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World-class diagnostics for low-income communities in sub-Saharan Africa
Genevieve Barnard Oni’s iPhone lights up with the same notifications dozens of times each day — but they aren’t from a popular Instagram account or an overactive group chat. Instead, the notifications signal every time a patient is treated at MDaaS Global’s health clinic in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Last month Barnard Oni MBA ’19, who co-founded the company with her husband, Oluwasoga (Soga) Oni SM ’16, as well as Joe McCord SM ’15 and Opeyemi Ologun, received 750 such notifications. If all goes according to plan, that number is about to multiply.
Operating outside of the wealthier, well-resourced city center, the company’s clinic offers affordable diagnostic services, including ultrasounds, X-rays, malaria tests, and other lab services, that were previously inaccessible to many families in the area.
MDaaS has accomplished this by building a supply chain that gets refurbished medical equipment into the African communities that need them most, and by leveraging technology to streamline clinic operations.
By partnering with dozens of nearby hospitals and clinics to get patient referrals, the MDaaS clinic has diagnosed more than 10,000 patients since opening less than two years ago. Now, fresh off a $1 million funding round, the company is planning to export its model to other areas of Nigeria and West Africa, with the goal of operating 100 diagnostic centers in the next five years.
“We’re trying to build four diagnostic centers [by early next year] and show that the new centers will have the same trajectory as our first,” Soga says. “After we’ve proven that, we can start building for scale, building maybe two or three centers a month all over Africa, the idea being we know exactly how things will go when you build them.”
A desperate situation
Soga’s father runs a private medical practice in Ikare-Akoko, Nigeria. Like many doctors in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, he has long struggled to get reliable medical equipment at affordable prices. Negotiating to purchase used equipment from Europe or China requires expertise in the global equipment marketplace and also comes with risks, as most secondhand equipment lacks warranties and operating manuals.
Genevieve, on the other hand, worked on public health initiatives in Malawi, Ghana, and Uganda before coming to MIT. During those experiences, she realized how useless donated medical equipment is without technicians trained to set up and maintain them, and without access to spare parts.
“Countless times I saw rooms full of equipment that had never been set up or equipment that had been used for a few months before breaking down, with no hope of repair,” she says.
A common goal
Soga entered MIT’s system design and management graduate program in 2014 and met Genevieve later that year. The two quickly realized they shared a passion for improving health care in Africa. For their second date, Soga invited Genevieve to his development ventures class, where he pitched a rough idea for providing rural doctors like his father with high-quality, refurbished medical equipment and ongoing service support.
MIT offered Soga and Genevieve seed funding to further pursue the idea through the Legatum Center, the PKG Center, MIT IDEAS, and the Africa Business Club.
McCord joined the team in the summer of 2016, and the co-founders were able to secure a partnership with Coast 2 Coast Medical in Massachusetts to begin buying refurbished medical equipment in bulk.
But when they began selling the equipment in Nigeria, they realized their biggest customers were from hospitals and clinics in big cities that predominantly served high-income patients. These facilities already had access to many of the machines MDaaS was selling, but found they could save money through the startup.
The founders faced a dilemma: They weren’t serving the people that needed them most, the low-income communities they’d dreamed of helping since their time in Africa, and yet, by the summer of 2017, the business was profitable — a difficult milestone for startups anywhere, let alone one in Nigeria. They tried different financing options to get their equipment to poorer clinics, including offering to lease or rent out the equipment, but clinics in rural and low-income areas still struggled to achieve the patient volumes necessary to make it work.
“We weren’t reaching this really large market, the 130 million patients that live outside of the largest urban areas that have the biggest issues accessing medical equipment,” Soga says. “The market of high-end hospitals wasn’t exciting for us. … We’d be stuck in big cities, serving high-end clientele. That wasn’t what drove us.”
