Morehouse School of Medicine president celebrates 10 years of change

First-year medical student Justin Barthel seized on an opportunity to introduce himself to Dr. Montgomery Rice while they both picked up a cup of ice cream. They talked briefly about where Barthel studied as an undergraduate student and getting started at Morehouse School of Medicine.

“She’s got a big presence here,” Barthel said. “When I saw her, I was a little nervous but ... I had to run up and introduce myself. She’s highly regarded, highly respected, and she chose to be here. And in that moment, I felt like she really wanted to get to know me and that she really cares about the students and getting to know us.”

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

This is a seminal moment for the university and for Montgomery Rice, who recently completed her 10th year as president of the institution with some major accomplishments: She has dramatically increased the number of medical students and has elevated the university’s role in working to help solve some of the biggest health equity problems of our time.

The stakes are huge. Across nearly every metric — from stroke deaths and cancer to pregnancy complications and maternal mortality — Black patients have poorer health outcomes compared to their white peers. Those long-standing gaps in health care were highlighted during the pandemic.

For Montgomery Rice, the job of school president is not just about training doctors, but about addressing those disparities in care, which for decades have resulted in measurably poorer health in the Black community.

In light of that larger goal, the historically Black medical school is working to train more Black doctors, especially for areas of high need such as primary care and pediatrics. The school has also made strides to fix a health crisis in the city triggered by the closure of Atlanta Medical Center.

But lofty plans need funding. Montgomery Rice is called a “masterful fundraiser” by the school’s leaders, who rely on her to supplement the college’s tuition income by connecting with and motivating big donors.

“It’s not only who we educate and train,” Montgomery Rice told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “but how we train and educate health care professionals to understand patients in a holistic way. And then where we place these health care assets throughout communities so they are easier to access, closer to where people work, live, play and pray.”

Credit: Ben Gray for the AJC

Credit: Ben Gray for the AJC

Working to fill gaps

Sitting in her office suite surrounded by framed artwork and awards, Montgomery Rice said the Morehouse School of Medicine’s vision and growth strategy remains squarely focused on closing the gap in access to care. It is a problem that became more urgent with the closure of Atlanta Medical Center.

The impact of hospital closures can be far-reaching, leading to interruptions in routine care that can snowball into a health crisis. A vast web of health services were lost when Wellstar Health Systems closed two locations of Atlanta Medical Center: a main hospital located in downtown and a smaller facility in East Point. Both Atlanta Medical Center locations served patient populations that included many low-income residents of color without insurance. Montgomery Rice is working to make Morehouse School of Medicine part of the solution to restoring access to care for those residents.

Late last year, Morehouse School of Medicine opened a new clinic in East Point, with the hopes of replacing some health services lost in south Fulton County when the East Point AMC facility closed. The new clinic is a partnership between the school, Fulton County and Atrium Health, which is part of Advocate Health.

Montgomery Rice, who is also CEO of the institution, is now leading efforts to see how the medical school might be able to also fill gaps left by the closure of the main AMC hospital in downtown. Some city leaders have discussed a potential partnership that would involve students helping staff a hospital on the former AMC site — it’s an idea Montgomery Rice doesn’t rule out. But for now, she said she is focused a plan that would open a network of outpatient clinics in the underserved areas.

“Whatever we are going to do, we are going to do in partnership,” Montgomery Rice said. “We are looking at what Grady (Health) is doing. We are looking at what Piedmont (Atlanta Hospital) is doing. And we are looking at what other entities are doing and asking ourselves, ‘What can we do that would be complementary, so we are all working together to meet the needs of the community?’”

‘Back to serve’

When Montgomery Rice became the president of Morehouse School of Medicine, the school had only 56 medical students and enrollment had barely budged over the previous two decades.

Since she arrived, the number of new students entering the medical school each year has grown to close to 100 students. Montgomery Rice said the goal is to grow the number of students entering medical school to 225 over the next decade.

Boosting enrollment is far more complex than simply accepting more students out of a pool of nearly 9,000 applicants a year. It requires investments in faculty, state-of-the-art classrooms and lab space and a curriculum that uses cutting-edge virtual reality technology and takes a holistic, “whole-person approach” to medical education.

Credit: Ben Gray

Credit: Ben Gray

Boosting enrollment requires one other thing: “Money, money,” said Gianluca Tosini, chief scientific research officer at Morehouse School of Medicine, repeating the word for emphasis.

Montgomery Rice brings the attributes needed to lead Morehouse School of Medicine, he said. “I think she would be the first to recognize her job as president is to have the vision and then to get the resources needed,” he said.

Tosini said she has the ability, even when talking about complex research projects, to “frame it within the bigger picture of the school, which is health equity and health justice.”

Dr. J. Adrian Tyndall, dean of Morehouse School of Medicine, said he remembers when Montgomery Rice was recruited to join the institution and then became president. He was practicing at the University of Florida at the time.

“I remember reading news articles about it at the time. It created this national buzz,” he said. “Everyone knows Valerie Montgomery Rice. It was clear to me, even back then, that this was a homecoming of sorts. She’s of Georgia and back to serve Morehouse School of Medicine.”

Early challenges

On a recent afternoon, Montgomery Rice stops at a koi pond added to the campus quad in honor of her 10th anniversary as president. Inspired by Montgomery Rice’s mother who loved to fish, the tranquil, circular pond is a connection to her childhood in Macon. As she eyes the fish with orange markings in the peaceful pond, she reflected on some of her earliest memories, which are filled with tension and anxiety.

