BUSM Chair, Chief Earns Top Award from North American Primary Care Research Group

Larry Culpepper, MD, MPH, chair and professor of family medicine at BUSM and chief of family medicine at Boston Medical Center (BMC), is the recipient of the 2010 Maurice Wood Award for Lifetime Contribution to Primary Care Research. The award is given annually to a researcher who has made outstanding contributions to primary care research over the course of a lifetime. Culpepper is a resident of Boston’s South End.

This award was presented to Culpepper on Nov. 14 during the North American Primary Care Research Group’s (NAPCG) annual meeting in Seattle.

“Larry Culpepper is an outstanding researcher, one of the finest in the United States. For years he has mentored young researchers and given his time and talents to the larger research community, making him a rare and treasured asset,” said Allen Dietrich, MD, past NAPCRG president.

Culpepper has made significant contributions in both clinical and academic areas. During the early part of his career, Culpepper played a key role in establishing a network of neighborhood health centers in Houston. During his residency in the Social Medicine Program at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, he helped establish the family medicine practice at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Neighborhood Health Center. When Culpepper joined Boston University in 1997, he established the department of family medicine.

In each of his positions, Culpepper developed programs to engage community health center physicians to become faculty members and helped place residents in community health centers for their training. At Boston University, he was instrumental in engaging the Boston HealthNet community health center network with the university’s research processes. He helped initiate and currently co-chairs the Boston HealthNet research committee that reviews all research to be conducted in centers before they are reviewed by the BUMC institutional review board.

Culpepper’s research includes federally funded studies on depression and anxiety, otitis media, and school-based and community interventions to improve pregnancy outcomes and to prevent teen pregnancies. He has chaired or been a member of grant review committees for five National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies, and has served on six federal expert panels for consensus committees or evidence-based centers. He was an initiator of the International Primary Care Network, which stimulated the creation and collaboration of research in 14 countries, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Ambulatory Sentinel Practice Network, and one of its principal investigators. Culpepper is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine