The Honorable Louis W. Sullivan, MD

Louis W. Sullivan, MD, is chairman of the board of the National Health Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, and is chairman of the Washington, D.C.-based Sullivan Alliance to Transform America’s Health Professions. He served as chair of the President’s Commission on Historically Black Colleges and Universities from 2002-2009, and was co-chair of the President’s Commission on HIV and AIDS from 2001-2006.

As secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 1989 to 1993, Dr. Sullivan released Healthy People 2000 (a blueprint for health promotion and disease prevention), waged a vigorous campaign against tobacco use, urged increased seat belt use in vehicles, and improved FDA food labels.

In 1975 Dr. Sullivan was the founding dean and president of the Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM), and went on to serve for more than two decades. He is now President Emeritus.

A native of Atlanta, Dr. Sullivan graduated magna cum laude from Morehouse College and earned his medical degree, cum laude, from Boston University School of Medicine. His postgraduate training included an internship and residency in internal medicine at New York Hospital – Cornell Medical Center (1958-60), a clinical fellowship in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital (1960-61), and a research fellowship in hematology at the Thorndike Memorial Laboratory of Harvard Medical School, Boston City Hospital (1961-63). Dr. Sullivan is certified in internal medicine and hematology.

He has served on the faculties of Harvard Medical School, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and Boston University School of Medicine.

He is the author (with Marybeth Gasman) of The Morehouse Mystique: Becoming a Doctor at the Nation’s Newest African American Medical School, published in 2012 by the Johns Hopkins University Press, and his autobiography Breaking Ground: My Life in Medicine (with David Chanoff), published in 2014 by the University of Georgia Press.