Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, PhD

Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, PhD, is University Professor of Medical Humanities at the George Washington University. She is the first woman and African American to hold this prestigious, endowed faculty position. She is also Professor of Health Policy and American Studies. Throughout her career Dr. Gamble has worked to promote equity and justice in American medicine and public health. A physician, scholar, and activist, she is an internationally recognized expert on the history of American medicine, racial and ethnic disparities in health and health care, cultural competence, and bioethics. She is the author of several widely acclaimed publications on the history of race and racism in American medicine and bioethics. Public service has also been a hallmark of Dr. Gamble’s career. She chaired the committee that took the lead role in the successful campaign to obtain an apology in 1997 from President Clinton for the infamous United States Public Health Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. She has served on the boards of numerous organizations in addition to Ibis’s including the Human Subjects Review Board of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, the Guttmacher Institute, and the Reproductive Health Technologies Project. Dr. Gamble is a member of the Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Sciences.