UAB President's Award for Diversity

Five Honored With UAB President’s Award for Diversity

Five individuals received the 2009 University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) President's Awards for Diversity during a ceremony Jan. 29, at the UAB Hill University Center, Great Hall. The annual awards recognize the importance of institutional diversity and honor those who nurture diversity of thought, culture, gender and ethnicity on the UAB campus and elsewhere. UAB President Carol Garrison, Ph.D., created the awards.

UAB dental student Cramin P. Wiltz II is the winner of the President's Diversity Professional Student Award. Huw F. Thomas, BDS, Ph.D., dean of the UAB School of Dentistry, credited Wiltz for playing an important role in the mentoring and recruitment of underrepresented minorities to the School of Dentistry.

Thomas said Wiltz has spoken at local high schools, colleges and health and church fairs about dentistry as a career. Wiltz has been a member of the School of Dentistry's Minority Recruitment Task Force, and he presented a proposal for a UAB Summer Pre-Dental Enrichment Program at the annual American Dental Association meeting in San Francisco in 2007. Also that year, he was a student representative at the National Dental Association's annual "Day on Capitol Hill" in Washington D.C., where he met with congressional staff members to discuss the challenges of recruiting minority students to health careers and about pending legislation affecting dental education.