Giselle Corbie-Smith, MD, MSc, professor of social medicine and medicine at the School of Medicine and director of the Center for Health Equity Research, has been honored with the 2016 Herbert W. Nickens Award. She will formally receive the honor at the Society for General Internal Medicine’s annual meeting in May.
The award honors an individual who has “demonstrated exceptional commitment to cultural diversity in medicine or to improving minority health.”
Since arriving at UNC in 2000 Corbie-Smith commitment to these issues has indeed been exceptional. Project GRACE, an initiative she founded to decrease the prevalence of HIV, works by training community members to serve as lay health advisors who go into communities to battle misinformation about HIV. Focused on communities in Eastern North Carolina’s Nash and Edgecombe counties, Corbie-Smith has formed a network of police, politicians, doctors, educators and others to ensure the effort’s success and sustainability. Early successes helped the project receive $1.4 million in grant funding.
“We engage community collaborators based on their own expertise and understanding of their communities,” Corbie-Smith said in a 2014 interview describing the program. “This allows us to build capacity in those communities to continue doing research; it allows for dissemination of evidence-based interventions, rather than each church or community-based organization developing their own solution to a problem. They can actually have access to evidence-based interventions that they know work and can be adapted to their local context.”
Corbie-Smith also directs CARES – Community Academic Resources for Engaged Scholarship – Services, a unit of NC TraCS that teams UNC researchers with providers and community members in an effort to find research-based solutions to the state’s health problems.
The Nickens Award is only the latest in a list of honors Corbie-Smith has earned for her work. The National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities has awarded her its Leadership in Health Disparities Research Award. UNC has honored her with the James E. Bryan Award for Public Service, the Jefferson Pilot Fellowship and the Engaged Scholarship Award for Community-University Partnership. Finally, she was recently named Kenan Distinguished Professor and a Humanities Academic Leadership Fellow with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
In announcing the award, Monica Vela, MD, chair of the Nickens Award Selection Committee, commended Corbie-Smith for her many contributions to promote cultural diversity in medicine.
“Many of us have already felt the impact of (Corbie-Smith’s) work,” Vela said.