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
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 ...
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.
Further reading
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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
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