Dr. Melissa Walls receives the President's Frontier Award
Dr. Melissa Walls has been awarded the President’s Frontier Award for her work promoting health equity for American Indian and First Nations communities. The award recognizes exceptional scholars who are on the cusp of transforming their respective fields and includes a $250,000 grant.
“[Melissa’s] work has shown the profound effects of colonization, racism, and various forms of discrimination on the health and welfare of Indigenous communities,” said Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels during the award announcement.
Walls said she is looking forward to investing some of the funds in expanding Indigenous faculty and staff as well as new scholarships for Indigenous students. “Another thing I will be looking at is creative pilot projects,” she added. “Some projects around traditional healing and traditional knowledge are tougher to get funded through regular public health avenues because we just don’t have a Western evidence base for them yet. This gives us the space to build that up.”
Read more at the Hub.