Featured Speaker

Dr. Georgia Rust

Dr. George Rust is a physician-teacher-scholar-author who has spent his career working at the intersection of race, health, and poverty. He has consistently worked in settings where he could make a difference, from training in Chicago’s urban public hospital to serving farmworkers and the uninsured in a racially fraught, Southern small town to helping build out the historically black Morehouse School of Medicine.

Dr. Rust has a unique perspective on race and privilege. He grew up surrounded by wealth in Boca Raton, Florida but worked as a janitor to attend an elite college prep school. He learned hospital and ER medicine in the organized chaos (the blood and pus and grit) of Cook County Hospital and learned community-based, primary care in the South Lawndale (La Villita) neighborhood clinic.

In Groveland Florida, he cared for poor and uninsured patients living in shotgun houses on dirt roads on the black side of town and in white neighborhoods with paved roads and in clusters of rundown mobile homes at the edge of an orange grove where migrant families lived. He saw needless suffering tied to poverty and uninsurance. And he sensed the dysfunction of a racial history which remained unspoken.

Dr. Rust joined the Morehouse School of Medicine when it was only ten years old, born out of the century-old, historically black Morehouse College. He taught students and residents. He founded the Morehouse Faculty Development program, teaching and mentoring hundreds of physicians over the years. He was also founding director of the National Center for Primary Care.

He is now a tenured Professor at the FSU College of Medicine in Tallahassee, FL, where he also worked as Medical Director for local county health departments. He fought through the politicization of public health through Covid and monkeypox, TB and syphilis. He helped prevent a measles outbreak.

Dr. Rust has received numerous local, state, and national awards for teaching and service.

His book, Healing in a Changing America: Doctoring in a Nation of Needless Suffering, tells the stories of lessons learned, mistakes made, and skills acquired during this journey. Scars and healing. Hope for the future.

Note: Attendees to the conference will receive a copy of Healing in a Changing America.