Rev. Willie Bodrick, II

Rev. Willie Bodrick, II

Aug 11, 2023

Senior Pastor

Senior Pastor

Twelfth Baptist Church

Rev. Willie Bodrick, II, J.D., M. Div., is the Senior Pastor of the Historic Twelfth Baptist Church in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, MA. He became the 14th Senior Pastor in 2021.

Prior to this role, Rev. Bodrick served on the ministerial staff for eight years as a Youth and Young Adult Minister, a Young Adult and College Minister, and, eventually, an Associate Pastor.

Previously, he served as the Director of the Afterschool Program and Summer Enrichment Program for two years, successfully managing both programs and maintaining student and family engagement. Rev. Bodrick has also served as the Vice President of the SAMH Corporation for the past three years, overseeing the church’s housing ministry, thrift shop, youth ministry, and after-school and summer enrichment programs.

Pastor Bodrick led the congregation through the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, which required various operational and fiscal implementations and a manifold of executive decisions that enabled the church to fully function on online platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Zoom, Tithe.ly, and PayPal.

They were able to increase their viewership and engagement to more than 1,000 weekly viewers from across the country and the world. During this difficult time, Pastor Bodrick played an instrumental role in garnering donations and partnerships with corporations, which allowed TBC to give upward of $250,000 to their community during the pandemic.

Rev. Willie Bodrick II was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, and is the eldest son of Rev. Willie Bodrick and Anna Bodrick. Pastor Bodrick matriculated to Georgetown University where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, double majoring in English and Sociology in 2010. Pastor Bodrick continued his studies and graduated in 2014 with a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School. Most recently, Rev. Bodrick graduated in May 2020 with his Juris Doctor degree from Northeastern University School of Law and is a practicing lawyer at a Boston law firm.

Rev. Bodrick has served on the Transition Team Steering Committee for Suffolk County District Attorney Racheal Rollins, as the Outreach Coordinator in the Community Engagement Division of the Massachusetts Office of the former Attorney General Maura Healey, and as the Senior Advisor for the Ed Markey Campaign for the United States Senate in 2020.

Rev. Bodrick also has extensive experience working in the community, including advocating for public education, public safety, and economic justice while serving as President and Chairperson of the Boston Network for Black Student Achievement (BNBSA) and as a member of the Boston Public Schools Opportunity and Achievement Gap Taskforce.

Rev. Bodrick currently serves on the Board of Advisors of the Roxbury YMCA, the Ward 12 Democratic Committee, Boston Bar Association (BBA) Taskforce on Police Accountability, and the MA Attorney General Racial Justice and Equity Council. He is also the Co-Founder of Sustained In the Shutdown Boston.

Rev. Bodrick has also received numerous awards including the 2019 Fletcher “Flash” Wiley Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association Legacy Scholarship Award, the 2019 Citizens for Public Schools Champion for Education Justice Award, the 2020 Eta Phi Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, the Inc. Citizen of the Year Award, the 2020 First District of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, and the Inc. Citizen of the Year Award.

He was also named one of The Boston Foundations’ 20 Leaders of the 2020s. Pastor Bodrick is also a member of the Boston Branch of the NAACP, the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association, and the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.

Rev. Bodrick is happily married to Dr. Devin Cromartie Bodrick and is the father of their son Willie Bodrick III. The Bodricks are proud residents of the Roxbury community of Boston.

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Dr. Keith Crawford

Dr. Keith Crawford

Aug 3, 2023

Director of Clinical Trials and Patient Education

Director of Clinical Trials and Patient Education

PHEN

Dr. Keith Crawford joined PHEN in 2019.  As Director of Clinical Trials and Patient Education, he is responsible for implementing programs in these areas as well as working with patients and PHEN partners.

Dr. Crawford has more than 20 years of experience in the Life Sciences and completed his graduate and post-graduate training at Harvard Medical School where he developed competencies in the area of genomics, proteomics, immunology, microbiology, infectious diseases, and regenerative medicine.

During his post-doctoral training, Keith was selected by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a Harold Amos Fellow. His work in the field of immunology caught the eye of the Department of Defense where he received funding to develop antidotes for chemical and biological weapons exposure as well as create a high throughput platform for the detection of biological weapons and emerging infectious agents.

After completing this directive, Dr. Crawford became the Director of the Center for Molecular Orthopedics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was responsible for leading research efforts at the center, which gave rise to the discovery of a novel population of early lineage adult stem cells.  Dr. Crawford and his colleagues were responsible for the preclinical studies, which laid the foundation for a spinal fusion therapeutic. 

Dr. Crawford is a graduate of Prairie View University, the University of Texas Medical School in Houston (Medical Doctorate), and Harvard University (Doctor Philosophy) where he studied cell biology and immunology.

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Mr. Thomas A. Farrington

Mr. Thomas A. Farrington

Aug 2, 2023

President and Founder

President and Founder

PHEN

Thomas Farrington founded the Prostate Health Education Network (PHEN) in 2003 after receiving treatment for prostate cancer in 2000 and publishing his first book Battling The Killer Within in 2001. Under Mr. Farrington’s leadership, PHEN is recognized as the leading prostate cancer education and advocacy organization with national programs and initiatives focused on the needs of African Americans.

A key foundation for PHEN’s success is its national network of prostate cancer survivors and their loved ones who support the organization’s efforts within their communities. PHEN partners with hundreds of churches across the nation to bring education and awareness programs into their communities and recruit local prostate cancer medical specialists as educators for these events.

PHEN also makes extensive use of online programming to reach and support individual educational needs. Mr. Farrington’s background is in Information Technology.  Farrington currently serves as a member of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s (NCCN) Prostate Cancer Treatment Guidelines Panel and the NCCN Prostate Cancer Early Detection Guidelines Panel. He serves as a trustee of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and as an advisor to a number of other healthcare organizations and programs. Mr. Farrington received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1966.

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David Vasir, PhD

David Vasir, PhD

Aug 31, 2022

Senior Research Analyst

Senior Research Analyst

PHEN

David Vasir, PhD, a Senior Research Analyst at PHEN, earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, U.K., in 1981 and his Master of Science degree from the University of Wales College of Medicine in Wales, U.K., in 1985. He then went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy at Jesus College and Oxford University Medical School in 1991. 

Dr. Vasir has been an investigator on several cancer vaccine programs where he designed and implemented a number of immunological based assays to monitor the pre-vaccination and post-vaccination immunological status of patients with breast, renal ovarian carcinomas, and patients with multiple myeloma in cancer vaccine clinical trials. The majority of these analyses pertained to a detailed pre-vaccination and post-vaccination analysis of the immune system as determined by Th1 and Th2 immune responses, levels, and functions of regulatory T cells as determined by surface markers, FOXP3 expression, and specific and non-specific immunological analysis.  

In addition, Dr. Vasir has extensively studied ex-vivo the immunobiology of antigen induced regulatory T cells from their phenotypic characteristics using six color flow cytometry analysis, their in vitro functional properties, their interaction with antigen presenting cells, detailed Th1 and Th2 cytokine profiles of segregated populations of regulatory T cells using multiplex arrays, and use of various strategies to reverse the suppressive properties of these cells. 

 Dr. Vasir also investigated the identification of specific microRNAs and kinases in six color sorted regulatory T cells isolated from the ascites of patients with advanced ovarian cancer, identifying and targeting cancer stem cells using small molecules, isolation, and characterization of stem cells for regenerative medicine.    

Mr. Rausan Battle

Mr. Rausan Battle

Sep 2, 2021

Survivor

It started when Rausan Battle noticed he was losing energy and did not feel well, for no obvious reason. “Physically, I couldn’t recover quickly from simply walking up some stairs,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.” He was diagnosed with prostate cancer October 2018 when he was only 45-yeras old. When he started chemotherapy treatments, his PSA was over 1400.  A body scan and CAT scan revealed the disease had metastasized “all over my body—rib cage, jaw, all over.” Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) put the disease at bay. After the shots, his PSA dropped drastically and “the lesions on bones vanished.”  Best of all, ”I feel good and am back to work full time.”

Covid-19 pandemic changed his work schedule. After a 14-day quarantine as a precaution, Battle now works in a rotation with other facility management teams—two weeks in the office and two weeks working remotely. Of the 134 people employed at his site, only 15 people are allowed in the facility at a time. “It was weird when I first started,” (working remotely). “Everybody on Zoom, on the phone and computer all day.” He goes for a walk every morning, and uses a home gym for workouts.

Thanks to PHEN, Battle is finding a supportive community and resources to “explain terminology and best practices to me.” “He was also invited to a meeting with PHEN sponsor, the biopharma company Amgen,—and found that experience refreshing. “It was my first time being around others going through the same thing,” He’s finding the information, “very helpful.”