepare to apply to college.
The endowment of the Creed/Patton/Steele Scholarship complements other efforts made by EPH to increase the enrollment of underrepresented minority students and to highlight the importance of diversity in graduate and professional education. Related initiatives include the creation of five tuition-free Public Health Opportunity scholarships, the development of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded summer academic enrichment program for high school and undergraduate students, and the 1998 adoption by the EPH faculty of a statement of principle making cultural diversity a priority. There is evidence that the efforts are paying off: according to Anne Pistell, Associate Dean for Student Affairs, in 1999, 11% of students in the School of Public Health were from underrepresented minority groups; by 2003, that figure had risen to 21%. -Story by Christy Gordon. Sources: 1. Anderson, Elaine, '76 MPH, Director of Alumni and Community Affairs.
Personal interview, December 3, 2003. |
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