Upending their business model, they decided to take on new costs and open their own diagnostic center in a low-income community in southwestern Nigeria. The people in this community had limited access to the high-quality diagnostic services enabled by the company’s machines. By centralizing diagnostic services, the founders could aggregate patient demand across dozens of hospitals and clinics, helping them keep prices low and scale faster than if they just sold equipment. This approach would also give the founders a chance to work directly with the patients they were trying to help.
Even as they faced bigger challenges and risks associated with the new model, they never planned to stop at one clinic.
“We had to make the change,” Soga says. “We just kept following our north star, which is to improve health care outcomes. Anybody can build one clinic, but it gets really interesting when you’re building 20, 30, 40 clinics across the continent.”
The MDaaS clinic has been up and running since November 2017. It features a digital X-ray machine, an electrocardiogram (ECG), an electroencephalogram (EEG), an ultrasound, and a full suite lab. For most tests, in-house physicians interpret the results. For others, results are sent to specialized clinicians in big cities.
Today, MDaaS gets patient referrals from more than 60 hospitals and clinics in the region in addition to welcoming walk-ins and partnering with insurance companies. About 70 percent of the people MDaaS treats are women and children.
The founders say they broke even on their operations in just five months and have been operating profitably ever since, proving the need for their services in the area. In fact, the number of patients seen per day at the center has grown by a factor of five since January 2018.
Their dream of operating 100 diagnostic centers will begin by building a few more in Nigeria before they expand to nearby countries, including Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, possibly as early as next year.
“Right now, we want to test replicating what we have and learn how to manage multiple facilities at once,” Soga says.
As for Genevieve’s mounting phone notifications, she remains thrilled to get constant reminders of the impact the co-founders’ hard work is having. Still, with the ultimate goal of transforming care across sub-Saharan Africa, she admits she’ll have to turn them off at some point soon.
“We’re trying to get to the point where it’s almost a diagnostic center in a box,” she says. “We can provide everything you’d need to go from zero patients to seeing 1,000 or 2,000 a month. We’re also getting so much data and information about the people we’re seeing, so we know the diseases they’re coming in for and the type of diagnostics they need. This information will become increasingly important as we look to build health care solutions for hundreds of thousands of patients instead of tens of thousands.”
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Family of Black man killed by cop in Buttigieg’s city wants officer’s pay stopped
A South Bend, Ind., family outraged by the police-involved killing of their loved one, wants the city’s mayor, 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, to revoke pay for the officer who shot him.
On Tuesday, the family of Eric Logan submitted a petition demanding that South Bend Police Sgt. Ryan O’Neill’s pay be revoked in light of the killing of the father of seven and the questionable circumstances of the case.
The family wants Buttigieg to make a recommendation to have the cop’s pay revoked since he doesn’t have the authority to render that decision.
READ MORE: Police shooting of Black man poses Pete Buttigieg’s biggest 2020 challenge yet
The fatal shooting has become a political headache for Buttigieg in the midst of his presidential campaign, even though he has tried to address it on the local level.
“It’s unfair to the Logan family, it’s unfair to the taxpayers of South Bend, Indiana, and his friends as well that this officer is receiving his pay from taking a life from this community,” said Vernado Malone, founder of Justice for South Bend said during a press conference on Tuesday, ABC News reports.
“We are asking the mayor and he has a duty to make a recommendation that Sgt. O’Neill be placed on leave, pending investigation, without pay,” Malone said. “The mayor has said he’s with the Logan family, and he wants change in this community. This here is the time, mayor.”
“This is the time, Mayor Pete, to step up and make your own demands and changes,” he said. “You don’t need a police board or anybody else. We are asking you, as our mayor, to obey this demand that we will be giving you today.”
READ MORE: 2020 Candidate Pete Buttigieg must confront racism after Black father killed by police
Logan, 54, was killed June 16 when O’Neill fired his weapon during an incident that took place as the officer followed up on a report of car break-ins in the downtown area.
The officer defended shooting Logan saying he confronted him in a parking lot and only shot him after he threatened him with a knife. But this remains unconfirmed because O’Neill did not have his body camera on at the time of the incident.
