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Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice
President and CEO of the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia since 2014, Dr. Valerie Montgomery Rice is the first female leader of that prestigious institution and is truly making it a leading voice in public healthcare policy in America. Recognized for her contributions to the field of in- fertility as both a researcher and clinician, Dr. Montgomery Rice is a member of both the National Academy of Medicine, and the Association of American Medical College Council of Deans. In an acknowledgement of her truly inspiring per- sonal story and her commitment to her community, she received the 2017 Horatio Alger Award and membership in the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, among dozens of other well-earned accolades.
Prior to coming to Morehouse, Dr. Montgomery Rice was a founding director of the Center of Women’s Health Research at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the first national research centers to devote itself to studying the diseases that disproportionately affect women of color. Dr. Montgomery Rice has dedicated her career to minimizing and eliminating healthcare disparities in America, and from her position at Morehouse School of Medicine, she is now leading the charge.
Her journey to the top of her field has been a long one. Dr. Montgomery Rice grew up in Macon, Georgia in a family that had few resources. Her parents’ divorce and the three months she spent in the hospital with osteomyelitis (a bone infection) as a six-year-old shaped the decades she would spend in medi- cine and public health, and the people she would aim to serve.
Growing up in a time when segregation in public schools was in its tumultuous final chapter in the South, Dr. Montgomery Rice and some neighborhood friends were bussed to a previ- ously all-white school. It wasn’t an easy time, but she devel- oped a love of science and math that led her to a degree in chemistry from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, then onto Harvard
Medical School. After that came a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Emory University in Atlanta, and a fellowship in reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the Hutzel Wom- en’s College in Detroit.
On her way from Macon to Morehouse, Dr. Montgomery Rice has been guided by three lessons that she learned from her mother. The first was never fear; be fearless. The second was accept loss and not defeat. And the third was give back and pay forward. Watching her mother rise from working on the assembly line at a paper factory to a machine operator, not- ing the sacrifices she made working the graveyard shift to give Dr. Montgomery Rice and her three sisters the best possible chance in life that she could, she never forgot those lessons, or her mother coming in from a late shift and whispering to her sleeping daughters that “All things are possible. You can be anything.”
The first two lessons – be fearless and accept loss without con- ceding defeat – helped channel Dr. Montgomery Rice’s incred-
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