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About Dr. Stephen Nurse-Findlay
Stephen Nurse-Findlay M.D., MPH
Dr. Stephen Nurse-Findlay is an intellectual explorer whose dissatisfaction with the plight of underserved children has led him on a challenging professional journey toward delivering a comprehensive equitable, accessible, error-free, affordable, and culturally sensitive healthcare product to the children of underserved communities.
Born and raised in Jamaica and Trinidad respectively, Stephen’s parents were mavericks who taught him to value intellectual independence and character development, to trust his instincts, to openly challenge or even ignore the textbooks when necessary, to take risks that were consistent with overall goals and to accept success and failure with equal amounts of grace. His mother, therefore, led by example when she abandoned her successful dress shop in Trinidad, and moved her five children to better prospects in Los Angeles, California. Stephen happily cleaned toilets of the wealthy and worked late weekend nights in a grocery store to make ends meet for his family. However, the sharp focus on achievement that would become Stephen’s trademark led him to academic success at Van Nuys High School, and earned him an invitation from Dr. J.H.M Henderson to attend Tuskegee University’s summer school program in 1990. Stephen’s instincts understood those 8 weeks to represent a beginning that was worth the risk of traveling 3,000 miles to a school completely sight unseen, and so he left Los Angeles with $40, a small suitcase, prayer from his mother, and a determination to never, ever work on his hands and knees again.
Stephen had a very successful career at Tuskegee marked by academic achievement, extra-curricular success, and lots and lots of fun. In between “Doing the ****” in the stands at football games, being a key house party, road trip, and community service planner for the Beta Kappa Chapter of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Incorporated, and immersing himself in the warm sea of Black history that permeates the campus, Stephen stayed busy. He was the 5-year captain of the Tuskegee University Honda Campus-All Star Challenge Team, and leading them to first-ever consecutive National Championships in 1993 and 1994, being selected as an All Star in 1992-1994, and winning over $100,000 in scholarships for the University. He was also elected by the student body to the office of Tuskegee University Judicial Advisor, and served as Tuskegee University Homecoming Coordinator in 1994. His many accolades included scholarships from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes, a 4-year tenure on the Dean’s List, selection to Beta Kappa Chi and Alpha Kappa Mu Honor Societies, and award winning, productive summer research internships at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NYU’s Sackler Institute, the Center of Molecular Biotechnology in Seattle, and Rochester NY’s Strong Memorial Hospital. Stephen was named a Tuskegee University Presidential Scholar, and was one of the first HBCU students to be a multiple year awardee of the USA-Today Academic All-American honors in 1994 and 1995 and was also included on the National Dean’s List, recognized by the National Collegiate Student Government Association, and in 1995 completed undergraduate degrees in both Biology and Chemistry, both with Magna **** Laude honors in addition to many other awards and academic accolades.
Stephen considered the Carver Research Foundation to be the key to his success at Tuskegee directly because of the wonderful mentorship, support and love he received from Dr. J.H.M Henderson, and Mrs. Mary Ballard in that building. They both stressed to Stephen that his personal dedication to excellence should never preclude working on his hands and knees when necessary to help other people to live their lives. That lesson, combined with his disgust of the rancid Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment solidified his profound antipathy for passive acceptance of healthcare injustice. It was at Tuskegee that his passionate commitment to the health and welfare of the underserved was ignited, and that passion propelled his successful admission to the medical school at the Johns Hopkins University, becoming one of the first Tuskegee graduates to do so.
At Hopkins, Stephen lost his innocence, but gained his mission as he continued his quest for knowledge, completing both his Masters Degree in Public Health with a focus on Health Policy, Management and Finance in 1999, and his Medical Doctorate in 2000. He completed clinical stints in Saitama, Japan, and captained the Johns Hopkins team to a National Championship in the National Healthcare Case Competition sponsored by the National Association of Health Services Executives.
However, the starkly unfair reality where such a crisp and sparkling center of medical knowledge showed only a minimal visible effort to reverse its community’s dubious distinction as a national leader in intravenous drug use, STD infection rates and infant mortality was appalling to him. This disappointment led him to serve as a member of the President’s Commission for Urban Health at Johns Hopkins, and as an active member of The Community Care Initiative, both while still in medical school to address these issues on a first-person basis. Additionally, he completed research projects investigating enrollment obstacles to pediatric insurance coverage, and healthcare reimbursement patterns in order to better understand funding and policy priorities.
More importantly, as an affiliate of now two institutions with a history of passive obedience to life-destroying healthcare Stephen felt obliged to actively re-define those principles through both academic mastery of the theories that underpin the clinical, policy and commercial elements of healthcare and first-person professional experience in all three elements within his career. This philosophy developed his commercial acumen as a healthcare consultant with Arthur Andersen in 2000-01, immersed him in governmental health policy issues a policy analyst and research fellow at the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in 2001-02, exposed him to the zeal of community advocates as a Board member, and strategic planning chair for the Health Education and Resource Organization, a community based HIV organization in 2002, and has sustained him through the demands of clinically serving the underserved as a pediatrician close to completing his residency training at Crozer-Chester Medical Center, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania in Summer 2005.
With this preface as prologue, Stephen continues to seek the training that will allow him to more effectively advocate for the health of his community, and thinks that his greatest accomplishment would be to encourage those coming behind him to surpass his considerable achievements, because that would mean that he would have been true to the tradition of Carver, Henderson and Tuskegee to encourage excellence and discipline in those whom you lead. His commitment clearly qualifies him, as someone to keep an eye on, and hopefully, as someone the world will have to pay attention to.