The family of the victim strongly opposes O’Neill’s narrative of events. The family has since filed a civil rights lawsuit.
Buttigieg does not have the power to directly revoke O’Neill’s pay, and he told ABC News on Tuesday that South Bend’s Public Review Board is charged with making that decision.
“It’s a board of safety. It’s five civilians appointed by the mayor, who meet and receive evidence and in a transparent and accountable process, decide on matters like this,” he said. “I know that some people imagine that a mayor sits up there in the office and decides who’s in trouble, who’s fired, who goes up and who goes down.”
“But we have a legal system here and it’s constraining and it’s frustrating,” he added.
The post Family of Black man killed by cop in Buttigieg’s city wants officer’s pay stopped appeared first on theGrio.
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Suzanne Berger named inaugural John M. Deutch Institute Professor
Political scientist Suzanne Berger has been named MIT’s inaugural John M. Deutch Institute Professor, joining the select group of people holding MIT’s highest faculty honor.
Berger is a lauded scholar who has published many studies of European politics and society, and who, in an overlapping phase of her career, has become an influential expert about the prospects of America’s innovation economy and advanced manufacturing.
Along with Berger, economist Daron Acemoglu has also been named Institute Professor. There are now 12 faculty holding the Institute Professor title, along with 11 Institute Professors Emeriti. The new appointees are the first faculty members to be named Institute Professors since 2015.
“It is difficult to imagine anyone more deserving of the distinction of Institute Professor than Suzanne Berger,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “Throughout her one-of-a-kind career, Suzanne has worked at the frontier of at least three distinct research areas and made influential contributions in every one. She stepped forward to inspire and lead groundbreaking research collaborations that brilliantly served both MIT and the nation. And — before we knew how much we needed it — she had the wisdom to invent the signature program that now leads MIT students into deep engagement with cultures around the world.”
In a letter sent to MIT faculty today, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and MIT Chair of the Faculty Susan Silbey lauded Berger as an “internationally acclaimed scholar” and praised her work on numerous campus-wide MIT initiatives.
Berger’s central role in multiple MIT studies of the innovation economy and global business competition has “helped MIT in the realization of its mission to ‘serve the nation and the world,’” Schmidt and Silbey wrote. They added that Berger, as founding director of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), “has had a profound impact on generations of MIT students.”
MISTI sends hundreds of MIT students a year to internships in overseas labs and companies, and funds MIT faculty collaborations with researchers globally.
Nominations for faculty to be promoted to the rank of Institute Professor may be made at any time, by any member of the faculty, and should be directed to MIT’s Chair of the Faculty.
In a sense, Berger has almost packed two careers into her time at MIT. When Berger joined MIT in 1968, she was studying the political ideologies of French peasants, and she has published multiple books and articles about French and European society and politics, including “Peasants Against Politics,” (1972), “The French Political System,” (1974), and “Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies,” (1980), the latter co-authored with Michael Piore.
Additionally, starting in the 1980s, Berger became a key figure in several MIT-wide study projects, a branching interest that Berger credits in part to the broad-ranging research environment at MIT.
“MIT really changed me,” Berger says. “I’ve learned a lot at MIT. What an extraordinary place to be constantly learning, and rethinking your basic assumptions about how the world works.”
Berger adds that she “deeply honored” to be named an Institute Professor, and noted that outside of MIT, “many people do not understand that we have extraordinary departments in economics, political science, linguistics, philosophy, and more. So on behalf of those of us on social sciences, I feel this is recognition of the role social scientists play, both in research and in the education of our students.”
As Berger also notes, her career is also marked by both her own individual research, and her participation in Institute initiatives, some of which have been highly influential in shaping public discourse.
“Over all my years at MIT, I’ve come to see that Institute Professors are people who both have worked in their own fields and made contributions to the Institute,” Berger says.
That certainly is true in her case. In 1986, Berger was named to MIT’s Commission on Industrial Productivity, which conducted an intensive multiyear study of U.S. industry. That resulted in the widely read book “Made in America” and spurred MIT to found its Industrial Performance Center.
