Faces of Medicine

On this episode, we hear from Dr. Adrienne Phllips. She’s a doctor and researcher at RWJ Barnabas Health in New Jersey who specializes in the treatment of blood cancer. Unlike most of the women profiled on Faces of Medicine, she came from a family of doctors. Phillips, who attended Brown University, Columbia and Harvard, says she was drawn to her specialty in part as a way to help Caribbean people who are disproportionately affected by the illnesses she treats. Phillips talks about how her family’s legacy has shaped her and about finding her own path as a third generation physician.

On this episode, we hear from Dr. Shani Muhammad, a family medicine doctor in the Los Angeles area. She calls planning a “guiding principal” and has felt throughout her life that she must follow a plan in order to succeed. But the demands of medical training - not to mention marriage and parenthood - have shaped her life and career in ways she never imagined. Mumammad talks about having a successful career in medicine, even when things don’t go as planned.

On this episode, we hear from Dr. Terry Moy-Brown. She’s a board certified emergency physician working in urgent care at Vancouver Clinic in Washington state. Moy-Brown grew up in Honduras and experienced more than a little culture shock when she & her family immigrated to Miami after her high school graduation. Her studies and work have taken her from Oklahoma and Florida to upstate New York and Washington state. As an emergency physician, she knows first hand that working in healthcare can lead some people to feel jaded, but she held on tight to the spirit of caring and empathy that brought her to the field in the first place. Moy-Brown believes in the importance of staying true to yourself.

On this episode, we hear from Dr. Chasity Jennings-Nunez, an OB-GYN who lives and works in the Los Angeles area. Jennings-Nunez grew up in a supportive all-Black neighborhood in Houston, and she went on to college at Tulane in New Orleans and then medical school at Harvard. When she accepted a residency at a community hospital in Los Angeles, she had some concerns about not going to a more well-known academic hub. But she loved working in the community and ended up staying at the hospital for many years, embracing the opportunity to help address health care disparities. Jennings-Nunez’s story provides a case study in embracing the unknown.

On this episode, we hear from Dr. Karla Williams. She’s an internal medicine doctor and an associate professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham. She grew up in South Carolina, and was fascinated by medicine from an early age. She surrounded herself with like-minding high achievers and excelled in school. But some unfair treatment she endured during her training shook her confidence, and it took years for her to fully recover. Today, as an instructor herself, she helps students learn to recognize and fend off the crippling self-doubt known as imposter syndrome.

In this episode of Faces of Medicine, we hear the story of Dr. Kierstin Kennedy, the Chief Medical and Quality Officer of UAB Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama. She was drawn to a career in medicine after a family reunion brought her face-to-face with an uncle who was a surgeon. At that point, no one in her immediate family had graduated from college, so meeting him opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Her path to medicine included pushing against the conventional pre-med track to study what mattered to her, knowing that it was a better path to success.She found the courage to keep looking outside of the box to create a career that works for her and allows her to practice medicine as well as be the leader she was born to become. Listen to hear about all of that and so much more.This podcast is part of Faces of Medicine, a donor-funded project to share the stories of Black women physicians to inspire the next generation and give everyone who listens a window into these remarkable journeys. It all started with an independent documentary which is available to rent at kinema.