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This year, two BWH employees were honored with the Greater Boston YMCA Black Achiever Awards for their professional achievements and commitment to community service. Egidia Rugwizangoga, BSN, RN, a nurse on Tower 4, and Mark Johnson, MD, PhD, a neurosurgeon and director of a research laboratory, were recognized at last week’s Celebration of the Legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at BWH.
Rugwizangoga came to the U.S. from Rwanda at age 19 to attend college, and she worked at BWH as a patient care assistant while attending UMass Boston. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she became a nurse’s aid, helping those wounded during the fighting. Now, she volunteers to translate booklets on cardiac surgery into the Rwandan language of Kinyarwandan for patients in Rwanda who will undergo lifesaving heart surgery performed by BWH’s Team Heart. In addition, she serves as a mentor to nursing students at UMass-Boston through Bringing the Best to Nursing, a U.S. Health and Human Service grant funded to increase the racial and cultural diversity of new entrants to the nursing field. Rugwizangoga also provides clinical training to nursing students at BWH through the Clinical Leadership Collaborative for Diversity in Nursing, a collaboration between Partners and UMass Boston.
Johnson is a neurosurgeon and director of a research laboratory focused on finding new ways to treat brain tumors called gliomas. He oversees two postdoctoral fellows and a graduate student in his lab, as well as many students serving internships. He believes that part of his mission at BWH is to serve his community and help those in the community to succeed. A native of Tennessee, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and earned a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard that same year. He is the director of the Pain Management Program in Neurosurgery at BWH, where he treats patients with a variety of chronic pain and related disorders, and he is an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. A resident of Westwood, Johnson also gives lectures at Morehouse College to students interested in studying science and medicine, and he mentors Native American high school students from Arizona as part of a Harvard Medical School program.