The Pathologist Magazine’s Ivan Damjanov interviewed Professor of Pathology Andrea T. Deyrup, MD, PhD, for its Outside the Lab feature as part of a two-part series about undergraduate medical education and race-based medicine. The first episode was published on Dec. 4, and the second will be released on Dec. 18, 2024. The interviews focus on Deyrup’s experience as an undergraduate medical educator as well as her extensive antiracism work.
The first installment, “Educator Activist/Activist Educator” covers her role teaching medical students, her responsibilities at Duke that contribute to its educational mission, and her plans to face challenges in medical education.
The second part, titled “(Nearly) Everything You Learned about Race in Medicine is Wrong,” takes a deep dive into her work combating race-based medicine over the years. She also talks about specific examples of racialized medicine and points to disparities in the 10th edition of “Robbins Basic Pathology,” which she edited with Vinay Kumar, MD, Abul Abbas, MD, and Jon Aster, MD, PhD, resulting in the 11th edition. Since 2022, she has given more than 75 invited lectures on the topic, and continues her commitment to this important work.
Earlier this year, Deyrup was named to The Pathologist Magazine’s Power List 2024. She was one of 20 Champions for Change awardees, selected by The Pathologist’s judging panel composed primarily of past Power Listers. Deyrup was recognized for her advocacy work to inspire pathologists to reject race-based medicine and discard outdated beliefs about biological race.
Deyrup is a nationally renowned speaker on the topic of race in medicine. In March 2024, she participated in a panel discussion following a presentation on “Using Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry as Population Descriptors in Genetics and Genomics Research.” It was hosted by Duke’s Precision Genomics Collaboratory and Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Leaders were Duke professor Charmaine Royal, PhD, and New York University professor Aravinda Chakravarti, PhD, co-chairs of the 2023 National Academics of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Report. It emphasized the importance of ensuring that genetics research benefits all groups in society and mitigates harm.
A large focus of Deyrup’s work has been to examine the questionable science that supports race-based associations in medical texts and board exams. After finding that the data were often inaccurate and misinterpreted, she has been building connections through presentations and a popular video series to end racialized medicine. Read more and watch a video about her work here.