Former PAEA President Receives Two Awards

By Eileen Evans

Dawn Morton-Rias, professor and dean of the College of Health Related Professions at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and a former PAEA president, has been accorded two honors simultaneously: She is the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Specialists Award and the first nonphysician to be recognized by the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health — for her commitment to community-based health care delivery and health professions education. Of the convergence of these two remarkable achievements, Morton-Rias said, “This is a very exciting time for me personally and for the PA profession. I was encouraged to apply for the Fulbright project a year ago. To learn of my selection for the Fulbright and the Arthur Ashe recognition within a few days of each other was an amazing coincidence.”           

For her Fulbright project, Morton-Rias will travel this summer to the University of Haifa in Israel, the Fulbright partner university to which she was matched, to undertake workshops, meetings, and field visits at leading medical centers and community health services. She said, "I am thrilled to be able to share my experience in health professions education, cultural competency, and leadership development.” She added that she was “equally honored to be able to represent the PA profession, the College of Health Related Professions, and SUNY Downstate in this exciting international project.”

The Fulbright Program, billed as “America’s flagship international educational exchange activity,” is sponsored by the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Created in 2000 to complement the traditional Fulbright Scholar Program, the Senior Specialists program provides prominent U.S. faculty and professionals with short-term academic opportunities to support curricular and faculty development and institutional planning at postsecondary academic institutions around the world. More than 285,000 emerging leaders have received Fulbright awards, individuals who later became heads of government, Nobel Prize winners, and leaders in education, business, journalism, and the arts. Morton-Rias is one of more than 400 U.S. faculty and professionals this year who have been, as she put it, “funded for what I do.”

Morton-Rias was the first PA to be recognized in the 14-year history of the Arthur Ashe Institute, a distinction she attributed to her clinical services to the Brooklyn community and the homeless; her efforts to educate diverse PAs and other health professionals; and her ongoing outreach efforts at area high schools, colleges, and community-based organizations. Along with the institute’s other 2008 honorees — the Time Warner Company; tennis champion Billie Jean King; Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons; Bryant Gumbel, host of HBO Real Sports; and Terry McDonell, editor of the Sports Illustrated group — Morton-Rias was feted at the institute’s 2008 Sportsball Gala in Manhattan earlier this month. In its recognition of a PA, the institute emphasized the importance of contributions made by allied health providers in eliminating racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in health.

In her acceptance remarks, Morton-Rias emphasized the important role that each member of the health care team plays in improving the health status of the community, and her belief that every professional has an obligation to teach and mentor future generations. Morton-Rias said the Ashe gala did much to heighten the visibility of the PA profession among the news media. As she was leaving the stage, other attendees in the audience of journalists and sportswriters were handing her their business cards to line up interviews for radio programs.

Ashe, a tennis great and the first African American to cross the color line in a formerly white sport, founded the institute in 1992, just two months before his death from AIDS, in response to what he recognized as the disproportionate amount of illness and death in urban communities from preventable causes. He eventually became a writer, journalist, and broadcaster for the Time Warner Company. This year’s gala marked the 15th anniversary of Ashe’s death.

Morton-Rias graduated from the Howard University PA Program in Washington, D.C., where she earned a second bachelor’s degree as a member of the first PA class at Howard University to receive the credential. She practiced as a clinical PA medical officer at a community health center in New York City for eight years. As the PA member of a mobile team that also included a medical assistant and a social worker, she went back and forth between soup kitchens and shelters at six different clinics a week and provided acute care and family medicine to the homeless. She said these were “wonderful” years for allowing her to be right where the help was needed.

Morton-Rias later turned her attention to PA education and, after 11 years as a PA program director at the SUNY Downstate PA Program, she earned her doctorate in education and became the college’s dean, where she oversees six academic programs: PA, PT, OT, diagnostic imaging, medical informatics, and midwifery. She remains a core faculty member at the PA program and has teaching, advising, and evaluative responsibilities. Even today, however, Morton-Rias says her name is “out there,” as a result of her longtime commitment to community groups that she continues to visit to familiarize students with and recruit them into the health professions — an activity that she credits for having come to the attention of the Ashe Institute personnel who were seeking health professions practitioners with roots in the community.