Dr. Ralph E. Watson
Associate Professor of Medicine and
Director of the Hypertension Clinic at MSU
Dr. Watson is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Director of the Hypertension Clinic at the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University. He is married to Demetria Watson,and they have two children, Ralph Jr. and Monifa. Dr. Watson earned his B.S. in chemistry at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He obtained his M.D. at the Michigan State University and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. He completed the Fellowship in Primary Care Faculty Development at MSU. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine and a Certified Specialist in Clinical Hypertension by the American Society of Hypertension. He was awarded membership to Alpha Omega Alpha Honorary Medical Society. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, Fellow of the International Society on Hypertension in Blacks, and a Fellow of the Association of Black Cardiologists. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Association of Black Cardiologists and Chair of their Research Committee.
He is studying endothelin actions on vascular function in hypertension, and the use of gene transfer to prolong the life of grafts used in coronary artery bypass graft surgery. He was awarded a KO1 research grant by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health totaling $800,000 for the next five years. He has written a four hour curriculum “Caring for Multicultural Patients”, funded by the Center for Excellence grant, that is required for all medical students and MSU internal medicine residents. He is also the Coordinator of Minority Health Curriculum Development for the College of Human Medicine. He has been awarded the Certificate for Excellence in Teaching several times by the CHM Minority Medical Student Association and the Teacher of the Year Award by the MSU Transitional Year Residents. He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Mid-Michigan Medical Society endowed scholarship, which is awarded to two outstanding minority College of Human Medicine and two College of Osteopathic medical students each year.
He is also very active in the African-American community in the Lansing area. He was the co-founder and has been an officer every year in the Mid-Michigan Medical Society, the association of African-American physicians in the Lansing area. He also has participated each year in the Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Annual Youth Workshop for 200 African-American male high school students from the Lansing area. In 2002 he was one of the Keynote Speakers. He has been a mentor for many MSU CHM medical students, and minority pre-medical students in the LANE (Leaders Achieving Notable Education) Premedical Society.
Dr. Watson is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Lansing Area American Heart Association and former Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Department of Medicine at MSU CHM. He is first author on a chapter in the 3rd edition of the Hypertension Primer (2003), the American Heart Association textbook on hypertension. He is also first author on a chapter in the soon to be released 2nd edition of the textbook Hypertension, which will be the authoritative textbook on hypertension in the English language. He also co-authored the chapter on hypertension in the recently released textbook Peripheral Vascular Disease: Basic Science and Therapeutic
Approaches (2004). The publication of his study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine on the influence of race on the utilization of invasive procedures in patients with myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) in Michigan hospitals was cited in the Institute of Medicine’s 2002 report “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care”.
