William E. Cunningham ’81, of Santa Monica, Calif.; Jan. 3. He was a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA. He graduated from UCSF School of Medicine in 1987 and completed his internal medicine residency training at UCLA, where he was selected into the 1991 cohort of the UCLA Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Program and completed a master’s in public health from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health before joining the faculty in both the Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He was a leader in addressing racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities among vulnerable populations living with, or at risk of, HIV. Most recently he was working to improve HIV care for HIV+ men and transgender women released from Los Angeles County Jail. He held several titles, including director of the UCLA Clinical Translational Science Institute Summer Fellowship Program, codirector of the Investigator Development Core for the NIA-funded Resource Centers for Minority Aging Research, director of the Training Core for the NIMHD-funded Project Export, and associate director of the UCLA Robert Wood Johnson/National Clinical Scholars Program at UCLA. For 15 years he served as a reviewer for the American Journal of Public Health. In addition, he taught graduate level courses on racial disparities and health and led efforts to recruit underrepresented minority trainees to all UCLA educational programs. He was a member of several professional associations and scholarly societies, including the American Medical Association and the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care. He authored numerous peer-reviewed publications and, at the time of his death, was a principal investigator for three research grants. He is survived by his wife, Sharon; and two sons.