For Berger’s part, serving on the commission also spurred her to play a central role in subsequent Institute-wide projects. That included studies of Hong Kong and Taiwan, for which she and Richard Lester, now associate provost at MIT overseeing international activities, co-edited the books “Made By Hong Kong” (1997) and “Global Taiwan” (2005).
More recently, Berger was a key part of a five-year Institute global study of manufacturing that resulted in a 2006 book she authored, “How We Compete.” The book evaluated the strategies of multinational companies, examining when they outsource tasks to other firms and under what circumstances they move their own operations overseas.
Berger followed that up by co-chairing MIT’s commission on Production in the Innovation Economy, formed in 2010, which took a deep look at the state of advanced manufacturing in the U.S., providing important input for federal policy in this area. Berger was also lead author of a 2013 book written with the other commission members, “Making in America,” summarizing the group’s findings.
Currently Berger’s work is continuing along two tracks. She is a member of MIT’s “Work of the Future” task force, which is studying the condition of labor in the U.S., and working to complete a book project of her own, on the wave of globalization that occurred in the late 19th century.
Berger received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and her PhD from Harvard University in 1967. She joined the MIT faculty in 1968 and has been at the Institute ever since.
Berger has received many other honors in her career. She was made a Chevalier de la LĂ©gion d’Honneur by France in 2009. She has also been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and been named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Daron Acemoglu named Institute Professor
Economist Daron Acemoglu, whose far-ranging research agenda has produced influential studies about government, innovation, labor, and globalization, has been named Institute Professor, MIT’s highest faculty honor.
Acemoglu is one of two MIT professors earning that distinction in 2019. The other, political scientist Suzanne Berger, has been named the inaugural John M. Deutch Institute Professor.
Acemoglu and Berger join a select group of people holding the Institute Professor title at MIT. There are now 12 Institute Professors, along with 11 Institute Professors Emeriti. The new appointees are the first faculty members to be named Institute Professors since 2015.
“As an Institute Professor, Daron Acemoglu embodies the essence of MIT: boldness, rigor and real-world impact,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “From the John Bates Clark Medal to his decades of pioneering contributions to the literature, Daron has built an exceptional record of academic accomplishment. And because he has focused his creativity on broad, deep questions around the practical fate of nations, communities and workers, his work will be essential to making a better world in our time.”
In a letter sent to the MIT faculty today, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and MIT Chair of the Faculty Susan Silbey noted that the honor recognizes “exceptional distinction by a combination of leadership, accomplishment, and service in the scholarly, educational, and general intellectual life of the Institute and wider community.” Schmidt and Silbey also cited Acemoglu’s “significant impacts in diverse fields of economics” and praised him as “one of the most dedicated teachers and mentors in his department.”
Nominations for faculty to be promoted to the rank of Institute Professor may be made at any time, by any member of the faculty, and should be directed to MIT’s Chair of the Faculty.
A highly productive scholar with broad portfolio of research interests, Acemoglu has spent more than 25 years at MIT examining complicated, large-scale economic questions — and producing important answers.
“I’m greatly honored,” he says. “I’ve spent all my career at MIT, and this is a recognition that makes me humbled and happy.”
At different times in his career, Acemoglu has published significant research on topics ranging from labor economics to network effects within economies. However, his most prominent work in the public sphere examines the dynamics of political institutions, democracy, and economic growth.
Working with colleagues, Acemoglu has built an extensive empirical case that the existence of government institutions granting significant rights for individuals has spurred greater economic activity over the last several hundred years. At the same time, he has also produced theoretical work modeling political changes in many countries.
He has researched the relationship between institutions and economics most extensively with political scientist James Robinson at the University of Chicago, as well as with Simon Johnson of the MIT Sloan School of Management. However, he has published papers about political dynamics with many other scholars as well.
Acemoglu has also been keenly interested in other issues during the course of his career. In labor economics, Acemoglu’s work has helped account for the wage gap between higher-skill and lower-skill workers; he has also shown why firms benefit from investing in improving employee skills, even if those workers might leave or require higher wages.
In multiple papers over the last decade, Acemoglu has also examined the labor-market implications of automation, robotics, and AI. Using both theoretical and empirical approaches, Acemoglu has shown how these technologies can reduce employment and wages unless accompanied by other, counterbalancing innovations that increase labor productivity.
In still another area of recent work, Acemoglu has shown how economic shocks within particular industrial sectors can produce cascading effects that propagate through an entire economy, work that has helped economists re-evaluate ideas about the aggregate performance of economies.
Acemoglu credits the intellectual ethos at MIT and the environment created by his colleagues as beneficial to his own research.
“MIT is a very down-to-earth, scientific, no-nonsense environment, and the economics department here has been very open-minded, in an age when economics is more relevant than ever but also in the midst of a deep transformation,” he says. “I think it’s great to have an institution, and colleagues, open to new ideas and new things.”
Acemoglu has authored or co-authored over 120 (and still rapidly counting) peer-reviewed papers. His fifth book, “The Narrow Corridor,” co-authored with Robinson, will be published in September. It takes a global look at the development of, and pressures on, individual rights and liberties. He has advised over 60 PhD students at MIT and is known for investing considerable time reading the work of his colleagues.
As a student, Acemoglu received his BA from the University of York, and his MSc and PhD from the London School of Economics, the latter in 1992. His first faculty appointment was at MIT in 1993, and he has been at the Institute ever since. He was promoted to full professor in 2000, and since 2010 has been the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics.
Among Acemoglu’s honors, in 2005 he won the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded by the American Economic Association to the best economist under age 40. Acemoglu has also won the Nemmers Prize in Economics, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, and been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This month, Acemoglu also received the Global Economy Prize 2019, from the Institute for the World Economy.
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Despite coming to blows with his father, assault charges dropped against Wendy Williams’ son
After a blowup between father and son that came down to fists swinging, it turns out Wendy Williams’ son, Kevin Hunter Jr., won’t have to face assault charges.
The younger Hunter, 18, was charged for punching his dad Kevin Sr., in the face during a fight that was said to have started because he confronted his dad about his demand for spousal support from Williams. Hunter reportedly cheated on Williams, which allegedly was the catalyst that made Williams file for divorce.
Hunter ultimately didn’t want to press charges against his son and on Tuesday, Kevin Jr. appeared in court to offer his not guilty plea. Prosecutors decided against moving forward with the case and the charges were ultimately dropped, Entertainment Tonight reports.
According to TMZ, the father and son got into a heated argument back in May in the parking lot of a store in New Jersey. Sources claim the two were arguing about Kevin’s demand for spousal support from his wife. Hunter allegedly called 18-year-old Kevin Jr. “brainwashed” and proceeded to put him in a headlock. Kevin Jr. then reportedly punched his father in the face.
According to a source, “Kevin Jr. was a bit aggressive towards his father and his father tried to control the situation,” The source said, according to ET. “Kevin Jr. then punched his father in the face and the cops were called sometime later. Kevin Sr. and Kevin Jr. have always had a great relationship. Not everything is as it appears and Kevin Sr. looks forward to moving past this.”
Williams recently returned to the air after a five-week hiatus and told her audience she was using the time to reflect.
READ MORE: Wendy Williams sheds tears over divorce drama, but then gets real about it
“I was just a woman relaxing and gathering my thoughts,” she said about the use of her vacation time. “I had my books, my thoughts, thinking about you, but mostly gathering my life for me, and my son and my family.”
She also spoke briefly about her new boyfriend.
“It helps that he’s a doctor. I am not gonna say one more word, you’re not gonna blow this for me. You’re not gonna blow this for me. But he’s been married, his kids are in their 20s… and yes, he’s Black. I know you’re wondering.”
