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Stephanie Williams | Miss DC 2010
Education: George Washington University
Talent: Vocal Platform: A Dose Of Prevention: Smart Medicine For What Ails America A third-year medical student at the George Washington School of Medicine, Stephanie Ariel Williams was crowned the 2010 Miss District of Columbia at the June 20th pageant held in Washington’s historic Lincoln Theater.
A virtual pageant neophyte (her only previous experience was a first runner-up finish in the 2009 Miss D.C. pageant), this twenty-three year-old, brown-haired hazel-eyed beauty grew up in the tiny Jersey shore communities of Ventnor and Margate, literally within walking distance of fabled Boardwalk Hall where so many Miss America’s have been crowned. |
As a grade schooler, Stephanie attended the annual boardwalk parade of contestants (“Show us your shoes!”), and even managed to talk her mother into taking her to pageant preliminaries on two occasions. As a teen, the stage and performing were her twin passions; she studied the violin and appeared annually in both school and community theater productions (including show-stopping turns as Irene Roth in Crazy For You and Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar).
In the fall of 2004, Stephanie left the Atlantic City area to matriculate at Wagner College on Staten Island, ranked by Princeton Review as the premier school for musical theater in the country. At Wagner, she immersed herself in campus and community affairs, serving as a member of the Pre-Health Society, the Wagner College Community Standards Review Board, and the Omicron Delta Kappa honor society for which she was the Community Service Chairperson responsible for organizing annual fundraisers. In her spare time, she volunteered at the Staten Island Community Hospital, participated in independent research on the development of MRI contrast agents to better visualize soft-tissue tumors, published an essay on the biblical Hagar, sang with the Wagner College Treble Choir, and was invited to exhibit paintings in the Wagner College Art Gallery.
In the summer of 2006, Stephanie interned in the Health Sciences Informatics Department at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute where she analyzed over 5,000 pages of interviews administered to Ethiopian healthcare workers with the goal of advising the Ethiopian Ministry of Health on integrating an electronic medical record system into their healthcare structure.
In 2008, Stephanie graduated summa cum laude from Wagner with a major in Arts Administration and minors in both Biology and Chemistry; she received the President’s Academic Scholarship, was nominated as a Rhodes Scholar applicant, and was one of only two students in her class to achieve a perfect 4.0 grade point average.
Since 2008, Stephanie has been a medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. In the summer of 2009, she traveled on a medical mission through almost inaccessible areas of Himchal Pradesh, the Himalayan regions of Northern India that were once portions of ancient Tibet. In these isolated areas, Stephanie witnessed first-hand the human cost exacted by an almost non-existent healthcare system, and realized just how profoundly early treatment and simple preventive measures could have affected the lives of these people.
Stephanie’s Miss America platform, A Dose Of Prevention: Smart Medicine For What Ails America, speaks directly to the looming healthcare crisis in our nation. On her mission through India, among the most common conditions Stephanie diagnosed was eye damage caused by wind borne sand, a condition that ultimately ends in total blindness, a terrible price to pay for damage that could be entirely prevented by simple safety glasses.
However, such simple solutions to such crippling problems are not limited to isolated areas of the developing world. In a time of spiraling medical costs and aging patient populations, as well as the fact that greater numbers of patients are about to enter the already struggling American medical system, it is important to remember that the least costly and most effective way to treat any disease is to never have the disease in the first place. Fortunately, a number of the most deadly, most common, and most expensive diseases we face are either readily prevented or amenable to effective treatment in their early stages. Colorectal cancer, a disease that has claimed two of Stephanie’s aunts, is the second-leading cause of cancer death and can be almost completely avoided by simple and relatively inexpensive colonoscopies.
Regular mammograms are highly effective in detecting one of the most dreaded diseases, breast cancer, at an early—and treatable—stage. A simple low-dose of aspirin has a significant impact on coronary heart disease in at-risk populations. And yet, these simple and cost-effective procedures remain woefully underutilized.
Stephanie looks forward to a year of promoting her platform, as well as serving the D.C. area and our nation.
In the fall of 2004, Stephanie left the Atlantic City area to matriculate at Wagner College on Staten Island, ranked by Princeton Review as the premier school for musical theater in the country. At Wagner, she immersed herself in campus and community affairs, serving as a member of the Pre-Health Society, the Wagner College Community Standards Review Board, and the Omicron Delta Kappa honor society for which she was the Community Service Chairperson responsible for organizing annual fundraisers. In her spare time, she volunteered at the Staten Island Community Hospital, participated in independent research on the development of MRI contrast agents to better visualize soft-tissue tumors, published an essay on the biblical Hagar, sang with the Wagner College Treble Choir, and was invited to exhibit paintings in the Wagner College Art Gallery.
In the summer of 2006, Stephanie interned in the Health Sciences Informatics Department at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute where she analyzed over 5,000 pages of interviews administered to Ethiopian healthcare workers with the goal of advising the Ethiopian Ministry of Health on integrating an electronic medical record system into their healthcare structure.
In 2008, Stephanie graduated summa cum laude from Wagner with a major in Arts Administration and minors in both Biology and Chemistry; she received the President’s Academic Scholarship, was nominated as a Rhodes Scholar applicant, and was one of only two students in her class to achieve a perfect 4.0 grade point average.
Since 2008, Stephanie has been a medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, D.C. In the summer of 2009, she traveled on a medical mission through almost inaccessible areas of Himchal Pradesh, the Himalayan regions of Northern India that were once portions of ancient Tibet. In these isolated areas, Stephanie witnessed first-hand the human cost exacted by an almost non-existent healthcare system, and realized just how profoundly early treatment and simple preventive measures could have affected the lives of these people.
Stephanie’s Miss America platform, A Dose Of Prevention: Smart Medicine For What Ails America, speaks directly to the looming healthcare crisis in our nation. On her mission through India, among the most common conditions Stephanie diagnosed was eye damage caused by wind borne sand, a condition that ultimately ends in total blindness, a terrible price to pay for damage that could be entirely prevented by simple safety glasses.
However, such simple solutions to such crippling problems are not limited to isolated areas of the developing world. In a time of spiraling medical costs and aging patient populations, as well as the fact that greater numbers of patients are about to enter the already struggling American medical system, it is important to remember that the least costly and most effective way to treat any disease is to never have the disease in the first place. Fortunately, a number of the most deadly, most common, and most expensive diseases we face are either readily prevented or amenable to effective treatment in their early stages. Colorectal cancer, a disease that has claimed two of Stephanie’s aunts, is the second-leading cause of cancer death and can be almost completely avoided by simple and relatively inexpensive colonoscopies.
Regular mammograms are highly effective in detecting one of the most dreaded diseases, breast cancer, at an early—and treatable—stage. A simple low-dose of aspirin has a significant impact on coronary heart disease in at-risk populations. And yet, these simple and cost-effective procedures remain woefully underutilized.
Stephanie looks forward to a year of promoting her platform, as well as serving the D.C. area and our nation.