GW Law Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew Honored with National Health Law Teaching Award

The Jay Healey Teaching Award is bestowed annually by the American Society for Law, Medicine & Ethics

June 10, 2022

Media Contacts:

Rachel Larris, [email protected], 202-994-6460


WASHINGTON (June 8, 2022)— In recognition of her excellence in health law scholarship and teaching, Dayna Bowen Matthew, the Dean and Harold H. Greene Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, was named the 2022 recipient of the prestigious Jay Healey Teaching Award. For over 30 years, the American Society for Law, Medicine & Ethics [ASLME] has honored the memory of Jay Healey, a beloved teacher of health law at University of Connecticut Schools of Law and Medicine, with an award given to faculty who have shown a passion for teaching health law.

“Dayna Bowen Matthew is an extremely deserving winner of the Jay Healey Award. She has long been recognized as an outstanding teacher, scholar, researcher and writer,” said Edward J. Hutchinson, executive director of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics. “Her scores of admirers and friends in the health law community would agree she stands as an ideal of what the Healey Award was created to honor: the idea that teaching matters, and good teaching can make the world a better place. It was a great honor for everyone at ASLME to award the 2022 Jay Healey Award to Dayna Bowen Matthew.” 

Dean Matthew joined GW Law in 2020 and is a leader in public health and civil rights law who focuses on disparities in health, health care, and the social determinants of health. She is the author of the bestselling book Just Medicine: A Cure for Racial Inequality in American Health Care and the newly released Just Health: Treating Structural Racism to Heal America.

Nominees for the Healey Award come from members of ASLME and the last 10 winners of the award select the next winner. The award was presented at the Health Law Professors Conference, hosted by ASLME, at the Arizona State University - Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

Jay Healey was one of the organizers of the first Health Law Teachers Conference in 1976 and soon became the spiritual leader of the nation’s health law teachers. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1993, at the age of 46, just six weeks after the disease was diagnosed. His legacy lives on in the work of the faculty honored by the award given in his name.