Godfrey Honored for Health Care Leadership

Dr. A. Blanton Godfrey, dean of the College of Textiles, received the North Carolina Hospital Association’s 2011 Meritorious Service Award for  leadership in ensuring quality in health care.

Godfrey lent his expertise in quality improvement to national demonstration projects, including the 100K Lives Campaign credited with preventing 128,000 deaths by reducing patient complications and error in hospitals. He collaborated with Dr. Donald Berwick, a Harvard professor and pediatrician who led the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement before his 2010 appointment as administrator for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

See how a statistician became involved in national health care projects.

Godfrey, also the Joseph D. Moore Professor of Textile and Apparel Technology and Management, joined NC State in 2000 after serving as chairman and CEO of Juran Institute, a quality management consulting firm, for 13 years. Prior to that, he was head of the Quality Theory and Technology Department of AT&T Bell Laboratories. For 19 years he was an adjunct professor at Columbia University, teaching graduate courses in quality management and control. He was a guest lecturer in clinical quality management at Harvard University for four years.

Godfrey holds master’s and doctoral degrees in statistics from Florida State University and a bachelor’s in physics from Virginia Tech.