Deborah Prothrow-Stith

Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith (b. 1954) is a consultant at Spencer Stuart for executive searches for Public Health and Health Care Services organizations, health professional associations, Academic Medical Centers, and Life Sciences companies. She has been the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Public Health Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health and the Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity. She remains an Adjunct Professor at the school. In 1987, she became the first female and youngest Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Prothrow-Stith was born On February 6, 1954 in Marshall, Texas to Percy and Mildred Prothrow but was primary raised in middle-class Atlanta, GA. Her father, Percy, worked for Atlanta Life, then one of two black-owned insurance companies in the South. She finished high school in Houston, Texas attending Jack Yates Sr. High. Though actively recruited by several ivy-league universities, she chose Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, for her undergraduate education and earned a degree in mathematics.Following her graduation from Spelman in 1975, she obtained an M.D. from Harvard University Medical School in 1979.

Dr. Prothrow-Stith is a nationally recognized public health leader. As a physician working in inner-city Boston, she broke new ground with her efforts to have youth violence defined as a public health problem; not just a criminal justice issue. Her passion for prevention was not satisfied with the emergency room work of "stitching people up and sending them out." She turned to public health and, with others, created a social movement to prevent violence that has affected Boston and the nation.

After completing her residency in 1982, Dr. Prothrow-Stith began to analyze violence as a health problem and determined that the best way to address the issue was by applying a public educational strategy, as has been done to reduce cigarette smoking and drunk driving. She has appeared on numerous nationally broadcast TV and radio programs and in print, explaining how families, schools, and communities can rein in the problem. Today, her Violence Prevention Curriculum for Adolescents is used in schools in all fifty states and abroad. Shortly after her residency, she took a teaching position at Boston University School of Medicine and became a staff physician at Boston City Hospital. She began to devote clinical hours in the Adolescent Clinic of the Harvard Street Neighborhood Health Center in Dorchester, a low-income section of Boston. From 1982 to 1996 (taking a sabbatical from 1987 to 1990), she treated teenagers for everything from sore throats to pregnancies, drug abuse and suicide attempts.

In 1987, Governor Michael Dukakis appointed her as the first woman Commissioner of Public Health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (the Massachusetts Department of Public Health). During her tern as Commissioner, she established the first Office of Violence Prevention in a state department of public health, expanded prevention programs for HIV/AIDS and increased drug treatment and rehabilitation programs.

In 1991, she published Deadly Consequences: How Violence Is Destroying Our Teenage Population and a Plan to Begin Solving the Problem, which was the first literary work to present violence from a public health perspective to a mass audience. In 1995, President Bill Clinton appointed her to the National Commission on Crime Control and Prevention.

Dr. Prothrow-Stith is married to Boston University professor and U.S. Ambassador, Charles Richard Stith

• Secretary of Health and Human Services Exceptional Achievement in Public Service Award (1989, Louis W. Sullivan)
• American Psychiatric Association's Solomon Carter Fuller Award (1998)
• World Health Day Award (1993)
• 10 honorary doctorates