Dr. David Hawkins

David Hawkins was born in St. John's, Newfoundland and was awarded his medical degree by Dalhousie University in 1960. Following postgraduate training in internal medicine at Dalhousie and McGill University , he spent three years as a research fellow at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla , California . He returned to McGill in 1968 as a Medical Research Council (MRC) of Canada Scholar, and subsequently was appointed professor of medicine and director of the Division of Rheumatology at the Montreal General Hospital . In 1980, Dr. Hawkins returned to Newfoundland as chair of medicine, and in 1987 he was appointed dean of medicine, the third person to hold this post since Memorial's Faculty of Medicine was established in 1967. In 1995 Dr. Hawkins became Executive Director of the Ottawa-based Association of Canadian Medical Colleges and Permanent Secretary of the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, an adjunct professor of pediatrics at the University of Ottawa, and he has a consulting practice in pediatric rheumatology at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario.

In 1991, he was appointed Vice-President of MRC, and filled the role of president on an interim basis for part of that year. He has served as president of the Canadian Society for Clinical Investigation, the Association of Canadian Medical Colleges, the Canadian Association of Professors of Medicine (CAPM) and as a governor of the American College of Physicians (ACP). Dr. Hawkins' volunteer contributions include membership on the boards of the Arthritis Society of Canada, the National Council on Bioethics in Human Research, the National Cancer Institute of Canada, and the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. In 1993 the MRC and Memorial University of Newfoundland jointly endowed The Annual David Hawkins Lectureship in Health Sciences Research, in 1995 Dr. Hawkins was named Alumnus of the Year by the Dalhousie Medical Alumni Association and in 2002 he received the Ronald V. Christie Award of the CAPM in recognition of outstanding contributions to academic medicine. In 2003 he was the laureate awardee of the Atlantic Provinces Chapter of the ACP and he was commissioned a colonel in the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels.