tremendous progress in striving to improve the health of all our citizens…We have gone in [to our four demonstration neighborhoods] and improved their physical environment, built environment, parks, streets, lighting, recreational activity, community gardens, and we are doing health assessments to determine what diseases they have. And we find them every day as we do these, new patients with unrecognized hypertension, diabetes and many other conditions. And now that we work with the Health System…to help run Copper Green, we bring them access to a primary care doctor. Some of these citizens in some of these neighborhoods—eighty, ninety percent—didn’t have a primary care doctor and it’s hard to take care of these diseases and they show up in our emergency room with a catastrophe. Well, we’re going to change that. This is about providing access to healthcare for all of our citizens….We’re preparing to take HealthSmart to other cities and communities across the state. The next step, we’re going to go down to Montgomery and Selma and Demopolis and take this playbook, this methodology, we’ve developed and bring it to them and challenge their hospitals, universities, city, county, corporate leadership to partner like we have.” UAB’s efforts in 2022 were supported by record philanthropic gifts ($111 million) and the university’s endowment surpassed $550 million in book value and $700 million in market value, which Watts deemed “pretty remarkable for a young university that’s about fifty years old.” Watts concluded the address by saying, “We’re excited about what we’ve accomplished over the past year and, as you know, we’re going to set the bar even higher in the coming year.” On November 18, 2022, Watts sent a campuswide email with accompanying video expressing Thanksgiving greetings and gratitude to the UAB community. The message read in part, "In this season of Thanksgiving, I enjoy pausing to reflect on the challenges we have overcome and give thanks for the blessings we enjoy. Across our great university and Health System that together are UAB, 2022 has been a year filled with tremendous accomplishments as we continued to make a positive difference in countless people’s lives in Birmingham, across Alabama and around the world. I am grateful for your hard work and excellence that make it possible to teach and learn, research, care for patients, and meet the varied and complex needs of our campus, as well as our local and global communities." Personal life