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Beyonce and Blue Ivy hit the red carpet in formation for ‘The Lion King’ Hollywood premiere
It was a mother/daughter date night for Beyoncé and daughter Blue Ivy Carter who were in formation and shined in crystals as they sashayed down the red carpet in matching outfits at The Lion King Hollywood premiere on Tuesday.
READ MORE: Blue Ivy’s summer vacation pics have us all in our feelings
Bey who voices the character Nala in the re-imagined movie, also executive produced a companion album “The Lion King: The Gift,” and dropped a new song “Spirit” on Tuesday night.
BeyoncĂ© e Blue Ivy! đŸ’› #TheLionKing pic.twitter.com/4XS9tVCDn8
— BeyoncĂ© Access (@beyonceaccess) July 10, 2019
Bey stepped out on Tuesday with her daughter by her side and stunned in an Alexander McQueen tuxedo dress, adorned with crystal chandelier embroidery with a dégradé crystal embroidered skirt, Entertainment Tonight reports. Blue Ivy stunted like her momma in a matching black dress with silver crystals.
While it didn’t appear that Jay-Z was in attendance, Beyonce’s bestie Michelle Williams did show up in support of her Destiny Child’s partner and praised Bey.
“Just excitement and how now is the time [for] different voices, different experiences and what she is going to bring to it. And because of her two little girls, of what she’s passing on for her family is really awesome,” said Williams about Beyonce’s movie role.
The new adaptation of “The Lion King” movie features BeyoncĂ©, Donald Glover (who voices the role of Simba), James Earl Jones (who stars as the voice of Mufasa), Chiwetel Ejiorfor (Scar), Seth Rogen (Pumbaa), Billy Eichner (Timon) and John Oliver (Zazu). The movie also features Amy Sedaris in a new character that was written intentionally for this movie adaptation.
READ MORE: Beyonce and Blue Ivy go on an Easter egg hunt at Target
“The Lion King: The Gift” will be released on July 19 when the movie hits the screen.
According to movie projections, this new adaption of “The Lion King” is expected to bring in a huge opening weekend box office tally.
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BeyoncĂ© drops ‘Spirit’ from Lion King soundtrack ahead of movie release
With the much hyped release of the new remake of The Lion King coming soon, BeyoncĂ© and Disney have collaborated to produce a companion album “steeped in the sounds of Africa.”
On Tuesday night as stars from the upcoming movie hit the red carpet for the world premiere of the reimagined animated movie, Bey’s song “Spirit” from the album was released ahead of the “The Lion King: The Gift,” album which drops July 19, CNN reports.
Disney made the announcement about the soundtrack in an Instagram post on Tuesday:
“The Lion King” digital soundtrack will be available on July 11.
The song is written by Ilya Salmanzadeh, Timothy McKenzie and Beyoncé, with the Queen Bey at the helm as executive producer.
BeyoncĂ© voices the character Nala in Disney’s new version of “The Lion King.”
In addition to her, the new adaptation of the Disney classic also features Donald Glover
(Simba), James Earl Jones (Mufasa), Chiwetel Ejiorfor (Scar), Seth Rogen (Pumbaa), Billy Eichner (Timon) and John Oliver (Zazu). The movie also features Amy Sedaris in a new character that was written intentionally for the movie adaptation.
On Tuesday, the cast and attended the premiere screening of the movie in Los Angeles at the Dolby Theatre.
“I think I’m really lucky, because I feel like a lot of the people who are experiencing it don’t remember the first one,” joked Glover. “(The original film) is such a big part of who I was,” Glover continued, adding he felt the weight of his role especially during his duet of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” with co-star BeyoncĂ©.
“Tackling it was really just trying to make the song feel as emotional as it was before,” he said.
“The Lion King: The Gift” will be released on July 19 when the movie hits the screen.
According to movie projections, this new adaption of “The Lion King” is expected to bring in a huge opening weekend box office tally.
