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Herbert C. Smitherman Jr., M.D., is assistant professor of medicine in the Department of Internal Medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine. Dr. Smitherman is based in Detroit, but he has seen the world, from Amherst to Zimbabwe, on behalf of under-represented people, whose health plights drive his research interests. He was, for example, a health delegate for South Africa's Fourth African, African American Summit.
Closer to home, Dr. Smitherman advocates for increasing the representation of African Americans in medicine. He has
published research documenting the high disparity in their perceptions of bias, noting that reports of bias were 60 to
70 percent higher among African American physicians, but relatively rare among European Americans. As associate program director for Wayne State's internal medicine residency program, Dr. Smitherman addressed this issue by increasing the number of African American doctors. Minority-group medical residents there rose from 2 percent to 57 percent.
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