John Flack, M.D., M.P.H., professor and chair of the WSU Department of Internal Medicine, recently was honored with the F. Dewey Dodrill Award for Excellence at the American Heart Association's 20th annual Metropolitan Detroit Heart Ball. The ball is an annual black-tie gala benefiting the AHA in its mission to raise awareness and funds in the fight against heart disease and stroke.

I am most proud of my ability to advocate for minimizing, if not eliminating, the use of race in the selection of antihypertensive and heart failure therapies for individual patients of any race. Utilization of race, per se, as a major criterion upon which to select drugs has not led to higher quality of care for any patient in any setting, Dr. Flack said. I am equally proud of our ongoing NIH-funded work at Wayne State University and the Detroit Medical Center focused on developing and validating metrics to measure quality of cardiovascular care in clinical settings and also our work in providing mechanistic and fundamental insights into cardiovascular diseases that disproportionately affect African-American and other minority populations.

William O'Neill, M.D., a 1977 alumnus of the School of Medicine and former president of the Medical Alumni Association, also was honored with a Seymour Gordon Award for Distinguished Achievement.