Erica Quinn Thompson MD’00, MPH, knew by second grade that she wanted to be a physician. In high school, she created a vision board of her life’s goals, including a network of clinics across her home state of Mississippi where no one would have to drive far or wait long to see a doctor.

“There was always traveling when we went to the doctor,” Thompson says of her childhood in Natchez, and “there would always be a lot of people in the waiting room.” She vowed that “nobody would ever have to wait in a waiting room if I was a doctor.”

But first she had to find an undergraduate school that would give her a full scholarship. That’s when Thompson’s favorite biology teacher told her about her alma mater, Tougaloo College. Thompson visited with her mom, “and I knew, this is it,” she says. “I’m going to Tougaloo.”

Tougaloo is a small, historically Black liberal arts school in Jackson, MS, with an outsized impact, producing more than one-third of the state’s physicians and dentists. Each year, a few of the college’s pre-med students go on to study medicine at Brown University through an Early Identification Program established in 1976.

Thompson hadn’t known about the EIP when she chose Tougaloo, and was reluctant to apply; she had left the state only a handful of times in her life. But one of the program’s creators, Tougaloo chemistry professor Richard McGinnis, PhD, kept cajoling her, even calling her dorm room, until she finally filled out the application the night before it was due. When she showed McGinnis her acceptance letter, he was a bit smug: “He was like, ‘Oh, really? You know, you didn’t want to apply,’” Thompson laughs.

The transition to Rhode Island and medical school was tough at first; Thompson contended with homesickness and academic challenges and snow in April. But she soon found her community, in a local church and with her classmates and professors. “It felt like what seemed big became very small,” she recalls. “And it made me feel more like home—the Hospitality State of Mississippi.”

After graduating, Thompson returned to Mississippi; she had not let go of her clinic-founding dream. In 2009, Magnolia Medical Foundation was born, with Thompson meeting people in churches, community centers, even hotel lobbies to discuss topics like diabetes management, reproductive health, and addiction. Now her nonprofit organization has five locations and does work in every part of the state, offering a comprehensive list of services from affordable medical and mental health care to HIV testing and discounted prescriptions to food pantries, diapers, and other resources. The primary care physician on staff is another EIP alum, Paul Alleyne MD’06.

The EIP, Thompson says, “has allowed me to do the things that were on that” vision board.

“I’m grateful that Tougaloo keeps giving the gift of education. I’m grateful that Brown University keeps giving the gift of hope for students who want to be in medical school,” she says. “We just need to keep programs like this going.”

Tougaloo and Brown first partnered in 1964 to promote undergraduate student exchanges, research collaboration, and cultural understanding. Shortly after the Medical School’s founding, in 1972, Dean Stanley Aronson, MD, and Associate Vice President of Biology and Medicine Levi Adams, MS, worked with McGinnis to develop the Early Identification Program, which offers Tougaloo sophomores provisional acceptance to the Medical School, upon completion of their premed curriculum.

The EIP made possible the new medical school’s commitment to provide more educational opportunities to students underrepresented in medicine. Fifty years later, the program has graduated dozens of physicians who work throughout the country in nearly every specialty. Many are in the South, and many use their training and their position of privilege to give back, by practicing in underserved communities, studying neglected diseases, and serving as mentors and role models.

“It’s a wonderful legacy, if you look at the alumni and what they’re doing: leaders in health care, primary care doctors, specialists, senior administrators,” says Joseph Diaz MD’96 RES’99 F’01 MPH’09, Brown’s associate dean for pathways and community engagement.

Vincent Harris MD’86 was one of the very first EIP students, coming to Brown before the Program in Medicine was even a decade old. He says the Medical School’s small size helped ease the transition from Tougaloo, as did a course on test-taking and study strategies. “I found whenever you needed help … that [faculty and administrators] were always very helpful and very nice,” he says. He remembers Adams and his wife especially, who were a “major source of encouragement” (and home-cooked meals), and other Tougaloo alumni at Brown who offered support and answered questions. “That was tremendous,” he says.

Nearly two-thirds of EIP students begin their pre-medical education as high school seniors in Tougaloo’s Summer Science Program. Now named for the late McGinnis, who founded the program, the rigorous month-long curriculum is taught in part by current medical students. “They were not only our teachers, they were mentors,” says Harris, who went on to teach for two summers himself. “It provided a platform to immediately give back and mentor other students.”

