So my name is Dr. Olajide Williams, I work at the Neurological Institute of New York
at Columbia University and my area of specialty is stroke.
And my goal is to eradicate pre-hospital delays to acute stroke treatments.
The classic public health paradigm is that information filters from parents to children
but when you're dealing with areas and populations that are dominated by hard to reach parents
and you just can't reach parents because they're busy struggling with survival and life and
trying to put food on the table.
When you're dealing with those types of parents how do you reach them?
How do you communicate with them?
And so, we were forced to reverse that paradigm and ask the question, can we reach them through
their kids?
Most Americans don't realize that stroke is a imminently treatable disease that's why
only three to five percent of Americans are actually treated.
So the hip hop stroke program is a program that utilizes hip hip music to teach children
the signs and symptoms of stroke and the appropriate action in the event of stroke.
As a result of our efforts across Harlem we actually saw one hospital quadrupling the
TPA treatment rate.
I really think that we do the coolest research on the planet.
How many NIH funded studies involve a hip hop icon, involves rap music, involves interacting
with children around the five pillars of hip hop culture?
So I was born in Lagos, Nigeria.
My father was a doctor, he was a physician he was one of the few physicians of his generation
of his time.
Remember he grew up in Colonial Nigeria.
Nigeria got its independence in 1960 fortunately for him his grandmother was a very successful
trader.
She traded in lace and fabrics across the West African coast.
So she was able to send him to medical school shortly after independence there was a huge
need for public health expertise setting up the infrastructure of healthcare in the country
and so he studied public health here at John Hopkins here in America and then went back
to Nigeria and really helped build the infrastructure of Nigerian Health system.
My mother actually majored in history but she ended up being a civil servant and she
was an incredible administrator and she worked at the highest levels of the Nigerian government.
I left for London, I think that I was about nine when I went to boarding school.
Where the likes of Prime Minister Attlee went and Chris Nolan was a classmate of mine actually.
I will not want to do it again but all in all it was very powerful because I think it
defined a lot of who I am today.
I always had to figure things out on my own.
I always had to depend on myself.
And I thought I had challenges in boarding school for all those years but it was nothing
compared to what I was about to experience at medical school in Nigeria.
You know a lot of my colleagues were very poor.
I was actually one of the lucky ones because I could eat three meals a day.
Most of my colleagues had a diet they called zero one zero which they only had one meal
a day.
We had very little electricity, no power most of time, our electric theaters were dilapidated.
I'd never seen a CT scan until I got to America, so I was going from wonderland into the belly
of hell.
So I think that enduring those challenges it made me fall in love with the idea of uplifting
those less fortunate than me.
And so it really made me realize that perhaps this experience is to prepare me for what
I was to be doing for the rest of my life which was which is service to those less fortunate
than me.
And so the seeds of what I do today I believe were planted and fertilized in those early
years in Africa.
We are constantly researching our own personal lives but I think that if you have a problem
that you want to make better the only way to do that properly is to do it through proven
mechanisms, proven methods and the only way to acquire the skill sets to develop those
types of proven methods and proven mechanisms is through research, training and the implementation
of that product.
And so no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what sector you're in,
we just happened to be in the healthcare sector, but research is part and parcel of making
things better and so my advice to anyone who's interested in a career in medicine or in health
or in science is to basically understand the basic principle that research is going to
be part and parcel of your life, its going to be part and parcel of he questions you
ask, on your road, on your journey.
Its going to be a part and parcel of your inner strive to make things better around
you.
Its just no escaping research.
I feel fulfilled by the direction of our research and by the progress we have made but I am
not satisfied with where we are.
I don't think I'll ever be satisfied because I think this is work that will go on indefinitely
and we're going to get closer and closer and closer to the answer and to that ideal.
But at least I don't see us getting there in my generation.
I think if you're passionate about something, if you believe in something, find your research
question in that space and run with it because if you don't love what you're doing, if you
don't love the research you're doing, if it's not meaningful to you the chances are you
won't excel in it and you won't discover the answers to the questions that you're trying
to solve.
And so I went into a very non-traditional space of research it's public health, social
science, neurology all mixed in together and it's not a well defined career there's no
clear pathway or trajectory within this space.
Sometimes its hard to get into the game and in those situations it may be best to create
your own game and invite others to join you.
And that's kind of what I feel we've done here with our hip hop program.
It's not a traditional area of research that one would expect the NIH to fund but that
tells you a lot about the NIH it tells you a lot about their openness to solutions their
openness to ideas.
As long as you can demonstrate feasibility as long as you can demonstrate plausibility,
feasibility and your ability to implement successfully and actually achieve the aims
that you set out to achieve they will support you.
When I first started this my research a lot of people didn't even think that there was
a research question housed in what I was trying to do.
A lot of people didn't think there was science and scientific principles and a career in
the question I was trying to answer but then again I was passionate about this question.
I believed in this question and I think that's where we should all begin.