Montgomery Rice has spoken openly about her parents’ tumultuous marriage. She said her dad was an abusive alcoholic.

Montgomery Rice was 7 years old when she developed osteomyelitis, a bone infection that left her hospitalized for three months. While she was in the hospital, her mother started divorce proceedings.

Credit: HANDOUT

Credit: HANDOUT

Following a surgery on her left leg for the infection, Montgomery Rice returned to school still on crutches. Unable to walk to school, she had to ride the “Lucky Duck” Bus for handicapped students, she recalled. Many other students on her bus were developmentally disabled. The teasing by her third-grade classmates was merciless.

She didn’t let it discourage her. She turned her attention to helping her bus mates learn to read.

“Sometimes the bus driver would slow down just so we could finish reading a story,” she said. “It became sort of a ritual.”

“It taught me empathy,” she said. “It taught me everyone has value.”

Montgomery Rice’s mother had only finished high school, but she knew education was the path to a better life and she instilled that in her daughters.

At Southwest High School, Montgomery Rice excelled at everything. Academics. Cheerleading. President of the senior class.

Credit: HANDOUT

Credit: HANDOUT

Montgomery Rice’s mom wanted her daughters to imagine a life beyond the south side of Macon.

At night, her mom would whisper in her daughters’ ears: “All things are possible. You can do anything.”

“You’ll be trying to sleep, and she is telling you these types of things,” Montgomery Rice recalled. “It was a nuisance at the time.”

Montgomery Rice originally majored in chemical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, but she realized during her senior year that she wanted to bring together her skills in math and science with a love for “helping people.” She changed her major to chemistry and started applying to medical schools.

She went on to graduate from Harvard Medical School and returned to Georgia, where she completed her residency at Emory University.

She married Melvin Rice Jr., whom she met at Georgia Tech, and they started a family. They now have two young adult children, a daughter who graduated from Harvard Medical School and is doing her residency at the University of Pennsylvania and a son who is graphic artist.

Montgomery Rice also shot up the career ladder, becoming an assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility and then director of the clinical trials unit at the University of Kansas.

In March 2006, she accepted an offer to become dean of the medical school at Meharry Medical College in Nashville Along with Morehouse School of Medicine, Meharry is one of only four historically Black medical schools in the U.S.

It didn’t last. Meharry got a new president, who fired Montgomery Rice after she refused to resign.

Fifteen months later in 2011, she arrived at Morehouse School of Medicine as the new dean and executive vice president. She took over as president in 2014.

While Morehouse School of Medicine was founded as a part of Morehouse College in 1975, many don’t realize it became an independent institution in 1981.

Early on, Montgomery Rice had been introduced to some of Atlanta’s biggest movers and shakers, including the late baseball legend Hank Aaron and his wife, Billye Suber Aaron

In 2015, the Aarons donated $3 million to help fund expansion of the Hugh Gloster Medical Education building and create the Billye Suber Aaron Student Pavilion. Their gift was matched by a $12 million gift from the Woodruff Foundation and a $1 million gift from MSM’s board of trustees.

Billye Aaron recalled what had impressed her about Montgomery Rice, saying, “After meeting her, we realized she was really going for the gold. She came in with her boots on the ground, and she was really running to try and make the school what she dreamed it could be.”

Credit: cust

Credit: cust

In 2020, Morehouse School of Medicine would get another significant donation of $26.3 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative. The funds were used to reduce medical school loan debt for Black students who were enrolled and receiving student aid. Each student received about $100,000.

The funding helped students financially so they wouldn’t feel compelled to go into medical specialties with higher salaries in order to pay down their school debt. The hope was that they instead choose to go into areas of greater need but lower pay, like primary care and pediatrics. While these students’ chosen fields aren’t known yet, close to 70% of graduates choose to work in primary care or another critical area of need, such as emergency medicine or pediatrics. Most also serve in underserved communities in both rural and urban areas.

Overall, the average year-over-year giving to the school has increased sixfold from the 2015 fiscal year to the 2023 fiscal year — from about $8 million to about $50 million a year.

Garnesha Ezediaro leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Greenwood Initiative, which is part of a push by the foundation to address historic underinvestment in Black communities.

Ezediaro praised Montgomery Rice’s persistence and leadership, which she said helped attract the largest donation ever for the nation’s four historically Black medical schools. Bloomberg’s $600 million gift announced in August bolstered the endowments of Morehouse School of Medicine, Howard University College of Medicine in Washington, D.C., Meharry Medical College in Nashville and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Science in South Los Angeles.

At Morehouse School of Medicine, the Bloomberg gift of $175 million will go toward student scholarships to help ease debt for aspiring doctors.

Increasing the diversity of the medical workforce is considered key to ending deeply entrenched racial disparities in health care.

Montgomery Rice also stresses health disparities exist beyond race and ethnicity.

“We have continued to be guided by our founding of being a historically Black medical school, but we have not allowed that to limit our possibilities of what we should and can be for the greater community,” she said. “And we feel that when we diversify the health care workforce, it actually benefits of all of us. You see improved health outcomes for all people and a narrowing of the gap based on race.”

Jeromey Beaman, a former high school teacher, is now a third-year medical student at Morehouse School of Medicine. His experience seeing a lack of equity in care in his Atlanta community drew him to the school. He is considering becoming a pediatrician, in part because of a family member with a delayed autism diagnosis.

“I look at all my patients and think about how I would want my mom, my grandmother, my cousin, my little brother and how I would want them to be treated,” he said.