RCMI International Symposium on Health Disparities
November 12-15, 2000
San Juan, Puerto Rico

Yvonne T. Maddox, Ph.D.

In addition, Dr. Maddox currently serves as Deputy Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a position she has held since 1995. In this role, she manages the institute's diverse extramural program that supports research on population issues, reproductive biology, contraception, pregnancy, child development, nutrition, developmental biology, AIDS, mental retardation, and medical rehabilitation. Most recently, Dr. Maddox oversaw NICHD's effort to reduce infant mortality in minority communities. One visible component of this initiative has been the institute's widely successful Back To Sleep Campaign, a communications strategy designed to help families reduce the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Before being recruited to NICHD, Dr. Maddox served for nine years in various capacities at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), an institute with the NIH that supports basic research. From 1991 to 1994, she was chief of the NIGMS pharmacology and physiological sciences sections, and deputy director of the institute's Biophysics and Physiological Sciences Program.

In 1985, Dr. Maddox was heading her own laboratory as a research assistant professor in Georgetown University's department of physiology and biophysics, when she was asked to join NIH as a health scientist administrator in the NIGMS. Already the author or coauthor of a number of scientific publications describing how various inflammatory agents cause cell injury and sex differences in vascular reactivity, Dr. Maddox was familiar with NIH, leading a Georgetown University lab that was in part funded by a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant. While training at Georgetown's medical center, she was also both an NIH predoctoral fellow from 1975 to 1976 and an NIH postdoctoral fellow from 1983 to 1985.

Foretelling her current appointment, Maddox was hired at NIGMS by its then-director Dr. Ruth Kirschstein, who would eventually recruit Dr. Maddox as her acting deputy director in 2000. From 1993 to 1994, Dr. Maddox served as acting director of the institute's Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) Program, which is renowned in the research community for ushering more minority students toward professions in medical and basic science and science administration.

A native of Virginia, Dr. Maddox earned a bachelor of science degree in 1965 from Virginia Union University. After graduation, she worked as a laboratory specialist in the Medical College of Virginia's department of medicine, research associate and group leader in Hazleton Laboratories' department of inhalation toxicology, research associate in the Washington Hospital Center's department of ophthalmology and biology instructor at American University. She completed advanced studies in biology at American University and received a doctorate in physiology and biophysics from Georgetown University in 1981.

A champion of women's issues, Dr. Maddox led a team of international scientists as part of a joint India-U.S. Reproductive Health Research Initiative in 1999. Also that year, at the invitation of the Japanese government, she gave the keynote lecture for the eleventh International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists in Chiba, Japan. She is also the author or coauthor of a number of scientific articles, including the often-cited paper on a method she developed to extract peritoneal macrophage, "A routine clinical source of peritoneal macrophages and their release of prostaglandins in vitro," which was published in 1984.

Dr. Maddox has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Meritorious Executive Rank Award, the Public Health Service Special Recognition Award and the NIH Director's Award. She is a member of the American Physiological Society and the New York Academy of Sciences. She has also delivered more than 100 lectures.