These days, almost every EIP student gains research experience with the Jackson Heart Study, an NIH-funded, multicenter investigation of cardiovascular disease in Black adults that began in 2000. “We select them during their freshman year, and then they’ll take Jackson Heart Study courses, they’ll be engaged in research, community outreach,” says Wendy White, PhD, MPH, principal investigator and director of the study’s Undergraduate Training and Education Center at Tougaloo.

Despite the training and preparation, some students struggle when they get to Providence. “My [vision board] did not look like it was going to actually come to fruition, because there were some days at Brown …” Thompson trails off. “There was so much equipment that I had never seen before.” But faculty like the late anatomy professor Ted Goslow, PhD, spent extra time with any student who needed it, she says; faculty and staff even had students over for dinner. “They wanted us to be as successful as we wanted ourselves to be,” Thompson says.

Culture shock and harsh winters were other obstacles. “By far and away, the weather was the worst,” says Emma Simmons MD’91 RES’94 MPH’04, who lived in Rhode Island for 25 years and never got used to the literal or figurative cold. Compared to people’s “genteel openness” in the South, “I thought Northerners were more, for lack of a better word, harsh … until you got to know them,” she says. “But initially they were more distrustful and standoffish, and that was very disconcerting to me.”

On top of that, Cari Hampton-Rayborn MD’21 says, “Being in a space where, as a Black woman, a lot of times you are perceived to be given opportunities because of race as opposed to intellect—sometimes that could be challenging.” On certain clinical rotations, she was mistaken for the housekeeper, or had her abilities questioned.

Yet Hampton-Rayborn loved her time at Brown. She turned her hardships into scholarship, publishing papers about how stereotype threat and imposter syndrome impact Black physicians. And she still recalls a pep talk from Richard Dollase, EdD, the now-retired director of the Office of Medical Education.

“When I first got there, he made sure to let me know that, hey, you’re here because you’re meant to be here, and you’re brilliant,” says Hampton-Rayborn, now a pediatric emergency medicine fellow at Texas Children’s Hospital. She adds that at Tougaloo, “we are taught to be resilient.”

To acclimate to life in the North and the Ivy League, EIP students spend one undergraduate semester at Brown. They get to know the city, meet faculty and other students, and take classes that Tougaloo doesn’t offer. “It was just like being immersed in a whole new world,” Hampton-Rayborn says: an academic environment where she knew she could “thrive.”

Alleyne, who plays the saxophone, says he took a medical school class during his undergraduate semester at Brown, but also Ghanaian drumming and music theory. “We tried to be open to doing things that we knew we didn’t have the opportunity to do while we were in Mississippi,” he says.

Derrick Hamilton MD’01, PMD’29 says it was “one of the best semesters of my life,” because he got to meet people from all over the country and the world. He grew up in Indianola, a small town in western Mississippi, where “I went to the public, 99 percent-Black school, and the private school was 99.8 percent white. So me going to Brown was the first time I could have intelligent conversations [about controversial topics] without people just getting upset.”

Tougaloo undergrads used to do their semester exchange in their junior or senior year. But since 2023, they arrive in August of their senior year to audit the first month of medical school with the incoming first-year students, then complete their fall semester on the main campus. Though EIP students can still explore Brown’s course catalog, Diaz says they are required to take a Program in Liberal Medical Education course that prepares undergraduates for medical school. It’s part of a plan to “prepare students for success early on,” he says.

“The structure and support that we try to offer here at Brown, I think, is a little bit unique,” Diaz adds. Unlike other undergraduate college-medical school partnerships, “where they’re basically like, OK, welcome, and that’s it,” he says, at Brown “we try to make the identification program a program, not just an acceptance to medical school.”

“It was hard at first,” Makayla Hamilton MD’29—Derrick’s daughter—says of that senior-year semester. “Luckily, I think Brown has a really good community. You can literally talk to anyone, and they’re going to send you to the right places.”

Alleyne, who grew up near Jackson, is one of just two family members who still live in Mississippi. Everyone else, including his sister, radiologist and EIP alumna Thelma Alleyne MD’09, is now in the Atlanta area.

“There’s a great brain drain from this state,” says Alleyne, who in addition to seeing Magnolia Medical Foundation patients is a nocturnist at a Jackson hospital. “When these patients come in, especially the ones that look like me, they ask me, ‘What are you doing in Mississippi?’ I say, ‘Well, I came back to take care of the people that made sure that I was well growing up,’” he says. “So to a large degree, it’s about being able to give back.”

