SEGMENT 4: Dr. Michael DeBaun talks about his community outreach projects, including his work at a Nashville community health center and the Sickle Cell Sabbath program.


Dr. Gary H. Gibbons, director, NHLBI:  I wanted to just start by taking a step back and just giving us a sense of what drove you to develop your interest in sickle cell disease. 

Dr. Michael DeBaun, Vanderbilt University:  It’s pretty straight-forward. I grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood and I had an aspiration to become a physician and to contribute to the lives of the people who were similar to me. The options were pretty straight-forward. When I made a decision to become a pediatric hematologist/oncologist, the pull to sickle cell disease was natural. 

Dr. Gibbons:  Let me change and switch gears a little bit to talk more personally about the concepts of mentorship and diversity in the biomedical workforce. This is a key part of the stewardship in the NHLBI, the next generation of scientists, and based on our previous interaction I think these are issues that we both share as being of major importance. I believe you participated in some NIH-sponsored programs to extend diversity. You are familiar with the program SIPID, more recently called PRIDE. I just wanted you to talk about the effect of these programs personally on your career. 

Dr. DeBaun:  When I started off in medical school in 1982 at Stanford, these types of programs did not exist. There was a profound sense of isolation for me, personally. I really didn’t have a cohort of peers who had traveled the same distance nor taken similar roads and had similar aspirations. It really wasn’t until the Robert Wood Johnson heralding the Faculty Development Award for Underrepresented Minorities, which I was a recipient of, did I got a chance to interact with other people of color who came from similar backgrounds and wanted to pursue academic medicine. It was a very enlightening experience for me and very motivating. Once you go through that experience, then you realize it’s paramount that you be part of a solution to help the next generation of underrepresented minorities in medicine pursue academic medicine. It’s been a pleasure to mentor students with sickle cell disease who have gone on to become physicians. In my lab right now we have three high school students with sickle cell disease and I am able to support a pre-doctoral student who is pursuing a PhD with sickle cell disease. 

The dividends are tremendous. They are often not seen on the NIH bio sketch. In fact, nothing that I just mentioned to you is formally written down anywhere, but it allows me to understand the impact of being a scientific leader and having my own resources to develop a lab in a fashion that reflects my own principals. 

Dr. Gibbons:  That is terrific.