Olajide Williams is an American neurologist and the founder of Hip-Hop Public Health. He is Chief of Staff and Associate Professor of Neurology at Columbia University.
Early life and education
Williams was born three months before his due date and spent the first three years of his life in hospital. As a teenager, Williams attended a boarding school in the United Kingdom. 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. Williams trained in medicine in the University of Lagos. It was in Lagos that he first became interested in public health, recognising how many people were dying from preventable diseases. 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. He earned a Master's of Public Health in 2004.
Research and career
After earning his graduate degree, Williams started working with the National Stroke Association and community groups in Harlem with whom he looked 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 music. Whilst working at the Harlem Hospital Center Williams established the Stroke Center of Excellence. 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. The school programme reached 12,000 children. 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. Hip-Hop Public Health was offered to schools and hospitals around New York state. As part of this work, Williams devised videos and cartoons to teach school students from minority backgrounds about the risks of stroke. After the training sessions, 60% of the children had perfect scores in a stroke perception test. Alongside his academic research, Williams looks to develop medical education programmes on neuroscience and to promote equity and inclusion in academic medicine. 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.
Awards and honours
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. In 2018 he was honoured by the Northeast Cerebrovascular Consortium for his work on stroke disparities in underserved communities.