High rates of cardiovascular and metabolic disease, severe shortage of health care workers, rural hospital closures, Medicaid cuts—“unfortunately, Mississippi is at the bottom of so many of the health indicators,” White says. When Jackson Heart Study scholars learn about these disparities, she adds, many are inspired to serve their communities as clinicians, while others, like Courtney Johnson PhD’15 MD’17, find their calling in the research arm of the program.

“You could really see the translation of the research in patient health. And it wasn’t just patients, it was my community, it was the people around me, it’s their health,” Johnson says. A Jackson native, she had hoped to return South someday. But as one of just three EIP students to enter Brown’s MD/PhD Program, she’s giving back both at the bench and the bedside.

“When you grow up in a community that’s already underserved and under-equipped to deal with health care and providing, you almost look for” opportunities to serve, Johnson says. “I always wanted to do something that would be impactful to people who have less.”

She studies and treats cutaneous lymphoma, which, as a dermatology resident at Johns Hopkins, she was told was typically a mild disease affecting middle-aged white men. But the reality in Baltimore was quite different.

“A lot of our patients of color, especially our Black female patients, Hispanic female patients, were coming in at younger ages—20, 30—and they were having very severe presentations of this particular disease. So severe that it was becoming systemic, that it required oncology and chemotherapy medications. A lot of them were dying at a very young age,” Johnson says.

The physician-scientist wanted to understand why cutaneous lymphoma presented so differently in different populations, and see how doctors could better predict the severity of a patient’s disease. “We are starting to see there are differences in the actual phenotypes,” says Johnson, now an assistant professor of dermatology at City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte, CA. “So that’s giving us a little more information, a little more guidance that I hope physicians can use to better decide how to care for patients when they come in with this disease.”

Simmons, another California transplant, had never planned to leave Mississippi in the first place. “It’s really hard to turn your back on your community” when you come from an underserved area, she says. “If you know of that life, then you want to make the world a better place.”

Growing up in Laurel, Simmons rarely went to the doctor; when she did, “the truth is, doctors didn’t even touch me. They looked at me across the room. I’d never had a doctor who would just really relate to you.” She decided to pursue medicine after meeting “many wonderful doctors,” including the legendary Robert Smith, MD, during Tougaloo’s Summer Science Program. “What I saw with Dr. Smith was that his patients absolutely loved him and they trusted him. I saw that connection. I saw the love. I saw the care. And I hadn’t seen that growing up,” she says. “I wanted that kind of relationship with patients and I wanted that kind of influence on my patients’ health.”

Both Simmons’ mother and McGinnis urged her to apply to the EIP. At Brown she met Scott Allen MD’91 RES’94, who married her with the understanding that they would practice in Mississippi. In the last week of her family medicine residency at Memorial Hospital of Rhode Islandsssss, she gave birth to their son, Miles, who within hours started having seizures. He was diagnosed with hemimegalencephaly, and at three months, a neurosurgeon removed half of his brain.

With contracts to fulfill, Simmons and Allen moved to Mississippi, but the dearth of local care was not just inconvenient but dangerous for their son. “We were flying back and forth to have emergent neurosurgery on him at [Johns] Hopkins,” she says. The young family returned to Brown, where Simmons later became the assistant dean for minority medical affairs, while Miles, for many years, received “really good” care in Boston. But as he got older, Simmons saw doctors treating her son as she’d been treated as a child.

“People don’t know what to do with [adults] with special needs. Do you talk to them? Do you look at them? What do you do? People feel very uncomfortable,” she says.

When Miles was 18, Simmons and Allen got a call from G. Richard Olds, MD, a former professor at Brown who had been appointed the founding dean of the new medical school at the University of California, Riverside. “This was February, and he said how warm it was,” Simmons recalls. “He knew what button to push.” She was enticed not only by the weather and the area’s underserved population, but the opportunity to help open a clinic dedicated to the care of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

The Access Clinic in Moreno Valley is now 14 years old. Simmons, who retired last year as the senior associate dean for student affairs at UC Riverside, and Allen not only have revolutionized care for special needs adults, they are offering the next generation of physicians the training that they themselves never received.

“As we tell our students and our residents, it’s not hard,” she says. “You listen to the patients, the parents. You listen to the caregivers. They will tell you what they need. They will tell you everything to do. Just listen to them.”

Derrick Hamilton wanted to be a pediatrician by age 7. He liked playing doctor, and he’d seen how much his mom, a schoolteacher, loved her students. But there was a decisive moment, when he was a teenager, when “I chose to go to school over the other options,” he says. “I chopped cotton for $20 a day for four days. After spending time suffering in the sun from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and receiving $80, my decision to use my brain to get a better life was solidified.”

