Applied Anthropologist Profile: Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith

 

Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith (Source: Yale University School of Medicine)

You may have heard of Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith prior to reading this blog post.  She was recently appointed by President Biden to lead a task force that focuses on racial and ethnic disparities in health care.  Prior to that she served as one of the three co-chairs to then President-Elect Biden’s National Covid-19 Advisor Board.  Nunez-Smith is an accomplished medical professional, but what you may not know is that she started out as a biological anthropologist, hence why she is featured here.  This blog post will discuss Nunez-Smith’s life, inspiration for going into medicine, and how her anthropological background aids in her research and vast accomplishments.

Marcella Nunez-Smith grew up in the US Virgin Islands, and she credits her family for inspiring her to pursue a career in medicine.  Her mother and grandmother were both medical professionals, so she would spend much of her free time reading their textbooks and professional medical literature.  Ultimately, however, it was her father’s failing health that locked her into pursuing medicine.  When her father had a stroke and went undiagnosed and untreated for related medical issues Nunez-Smith saw first hand how health care disparities can and do gravely harm individuals, particularly the most vulnerable populations.

When she graduated high school at the age of 16 she pursued degrees in biological anthropology and psychology at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.  She continued her studies by attending Jefferson Medical College, where she earned her M.D., followed by her residency at Harvard and the Women’s Hospital in Boston.  She later earned a Masters of Health Science from Yale.  She returned to the Virgin Islands where she opened a large research center that focused on providing equitable medical care to residents, while also researching health disparities in the region.  She later moved on to work at Yale University as the founder and direct of Yale’s Equity Research and Innovation Center, an Associate Professor of Internal Medicine, and multiple other roles.

Her biological anthropology background enables her to approach medicine from both a scientific and sociocultural perspective.  She recognizes the need to use science to solve the complex health problems but also to understand the effects of sociocultural, economic, structural, and historical factors in preventing appropriate health care practices, be it by medical professionals or patients.  Medical professionals may not trust their patients or see their patients as willfully ignoring sound medical advice, while patients’ reactions may be due to fears of greater financial burdens, previous bad experiences among doctors, or another legitimate concern.  Her research has and continues to focus largely on stereotypes of minorities-both as medical professionals and patients-and how that affects health care; she has also focused on distrust among patients and medical professionals (and vice versa) and how that affects the administration of health care and desire among patients to seek out medical help.  In her new role as the leader of the Biden administration’s task force that focuses on racial and ethnic disparities in health care her expertise will hopefully address these very real issues that exist throughout the United States and lead to real solutions so that health care is accessible and fairly provided to all.

 

Works Cited

Nielsen, E. A. (2020, November 11). Marcella Nunez-Smith (1981- ). Retrieved from Black Past: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/marcella-nunez-smith-1981/

Nunez-Smith, M. (2019, July 15). Marcella Nunez-Smith, MD, MHS. Retrieved from Yale School of Medicine: https://medicine.yale.edu/profile/marcella_nunez-smith/

Rabin, R. C. (2021, January 8). Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith Takes Aim at Racial Gaps in Health Care. New York Times.