Pauletta and Denzel Washington Family Gifted Scholar

Jet, August 6, 2007

PAULETTA AND DENZEL WASHINGTON FAMILY GIFTED SCHOLAR: Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington (2nd, I) and his wife, Pauletta (r), along with Dr. Keith L. Black, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, present Connie Taylor (2nd, r), a second-year medical student at Atlanta's Morehouse School of Medicine, with an honorary Pauletta and Denzel Washington Family Gifted Scholars Award, in the graduate/medical student category, during a ceremony at Southern University at Shreveport in Shreveport, LA.

A neurobiology graduate from Harvard College, Taylor will receive $2,500 monthly in support as a graduate-level researcher. Henry Wu and Donald Phillips were also scholarship recipients. The scholarships, bearing the Washingtons' name, have been given annually since 2004 by the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai. Washington was in Shreveport filming The Great Debaters.