Mr. Rick Wallace, a masters student in the department of biostatistics and epidemiology at East Tennessee State University College of Public Health and the assistant director of the Medical Library at East Tennessee State University's James H. Quillen College of Medicine, is the recipient of the 2013 Michael DeBakey Library Services Outreach Award, an honor regarded as one of the most prestigious in the profession. Presented by the Friends of the National Library of Medicine (FNLA), the DeBakey Award recognizes outstanding service to rural or underserved communities.
"We've made it our mission at the Medical Library to perform outreach to underserved and rural communities," Mr. Wallace said. "We've visited and served the medical library needs of more than 40 hospitals and more than 40 clinics through the years, in some of the most remote areas of the state. "These people need our help, so let's go get it done. Some of them wouldn't have access to crucial information without these outreach programs." Mr. Wallace says, "I am very proud to be a student of COPH. I feel like the factors that won the award were really public health interventions we did using health information."