After his pediatrics residency at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Hamilton completed his National Health Service Corps commitment in rural Fayette County, TN. Toward the end of his four-year service, “all of these parents started coming to me saying, ‘You’re not going to leave us, are you? Everyone that comes here leaves us,’” he says. “I felt like I had made a significant impact on the community, and I chose to continue to serve the population rather than chase the dollars.”

Hamilton is the only pediatrician, and the only Black physician, in the county. After more than 20 years in practice, he’s now seeing the grandchildren of his earliest patients. He dresses up for Halloween, posts videos of himself dancing in his waiting room, and drives a Corvette and a motorcycle. “The kids like that,” he says. He capitalizes on patients’ admiration by taking time during appointments “to show them that there’s a different way.”

“The area that I’m in now is much like the area I grew up in,” Hamilton says. “My goal is to let people know that there’s more than drugs, and there’s more than just following the status quo.”

He also inspired his daughter—though at first she resisted following in his footsteps. “When he mentioned Tougaloo, I was not looking at it, nor even thinking about it,” Makayla says. But when she visited campus, “I fell in love.” Now they are the EIP’s first parent-child legacy. She also majored in chemistry, and wants to train in pediatrics and return to the South to practice in underserved communities.

“Growing up watching him serve as the county’s only pediatrician... showed me how much a single physician can mean to a community,” she says of her dad. “I see how it impacts the children.... Seeing them say, ‘I want to be like you,’ I love that. I think it’s important for children, especially little Black girls, to see doctors who look like them.”

Harris, who grew up in Clarksdale, MS, had role models in his parents, too. Both were educators with advanced degrees and the expectation that their two sons would pursue medicine or law. But Harris hoped to get a football scholarship, and Tougaloo, which didn’t have a team, “was not on my radar”—until a devastating injury sidelined his NFL dreams. He attended the Summer Science Program and met McGinnis, who later encouraged him to apply to the EIP. (His brother also attended Tougaloo, and is now a lawyer.)

The rest is history. Harris did his radiology residency and fellowship at Howard, where he met his wife. They’ve worked in the Houston area ever since (she’s a health educator at MD Anderson) and have two children and a grandson, and Harris is a leader in his church. “Brown has been a tremendous blessing for me and my family,” he says—as was his football injury, “because I probably would have gone to a college that didn’t have an emphasis on medicine and medical school.”

Buoyed by the success of its partnership with Tougaloo, the Medical School created similar programs with Rhode Island colleges. Several dozen graduates of the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, and Providence College have earned their MDs through those institutions’ EIPs with Brown.

But as their program turns 50, alumni and students are hoping it can continue long into the future. Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education Star Hampton, MD, who oversees medical school admissions at Brown, explains that while Tougaloo is a historically Black college, “it is open to all students, regardless of race.”

“The Medical School operates the EIP in compliance with federal, state, and other applicable nondiscrimination laws and Brown policy,” Hampton writes in an email. “Any student at Tougaloo, regardless of race, can apply to the EIP, where applications are considered, regardless of race, on the basis of academic record, as well as commitment to and aptitude for the study of medicine.”

Diaz says as the EIP evolves to meet the needs of today’s students and tomorrow’s doctors, it has found guidance in the program’s past. Tougaloo’s archivist recently discovered the 1976 memo laying out the components of the EIP, including faculty exchanges, summer research opportunities, and a clinical rotation in Mississippi. “I think about the history and that document and how we can strengthen the current program, and really it is going back to those original ideas,” Diaz says. They are talking to Thompson about including Magnolia Medical Foundation as a rotation site.

“Paul [Alleyne] and I would love that,” Thompson says. Most students who rotate through her clinic come from local schools, but she once hosted University of Connecticut students, who in just one week saw the far-reaching effects of Jackson’s many barriers to health and health care. “It opened up a new level of real exposure,” she says. “Mississippi was no longer just what you saw on paper regarding health disparities, but you saw context to what that looks like, and why that exists.”

Hampton-Rayborn says the ethos of Tougaloo is “always remembering where you come from, and always helping the next person,” while at Brown, “people are passionate about helping you continue to serve.” By bringing them together, the EIP becomes a catalyst for big ideas and bold change. “Tougaloo gives you the grit and the resilience,” she says, “and then at Brown, you just take off.”