Maxine Hayes, MD

Maxine Hayes, MD.

Maxine Hayes, MD ’73, is a nationally recognized expert in maternal and child health. She was one of the first Black women to earn a medical degree from the University at Buffalo.

Hayes is clinical professor emerita of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and professor emerita of health services in the University of Washington School of Public Health.

Hayes’ extraordinary career includes serving the Washington State Department of Health for 25 years, from 1988 to 2013, 16 of them as state health officer. As the state’s top public health doctor, her role included advising the governor and secretary of health on issues ranging from health promotion and chronic disease prevention to emergency response.

After graduation from UB, she did postgraduate training at Vanderbilt University Hospital and the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston. She earned a Master of Public Health degree at Harvard University and took a teaching position at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1985 and was medical director of the Odessa Crown Children’s Clinic, delivering primary care to underserved populations.

Hayes is the recipient of many awards and honors for her work in maternal and child health, including the American Medical Association’s Dr. Nathan Davis Award, the Heroes in Health Care Lifetime Achievement Award through the Washington Health Foundation, the American Public Health Association’s Helen Rodriguez-Trias Social Justice Award and the Martha May Eliot Award from the American Public Health Association.

Originally interested in becoming a cancer scientist, Hayes chose to attend the Jacobs School over Harvard, where she was accepted, because of the proximity to the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. But her plans changed after her first year in medical school when she worked in the Mississippi delta, in Mt. Bayou, through a UB externship.

Even though she, too, had grown up in poverty in the same state, the experience served as a powerful wake-up call. “I saw the tremendous amount of suffering,” she said, adding that the community had none of the basic environmental protections that other communities took for granted.

“I was building privies to keep waste away from drinking water, we were putting screens on houses so mosquito bites didn’t lead to impetigo,” said Hayes. “I was learning about poverty and neglect.”

That experience changed Hayes’ mind about becoming a cancer scientist. “I had encounters with so many elderly people who had never seen a lady with a white jacket,” she said. “They knew I was a student and they said, ‘come back, we need our doctors to be people who really care about us,’ and that put a burning piece in my heart.”

The experience instilled in her the passion to be a physician for the underserved and to become an activist for public health, a passion that she works hard to instill in others.