Mohamed Adam, MBBS Named 2020 John A. Watson Faculty Scholar and Recipient of Dean's Diversity Fund Award
Mohamed Abdelgadir Adam, MBBS has been named a 2020 John A. Watson Faculty Scholar and recipient of a Dean's Diversity Fund Award by the UCSF School of Medicine. Dr. Adam will be an incoming Assistant Professor in the newly established Division of Surgical Oncology at UCSF, starting this fall. He completed his surgical residency at Duke University, where he was also a research fellow in advanced statistical modeling at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. He was recruited from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where he is finishing a Complex Surgical Oncology Fellowship.
The Dean’s Diversity Fund was established to support the recruitment and retention of faculty who share the university’s commitment to diversity and the institution's responsibility to care for underserved and vulnerable populations. The awards are named after John A. Watson, PhD, a pioneer for diversity, an inspiring mentor, and a tenacious scientist whose service to the UCSF School of Medicine spanned forty-six years. During his tenure as dean of admissions in the 1970s, Dr. Watson rapidly increased the number of women and minority students entering medical school.
Dr. Adam’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is very personal and unquestionable. A native of Sudan, he moved to North Carolina after medical school. Despite the apparent challenges he faced working as a Black Muslim immigrant named Mohamed, this experience impacted him positively and has given him deeper understanding of the inequalities and challenges faced by under-represented groups. He felt galvanized and became a positive agent of change in that challenging environment. As a junior resident, he helped several immigrant patients from the community to navigate the "system", to get treated adequately, to alleviate their element of fear and mistrust, and to make them feel represented.
Dr. Adam has more than 90 publications, including impactful manuscripts on the topic of disparities. These publications include temporal trends of racial differences in the management of thyroid cancer in the US, disparities in the surgical staging of high-grade endometrial cancer in the Southeastern US, interaction of race and insurance in surgical approach for rectal cancer in the US, and the role of race in the timeliness of presentation of colon cancer in the US.