Dr. Ray L. Watts is the President of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and he is the one who pulled the plug on the university’s football program. He cites lack of funding. It would costs $49 million to keep the football program going over the next five years.
Dr. Watts is a Birmingham native and UAB grad (Engineering, 1976). He got his doctorate at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (valedictorian of his class) and did his residency, internship and fellowships at Harvard and Mass General. He left Emory University, where he helped create a renowned research and clinical center for Parkinson’s disease, for UAB in 2003. He became Dean of the UAB School of Medicine in 2010. His goal is to make UAB “the preferred academic medical center of the twenty-first century.”
Learn more about Dr. Watts’ AMC21 strategic plan for UAB, here.
