African-American Scholar Named President of Grinnell College

Raynard S. Kington was elected the 13th president of Grinnell College, the highly selective liberal arts institution in Iowa. Dr. Kington, who is currently the deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, will take office at Grinnell on August 1, 2010.

At the age of 16, Kington entered the University of Michigan’s joint undergraduate/medical school program. He completed college and medical school by the age of 21. After completing his residency in Chicago, Dr. Kington was named Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned an MBA at the Wharton School and a Ph.D. in health policy at Penn.

Before accepting his current post at the NIH, Kington was a division director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Previously he was a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation where he was co-director of the Charles R. Drew University Center on Health and Aging. He has taught at the medical schools at UCLA and Johns Hopkins University. In 2006 Kington was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science.

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