By Usha Lee McFarling, Photo: Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, STAT, April 11, 2022
A year after the prestigious medical journal JAMA was embroiled in controversy over a podcast seen as racist by critics, the American Medical Association has appointed a prominent health-equity researcher as the publication’s new editor-in-chief — the first person of color to hold the position.
Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a Black internist, epidemiologist, and health-equity researcher from the University of California, San Francisco, who has been a leading voice for equitable health care during the Covid-19 pandemic, will lead the Journal of the American Medical Association and the JAMA network of journals, the AMA announced Monday.
Bibbins-Domingo is replacing Howard Bauchner, a Boston pediatrician who held the position for 10 years, until he stepped down in June 2021 after JAMA aired a podcast and posted a tweet questioning whether structural racism exists in medicine. That incident led to an outcry over what many saw as deeply embedded structural racism within the journals and for having editors and editorial boards that were overwhelmingly white.
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