William Carter Jenkins (July 26, 1945 – February 17, 2019) was an American public health researcher and academic. Jenkins worked as a statistician at the United States Public Health Service in the 1960s, and is best known for trying to halt the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in 1969. He spent the rest of his career fighting racism in the U.S. healthcare system, working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the early days of the AIDS crisis, and overseeing the government benefits program for survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Life and career

Jenkins graduated from

historically black Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are institutions of higher education in the United States that were established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the intention of primarily serving the African-American community. ...

Morehouse College , mottoeng = And there was light (literal translation of Latin itself translated from Hebrew: "And light was made") , type = Private historically black men's liberal arts college , academic_affiliations ...

with a degree in mathematics in 1967, and he earned a master's in biostatistics from Georgetown University in 1974, a master's in public health from the university of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in 1977, and a PhD in epidemiology from UNC in 1983. He was one of the first cadre of African Americans recruited to the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps in the 1960s. In 1980 he joined the Division of Sexually Transmitted Diseases at the CDC, where he was a Supervisory Epidemiologist and manager of th
Tuskegee Health Benefit Program
He later taught in the Epidemiology department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at

in Atlanta Georgia. He served as co-director of the UNC Minority Health Project.

Recognition

Jenkins received the Hildrus Augustus Poindexter Award from the National Black Caucus of Health Workers of the American Public Health Association.

References

Morehouse College alumni Georgetown University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health alumni People from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina 1945 births 2019 deaths Centers for Disease Control and Prevention people United States Public Health Service personnel American epidemiologists African-American activists African-American statisticians University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty Morehouse College faculty 21st-century African-American people {{US-physician-stub

Life and career

Recognition

Further reading

References