Regina Marcia Benjamin
She served as the President of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama (MASA) in 2002. In 1995 she was elected to the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association, making her both the first physician aged under 40 and the first African American woman to be elected.
1956
Mobile, Alabama
African American
1979
Benjamin received a BSc from Xavier University of Louisiana
1980-1982
She attended the Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta, Georgia
1984
She received a MD from the University of Alabama
She was born in Mobile, Alabama on 26 October 1956. She attended Xavier University, the Morehouse School of Medicine and received her M.D degree at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Benjamin was the first member of her family to attend medical school.
In 2009-2013, Benjamin served as the eighteenth Surgeon General of the United States.
Benjamin completed a residency in family practice at the Medical Centre of Central Georgia in 1987. From the years 1986-1987, she served on the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) Women in Medicine Panel. In 1995 Benjamin became the first African American woman and the first person below the age of 40 to be elected to the AMA’s Board of Trustees.
In 2002-2003 Benjamin became president of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama. She was the first African American woman to be president of a state medical society. From 1996-2002, she served on the board of Physicians for Human Rights. In 1998, Benjamin received the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights.
During 2000-2001, she worked with the University of South Alabama’s College of Medicine, and she oversaw the university’s telemedicine distance learning programme, which offered medical education and health care to clinicians and patients in rural areas through a telecommunications network. She was also the founder and CEO of Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic, Bayou La Batre, Alabama.
US Surgeon General
Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights
The 2000 National Caring Award
Recognised with the Papal honour Pro Ecclesia et Ponticifice from Pope Benedict XVI.
Benjamin’s parents divorced when she was a child and her mother worked as a domestic and waitress to support Regina and her older brother. Although the family had owned land, financial necessity forced them to sell it.
https://www.d2l.org/d2lgroups/regina-benjamin/#:~:text=Benjamin%20was%20the%20United%20States,Ponticifice%20from%20Pope%20Benedict%20XVI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_Benjamin
https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_31.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Regina-Benjamin
