July 5, 2007

Clintoria Richards-Williams, a graduate student working on the scientific underpinnings of diabetes in African Americans, has been chosen by the American Physiological Society (APS) as a role model.

Richards-Williams, 28, has earned the society’s 2007 Minority Outreach Fellowship. One other person was named an APS 2007 Minority Outreach Fellow: a postdoctoral trainee working at the University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo.

A doctoral candidate in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Richards-Williams has focused her research on the molecular pathways that lead to diabetes in humans.

Diabetes occurs in 20.8 million children and adults in America and is counted as the sixthth leading cause of death. The condition occurs 1.8 times more often in African Americans compared to whites, according to national statistics.

“The reason I became interested in diabetes is because of the population that it effects: mainly African Americans. I want to confront that,” said Richards-Williams. “My ultimate goal is to eventually have a biomedical lab where I train minority researchers to work in diabetes.”

The Minority Outreach fellowships pay a variety of conference registration fees and travel expenses that include the following events:

• Representing the APS at the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students
  
• Serving as a physiologist-in-residence at the APS’s annual Science Teaching Forum, a week of training for middle and high school teachers
  
• Visiting K-12 minority classrooms during the 2007-08 school calendar to give career presentations and encourage more biomedical research college applicants
  
• Planning and implementing outreach projects during the annual Experimental Biology meeting, which is a multi-organization meeting hosted by the APS and various scientific/medical professional and nonprofit groups

*Digital photograph (headshot) of Clintoria Richards-Williams available by calling 934-8938.