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Personal Biography of Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD, Ph.D.
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 and is also member of the University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences faculty in the Department of History. 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, including the award-winning Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement: 1920-1945. Public service has 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 numerous boards including the National Advisory Council of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, the board of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, and the board of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project. Dr. Gamble is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences.
A native of West Philadelphia, Dr. Gamble received her B.A. from Hampshire College and her MD and PhD in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania.