Two members of the University of Pennsylvania community have been named recipients of the National Minority Quality Forum’s 40 Under 40 Leaders in Minority Health Award, recognizing young minority thought leaders who are working to reduce health-care disparities.
    
Paris Butler, an assistant professor of plastic surgery in the Perelman School of Medicine, and Kevin Ahmaad Jenkins, the vice-provost’s postdoctoral fellow in the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at Penn, will receive their awards at the NMQF Leadership Summit on Health Disparities and Congressional Black Caucus Spring Health Braintrust Gala in Washington, D.C., on April 25.
    
Butler is nationally recognized for his dedication to reducing health-care disparities along ethnic lines, something he has approached with research, policy and teaching. He has used his formal training to explore the underrepresentation of minorities in academic medicine. Butler was one of 30 national finalists for the White House Fellowship and as a result served as a policy fellow in the Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health.
    
He has also received numerous teaching awards for his work to mentor medical, undergraduate and high school students aspiring to enter the field and has served on the Accreditation Council for Graduation Medical Education’s Surgical Residency Review Committee, which is responsible for the oversight of all surgical training programs in the country.    
      
Jenkins is a scholar and author whose research investigates the intersection of race, law and health and focuses on the elimination of disparities and discrimination in health care. In addition to his role in the Leonard Davis Institute, he holds appointments in Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice and the Division of General Internal Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine.
    
Jenkins has presented research as a guest lecturer or conference speaker more than 20 times in the last three years and has published peer-reviewed articles and contributed extensive commentaries in the field of race, law and health. The winner of two national journalism awards, Jenkins created and taught his inaugural course, “Race, Law and Health: The African-American Health Experience in America,” at the University of Florida in 2012.
    
He is currently working on three book projects: Hue Process: The Quantitative Measurement of Racism in Medicine, Refund My Freedom: How the Law Created Health Inequity in the Black Community and Branding Jezebel: Black Women, Law and Medicine in Antebellum America.