About Wally R. Smith

Wally R. Smith, M.D., has had a distinguished career in medicine, with an emphasis on internal medicine, prevention and clinical epidemiology. His current positions at Virginia Commonwealth University include Professor and Chairman of the Division of Quality Health Care, Medical Director of the Center on Health Disparities, general internist, and health services researcher.

Dr. Smith has almost 20 years of experience in teaching and performing critical reviews of the medical literature. He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles on health disparities and minority health, especially on clinical and health services in sickle cell disease. His research interests are quality, health disparities, clinical epidemiology, medical decision-making, especially changing physician behavior. He has presented his research internationally, including meetings of the Global International Clinical Epidemiology Network and The Cochrane Collaboration.

He is Secretary of the Society of General Internal Medicine. He was an inaugural Robert Wood Johnson Generalist Physician Faculty Scholar, and the first African-American to receive the award. He has been on the editorial boards of the journals Medical Decision Making and Clinical Performance and Quality Health Care. He has served as a mentor for numerous minority faculty and research fellows. Further, he has chaired a task force, which has produced a comprehensive curriculum guide on teaching about health disparities in graduate medical education and medical education, to be published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Dr. Smith received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College. He later obtained his medical degree from the University of Alabama School of Medicine.