Olajide Williams (scientist)

Williams was born three months before his due date and spent the first three years of his life in hospital.[1] As a teenager, Williams attended a boarding school in the United Kingdom.[2] This was not a happy time of his life, partly due to his own health complications and partly the racism that he experienced from his classmates.[1] Williams trained in medicine in the University of Lagos.[3] It was in Lagos that he first became interested in public health, recognising how many people were dying from preventable diseases.[1] In an interview with the American Heart Association, Williams said that he felt "too African in England, and too English in Africa,", so instead moved to the United States. He completed his specialist training in neurology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. It was whilst working at the Harlem Hospital Center that he recognised the same public health disconnect that he had seen in Lagos; people from underserved communities were not aware of the warning signs of stroke.[1] He earned a Master of Public Health in 2004.[3]

Williams started working with the National Stroke Association and community groups in Harlem to establish trusted, evidence-based public health awareness programmes. With the support from the NSA, Williams researched the effectiveness of teaching children about neurological conditions through hip hop.[1] Whilst working at the Harlem Hospital Center Williams established the Stroke Center of Excellence.[4]

Williams founded the Hip Hop Stroke programme, an National Institutes of Health initiative which developed a school-based stroke education programme to teach children about stroke.[3][5] The school programme reached 12,000 children.[6] In 2014, Williams and hip-hop pioneer Doug E. Fresh launched Hip-Hop Public Health, a non-profit organisation that looks to educate people about public health issues through the lens of public health.[7][8] Hip-Hop Public Health was offered to schools around New York state.[9] was offered to hospitals As part of this work, Williams devised videos and cartoons to teach three thousand school students from minority backgrounds about the risks of stroke. After the training sessions, almost 60% of the children had perfect scores in a stroke perception test.[1]

Alongside his academic research, Williams looks to develop medical education programmes on neuroscience and to promote equity and inclusion in academic medicine.[10]

During the COVID-19 pandemic Williams joined Doug E. Fresh to create a series of videos to encourage young people to wash their hands for twenty seconds or more.[11]

Williams has won several awards for his research and advocacy. In 2008 he was awarded the NAACP Community Service Award. He was selected by The Root as one of the United States' most influential African-Americans in 2012. He was awarded the European Stroke Research Foundation Investigator award in 2017 in Berlin.[12] In 2018 he was honoured by the Northeast Cerebrovascular Consortium for his work on stroke disparities in underserved communities.[13]

• Williams, Olajide. (2010). Stroke diaries : a guide for survivors and their families. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-974548-7. OCLC 610218547.
• Williams, Olajide; Noble, James M. (2008). "'Hip-Hop' Stroke". Stroke. 39 (10): 2809–2816. doi:10.1161/strokeaha.107.513143. ISSN 0039-2499.
• Willey, J. Z.; Williams, O.; Boden-Albala, B. (2009-11-04). "Stroke literacy in Central Harlem: A high-risk stroke population". Neurology. 73 (23): 1950–1956. doi:10.1212/wnl.0b013e3181c51a7d. ISSN 0028-3878.
• Williams, Olajide; DeSorbo, Alexandra; Noble, James; Gerin, William (2012). "Child-Mediated Stroke Communication". Stroke. 43 (1): 163–169. doi:10.1161/strokeaha.111.621029. ISSN 0039-2499.