E. Dale Abel calls for UWI graduates to stand on values
Published:Monday | November 6, 2023 | 12:09 AMAsha Wilks/Gleaner Writer
Professor Evan Dale Abel, who was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree, has challenged the 2023 graduates of The University of the West Indies (UWI) Mona, to uphold their core beliefs and values as they pursue their professional endeavours.
In his address to the outgoing students of the faculties of medical sciences and sport, Abel, who graduated from The UWI in 1985, urged the graduands to believe that “there’s nothing that can be imagined that you cannot achieve”.
“In my own field of diabetes, when I was a student ... we had three medicines to treat diabetes, insulin which was made from cows and pigs and there were two pills that we prescribed to patients with diabetes. Fast forward three decades, now we have a panoply of therapeutics. We have drugs now that will save lives, [and] we have artificial pancreases that in fact will completely control diabetes,” he said, adding that many of the diseases that were death sentences when he was a medical student had been cured or better managed due to the advancement of technology.
As the graduands “walked into their futures”, Abel said he wished for them to follow four guiding principles, the first being to remain humble.
“Think of yourselves as servants because you have knowledge that very few have, but that knowledge should not puff you up, it should be used to change your communities and it should be used to prove to be transformative,” he said.
Additionally, he urged them to seek mentorship without hesitation. Finally, he said that they should fight the temptation to be motivated solely by self interests.
Abel is the William S. Adams distinguished professor and chair of the department of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California in Los Angeles.
His work as an endocrinologist focuses on the molecular mechanisms that underpin cardiac failure in diabetes.
He is also a fellow of the American Heart Association and the American College of Physicians and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences. Abel completed his undergraduate studies at The UWI in medicine and his doctoral research in physiology at the University of Oxford.
Since then, he has been on a continuing trajectory, particularly in the area of diabetes.
While on the faculty at Harvard, he was appointed co-director of the fellowship programme at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was recruited to the faculty at the University of Utah in 2000, first as assistant professor rising to professor of medicine. He moved to the University of Iowa in 2013 to direct the F.O.E. Diabetes Research Center and served as chair of medicine until 2021.
He has received many awards and honours, including the 1986 Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford and continuing to the present with the presentation of the 2018 African American Museum of Iowa History Makers Award and, in 2020, being named one of the most inspirational black scientists in the United States.