The film is directed by Jon Favreau and includes some of Elton John’s songs from the original movie.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Phil Freelon, architect known designing for African American museum dies
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Architect Phil Freelon, who designed buildings ranging from local libraries to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, died Tuesday in North Carolina.
Freelon, 66, had suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease for several years. He died in Durham about a week after he had quit consuming food or liquids, his neurologist said.
“I’ll remember him as one of the most gifted architects I’ve ever worked with but also one of the kindest individuals I’ve ever known,” said Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the African American Museum and now secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
One of Freelon’s most important contributions to the museum was recognizing the National Mall as “sacred space,” Bunch said, so visitors “didn’t just go into a building. They could look out and see where history occurred. So that was kind of his genius.”
Freelon, a Philadelphia native, worked for years at architectural firms in Texas and North Carolina. When he opened his own firm, he was the only employee. He declined to design prisons, casinos or strip malls, focusing instead on libraries, museums and schools because he preferred “projects that contribute to society in some way,” he told The Associated Press in early 2017.
A statement from his family said Freelon “designed buildings to uplift the human spirit.”
His reputation grew as he designed projects such as the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African American History and Culture in Baltimore, and the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro.
Along the way, The Freelon Group merged with Perkins and Will, where he was managing and design director.
In a statement on its website, Perkins and Will said Freelon “was committed to designing a socially equitable world,” and broke down socio-economic and cultural barriers in architecture and design.” It added, “He led the design of almost every major museum or public space dedicated to black culture in the United States … He was, arguably, the most significant African American architect in recent history.”
The African American history museum opened in September 2016 in Washington, D.C., to wide acclaim. Freelon was the architect of record for the museum, working with partner David Adjaye, the lead designer, and Max Bond, whom Freelon described as dean of the project. The building’s design included a facade known as the Corona. Its three-tiered shape was inspired by a symbol from the Yoruba people of West Africa featuring a crown.
“Freelon’s career reflected how much he valued transforming the diversity of the architecture practice, especially for African Americans,” said professor David Hill, head of the school of architecture at North Carolina State University, where Freelon graduated in 1975 with a bachelor’s degree in environmental design.
Months before the Washington museum opened, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative neurological disease that leads to total paralysis. His disease slowed him, but he kept working, with projects that included a $50 million expansion of the Motown Museum in Detroit.
Dr. Rick Bedlack, a Duke University neurologist, said he last saw Freelon on June 27. By then, Freelon was in a wheelchair and unable to dress or bathe himself without assistance.
“In that conversation, Phil had told me that he just had had enough,” said Bedlack, who began treating Freelon in March 2016. He had decided to quit eating and drinking, which he did on June 30, Bedlack said.
“He lived his life, and he made the decisions,” Bedlack said. “The disease didn’t make the decisions for him.”
In a speech at Duke University in 2017 for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Freelon described his vision of architecture as a form of activism.
“I have worked through my career as an architect to create environments that are uplifting, inspiring, and set the tone for sharing knowledge and facilitating cultural exchange,” he said. “You see, I believe that the built environment — that’s buildings and landscapes — can and SHOULD contribute in a positive way to the lives of everyday people. Beautiful architecture should be accessible to all, not just the 1 percent that can afford to engage the stars of our profession.”
Friends and colleagues described Freelon’s genius and generosity. He would sit quietly and beam as a colleague made a presentation at museum planning meetings, said Kinshasha Holman Conwill, the museum’s deputy director.
“He listened deeply. He heard profoundly. And he translated brilliantly the ideas of his clients,” she said. Many architects have an attitude of “my way or the highway,” but Freelon was different, she said.
Bunch said Freelon was valuable not only as an architect but as one who remained calm during the stress of deadlines and budgets.
“He made us believe we could always do this,” Bunch said. “And that’s a unique talent.”
A service will be held Sept. 28 at the Durham County Human Services Complex, which Freelon designed. Survivors include his wife, the Grammy-nominated singer Nnenna Freelon, and three children.
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Reddit’s ‘Manosphere’ and the Challenge of Quantifying Hate
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