Montgomery Douglas, MD
Professor of Family and Community Medicine
Montgomery Douglas, MD has spent his entire career in patient care, teaching, and community health, caring for underserved and inner-city populations; the goal being to improve health, healthcare and health equity. He’s been a tenured Professor of Family and Community Medicine at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University since March 1st 2020. He served as former Chair of Family and Community Medicine at Downstate from March 1st 2020 to December 31st 2023. He also served as One Brooklyn Health’s Chief of Population Health Strategy and Innovation for 2 years from March 1st 2020.
His clinical practice, which has always encompassed full-spectrum family medicine, began in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, NY and Jamaica, Queens, NY in 1989; continued in Bushwick, Brooklyn; Rosedale, Queens in the private practice of family medicine; and East Harlem, NYC; UConn Health in Farmington and Canton, CT, and St Francis Hospital in Hartford, CT; and now East Flatbush, Brooklyn, NY.
He founded the Brooklyn Health Equity Index (BKHI) in April 2021, when it was funded as a research project by the New York Health Foundation with him as principal investigator (PI), and with SUNY Downstate, One Brooklyn Health (OBH) and the Arthur Ashe Institute of Urban Health as the 3 partnering institutions.
He previously served as Chair of Family Medicine at the University of Connecticut in 2016-2019; and Chair of Family and Community Medicine at New York Medical College (NYMC) 2006-2016. While at NYMC, he grew the Dept from one to four family medicine residency programs; and was also appointed Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion, whereupon he increased the percent URM medical students at NYMC from 10% to 21%.
Dr Douglas was elected to serve on the board of directors of the American Board of Family Medicine (2013-2019), the organization that sets the standard for the specialty of Family Medicine. He was also elected to the board of directors of the New York State Academy of Family Physicians in 2010-2013, including serving as Board Chair in 6/2012-6/2013.
In 1979, he migrated to the US from the island of Dominica at age 19 to attend the University of Hartford. There he graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Chemistry and Biology. He was admitted to medical school a year early, after spending only 3 years in college. He returned in 1983, towards the end of his first year at Weill Cornell University Medical College, to formally graduate from the University of Hartford.
He grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica (not the Dominican Republic with which it often gets confused), where he was number 15 of a family of 16. After graduating from Cornell with his medical doctorate in 1986 and attaining the Lemmon Company Family Practice Award, he did his residency in family medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Highland Hospital in upstate NY.
He is the recipient of over two and a half dozen awards, including the New York State Academy of Family Physicians’ Family Practice Educator of the Year in 1997, and being listed as an American Top Doctor by Castle Connolly each year from 1998 to 2008. He is married, and has 3 children – 25, 26, and 40.