Vivian W. Pinn, MD, was the inaugural full-time director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Associate Director of NIH from 1991 until her retirement in 2011.  She has since been named as a Senior Scientist Emerita at the NIH Fogarty International Center and is also Professor in the Institute for Advanced Discovery & Innovation at the University of South Florida.  Prior to NIH, she was Professor and Chair of Pathology at Howard University College of Medicine, and previously held teaching appointments at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University.  She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 1995. A graduate and former Trustee of Wellesley College, she earned her M.D. in 1967 from the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where she was the only woman and only minority in her medical school class. She completed her post-graduate training in Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. The Association of American Medical Colleges awarded her a Special Recognition Award for exceptional leadership over a forty-year career. 

She has held many professional leadership positions and currently serves on the Board of Trustees/Advisors of Thomas Jefferson University and Tufts University School of Medicine. Dr. Pinn is also a Past President and currently Chair of the Past Presidents Council of the National Medical Association. She has received numerous honors and awards, including 15 Honorary Degrees of Science, Law and Medicine, her most recent a Doctor of Science, honoris causa which she proudly received from Howard University in 2018.  She served as a NAM representative on the National Academies Committee on Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine from 2012 through 2017.  The University of Virginia School of Medicine has named one of its four advisory medical student colleges as ‘The Pinn College’, and in 2016, renamed its medical research and education building as ‘Pinn Hall.’  Lectures in women’s health named for her have been established at the NIH, the National Women’s Health Congress, and the NMA.   Her oral history is included in the National Library of Medicine’s exhibit on women physicians, ‘Changing the Face of Medicine’; in the University of Virginia’s project ‘Explorations in Black Leadership’; and, in The HistoryMakers collection which is now housed in the Library of Congress.