Bill Jenkins (epidemiologist)

William Carter Jenkins (July 26, 1945 – February 17, 2019) was an African American public health researcher and academic.

Early life 
He is best-known as the  U.S. government epidemiologist who tried in 1969 to bring to public attention the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. He spent the rest of his career fighting racism in the U.S. healthcare system, working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the early days of the AIDS crisis, and overseeing the government benefits program for survivors of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

Jenkins trained as a mathematician at historically black Morehouse College and then biostatistics at Georgetown University. He was one of the first cadre of African Americans recruited to the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps in the 1960s. In 1980 he joined the Division of Sexually Transmitted Diseases at the CDC, where he was a Supervisory Epidemiologist and manager of the Tuskegee Health Benefit Program.

He later taught in the Epidemiology department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and at Morehouse College in Atlanta Georgia. He served as co-director of the UNC Minority Health Project.

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References

Category:Morehouse College alumni
Category:Georgetown University alumni
Category:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alumni
Category:People from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina
Category:1945 births
Category:2019 deaths
Category:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention people
Category:United States Public Health Service personnel
Category:American epidemiologists
Category:20th-century African-American activists
Category:African-American academics
Category:African-American mathematicians
Category:University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty
Category:Morehouse College faculty