Service to Society: 2008 Honoree Highlights
Jim Yong Kim ’82 || George Lima ’48
William Rogers Award
Jim Yong Kim ’82
Dr. Jim Yong Kim is a public health physician specializing in the control and eradication of infectious diseases. He has been recognized as a global leader and distinguished professional, including being awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2003, being named as one of America’s 25 best leaders by U.S. News & World Report in 2005; and being named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2006.
Dr. Kim was director of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, a post he was appointed to in 2004. His vision has inspired local communities, world health organizations, political leaders and pharmaceutical companies to collaborate productively. At the World Health Organization, Dr. Kim is currently mapping new and effective strategies for international health leadership in tuberculosis, AIDS, and other infectious diseases.
Dr. Kim has also formulated new models for containing multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, a disease that was once considered by major health organizations to be untreatable in some settings around the world. His protocol for community supervision of directly observed treatment of multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis in Russian prisons and Peruvian ghettos has resulted in a dramatic increase in successful outcomes. Dr. Kim holds appointments as Francois Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health and Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical school.
John Hope Award for Public Service
George Lima ’48
In April 1945, as a member of the U.S. Army’s 477th Bombardment Group, George Lima was one of 60 black Air Corps officers arrested for trying to enter a white officer’s club at Freeman Field in Indiana – a courageous and potentially dangerous decision for a military officer. But this incident proved to be decisive in the Army’s move to integrate its clubs and was a turning point on the road toward the full integration of the military just three years later. As it turns out, this was only one in a series of courageous actions George Lima would take in a lifetime of commitment to civil rights.
The son of immigrants from Cape Verde, Lima first attended NC A&T State College, and served with the legendary Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. Enrolling at Brown after the war, he chose to study sociology in part to try to understand the segregation and discrimination he had witnessed and experienced. After graduation, despite his military service and Brown degree, the only work he could find was as a shipping clerk. But with characteristic determination, he went on to serve as a union representative and organizer, then as an administrator with the War on Poverty and VISTA in Washington.
Returning to Providence, he served as president of the local NAACP and as a Rhode Island state representative – using both positions to continue his fight for civil rights. And the passage of time has not diminished his drive for change. Just a few years ago, now in his 80s, he founded the Black Air Foundation to create programs empowering minority youth through education and training.