One year ago, Jamie Bozeman MD’27 says, she felt “indifferent about organ donation.” Then she learned about the late Galen Henderson MD’93 and his namesake program.
The Galen V. Henderson MD SEED Program offers medical students a better understanding of the inequities in transplantation and potential career paths in the field. Last summer, Bozeman was one of seven students who made up the program’s first cohort.
Bozeman shares a special connection with Henderson; they both matriculated to The Warren Alpert Medical School from Tougaloo College through the Early Identification Program. Despite never meeting Henderson personally, Bozeman says she was “touched by his life because others he touched during his life were able to teach [her] through this program about organ donation.”
Henderson was the director of Neurocritical Care in the Department of Neurology and the chief diversity and inclusion officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was also the associate medical director of New England Donor Services, which coordinates organ and tissue donation in the region and created the Henderson Program.
“In medical school, students get limited exposure to transplantation and even less to organ donation,” program director Jim Rodrigue, PhD, says. Henderson’s generosity served as an inspiration for the program, he adds. “That’s how he was as a person: generous with his time and knowledge. Not just to disseminate knowledge to students, but to allow yourself to be personal and tell your story of who you are and how you got here.”
Throughout the eight-week program, Bozeman says she was enthralled by the hands-on immersion. She spent half the time in seminars with world-renowned leaders in the field, discussing topics ranging from brain death and hand transplants to candid advice on career building. The other half she spent in the operating room, shadowing surgeries of all kinds, and in the community doing volunteer work.
Of her experiences, Bozeman found donor surgeries the most meaningful and intimate. “During these moments, you get to see people from different sectors of medicine come together and honor this person’s wishes to donate,” she says.
“Knowledge about organ donation is important for all physicians regardless of subspecialty because it helps them guide patients at any point in their care,” Rodrigue says. Bozeman says she is now committed to working in the field of organ donation and with the donor community in any way, “whether that’s directly through my work, or whether that’s just volunteering, spending time, and helping stuff like this to continue happening,” she says.
Last year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, non-Hispanic Black individuals accounted for 14.5 percent of deceased organ donors in the US, but comprised approximately 27 percent of the national waiting list for all organs. To encourage more Black donors, Bozeman wants to work to regain her community’s trust, which has been lost after decades of discrimination and pseudoscience. For example, race was used to determine a patient’s priority for a kidney transplant—systematically disadvantaging patients of African American descent—until 2021.
“As a society, we stopped accepting things like that to be true,” Bozeman says. “We should open up and be more willing to donate because there are a lot of African Americans on the waiting list who need more chances for compatible matches for them to get the lifesaving organs that they need.”
To that end, for her scholarly project for the Henderson Program, Bozeman crafted a video that addresses organ donation from the perspectives of people within the African American community. “I’m really proud of how the video turned out, and it was a lot of fun doing the project along with all the other experiences that were part of the program,” she says. The video is currently under review for broadcast.
Now a proud registered organ donor, Bozeman has also made it her mission to advocate for this cause.