Delgado Awarded Marie Wilson Howells Chair in Psychiatry

By Spencer Watson

 

Nov. 19, 2014 | Pedro L. Delgado, M.D., chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) and director of the UAMS Psychiatric Research Institute, has been named the holder of the Marie Wilson Howells Chair in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Delgado was awarded the endowed chair at a formal ceremony held Nov. 5 at UAMS.

 

Delgado joined UAMS’ faculty in April 2014 after serving as chairman of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio’s Department of Psychiatry for nine years. He also served as associate dean for faculty development and professionalism at UTHSC, and held the Dielmann Distinguished Chair in Psychiatry there.

 

Delgado was chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and the Douglas Danford Bond Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western and University Hospitals of Cleveland while also serving as president and CEO of the Foundation for Clinical Neuroscience there. He previously held faculty posts at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson and Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn.

 

Delgado received his medical degree from the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston, Texas, in 1983 and a Master of Arts in pharmacology from UTMB the following year. He completed his internship and residency in psychiatry at Yale and worked on the faculty there until 1992.

 

He has been an active National Institutes of Health-funded investigator throughout his career, with an emphasis on mood disorders. He has served on numerous review panels for the National Institute of Mental Health and other NIH institutes and is active in many national professional organizations. He has served on several editorial boards, including the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and the International Advisory Board of Academic Psychiatry.

 

The Marie Wilson Howells Chair is named after the native of the Mississippi County town of Wilson that bore her family’s name. Born Feb. 28, 1894 in Wilson, Howells died Nov. 27, 1978, at her home in New York City. The following year, the University of Arkansas received a bequest of $3 million from the estate of Howells, the largest gift ever given to the university at the time.

 

Howells’ will specified that half of the earnings from the gift, which consisted of about $1 million in municipal bonds and the remainder in corporate common stocks, would go to the UAMS Department of Psychiatry. The other half of the gift was earmarked for the psychology departments of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

 

The gift led to the creation of the Marie Wilson Howells Professor endowment, which was initially awarded on May 4, 1982, to William G. Reese, M.D., chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the time.

 

UAMS is the state’s only comprehensive academic health center, with colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Health Professions and Public Health; a graduate school; a hospital; a northwest Arkansas regional campus; a statewide network of regional centers; and seven institutes: the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, the Jackson T. Stephens Spine & Neurosciences Institute, the Myeloma Institute, the Harvey & Bernice Jones Eye Institute, the Psychiatric Research Institute, the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging and the Translational Research Institute. It is the only adult Level 1 trauma center in the state. UAMS has 2,890 students and 782 medical residents. It is the state’s largest public employer with more than 10,000 employees, including about 1,000 physicians and other professionals who provide care to patients at UAMS, Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the VA Medical Center and UAMS regional centers throughout the state. Visit www.uams.edu or uamshealth.com.