The Wellesley Person of the Week is the Associate Director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Vivian W. Pinn '62. Pinn, an African-American, was raised in Lynchburg, VA, in a family of modest means, and attended the city's then segregated public schools.

Exhibiting exceptional caring and responsibility even in her childhood, she tended to the needs of her ailing grandparents. This included administering insulin injections to her diabetic grandmother, an experience that helped to solidify her ambition to become a doctor. Pinn heard and heeded advice from her father, a physical education teacher, that to reach her goal, she'd need to "study very hard." She came to Wellesley College on a scholarship.

While Pinn was a Wellesley student, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. She interrupted her studies, making time to care for her ill mother, who died at the age of 46. Following her graduation from Wellesley, Pinn attended the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where she earned her M.D. in 1967. She was the only African-American or woman in her graduating class, and the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

The alumna who nominated Pinn to be Wellesley Person of the Week wrote, "As a young Black woman, it made me proud to also see that Black alums like Dr. Pinn have succeeded as well. She is a role model for women for she had to deal with adversity and sexism during her studies at University of Virginia." Referring to those years, Pinn said in a 1997 article, "It was a lonely situation at first, but I learned to manage challenges by viewing them as a source of excitement and opportunity instead of fearing them. With so few women in medicine in the 60s and 70s, I was often the only woman or one of the few women involved in my professional activities. My philosophy then and now is not to let obstacles, no matter how great they may seem, stand in the way of accomplishing your goals. And to do this, one must be intellectually prepared and dedicated to those pursuits."

After leaving the University of Virginia, Pinn returned to the Boston area, completing her training in pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and teaching at Harvard Medical School. Pinn then joined the faculty at Tufts University School of Medicine, where she also took on the role of faculty advisor to minority medical students. In 1982, she became a professor and department chair at the Howard University College of Medicine, in Washington, DC.

In 1991, Vivian Pinn was named the first full-time Director of the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH) at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, MD. The ORWH's mission includes supporting research dealing with women's health issues, the promotion of opportunities for women in the biomedical field, and ensuring the inclusion of women in biomedical and biobehavioral research studies. She continues to run the ORWH today.

Pinn served on the Executive Committee of the Association of American Medical Colleges. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in October 1995, was elected to the National Academies of Science Institute of Medicine. Vivian Pinn is a member of the Board of Trustees of Wellesley College.

For additional information about Vivian Pinn, see "No Mountain High Enough: Secrets of Successful African American Women," Conari Press, 1997.