Environmental health advocate Catherine Coleman Flowers is determined to battle “America’s Dirty Secret”: unequal sewage and sanitation access for rural communities and people of color. A MacArthur Genius, she works on multiple fronts to improve public health, economic development, and access to water and sanitation amidst the growing threat of climate change.
Andrea Jenkins made history in 2017 when she became the first African American, openly transgender woman elected to public office in the United States. As a politician, poet, activist, and community historian, Jenkins strives to bring “the notion of love into the public discourse.”
Dr Virginia Davis Floyd makes a difference by extending medical care to underserved populations around the world and integrating indigenous medical traditions with Western methods.
In 1973, Dr. Shirley Marks was the first Spelman College alumna, and only the second African American woman in twenty-three years to graduate from Harvard Medical School.
Pediatric ophthalmologist Terri L. Young, M.D., has researched the molecular genetics of myopia to help find better treatments for eye disorders.
Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble is a physician and historian of medicine.
Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey is the first woman and first African American to be president and chief executive officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest health care philanthropy organization in the United States.
Dr. Ruth Marguerite Easterling, pathologist, worked with William Augustus Hinton, the African American physician who developed the Hinton test for syphilis. She also served on the staff of the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Hospital in Alabama, and was director of laboratories at the Cambridge Massachusetts City Hospital.
In 1974, Dr. Omega Logan Silva was the lead author of the first description of the production of calcitonin from human small cell cancer of the lung.
Dr. Paula Johnson was the first African American in the history of Brigham and Women’s Hospital to be chosen as chief medical resident in 1990.