William C. (Bill) Jenkins, PhD, MPH is Adjunct Professor, Department of Epidemiology, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and Co-director of the UNC Minority Health Project. Dr. Jenkins came to UNC from Morehouse College, where he was Professor of Public Health Sciences and directed the Morehouse College Research Center on Health Disparities and founded the Public Health Sciences Institute.
Previously he served as Supervisory Epidemiologist in the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He managed the center's Minority HIV Prevention Program and the Participant Health Benefits Program, which assures medical services to the survivors of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. Also at the NCHSTP, he was the Chief of the Research and Evaluation Statistics Section in the Division of Sexually Transmitted Diseases Prevention and served as Manager of the National Minority Organizations HIV Prevention Program. Jenkins served as an expert on minority issues in disease transmission for over two decades.
Dr. Jenkins instructs medical, graduate, and undergraduate students in biostatistics, epidemiology, and public health at Morehouse School of Medicine, Morehouse College, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also consults on the development of Public Health programs at institutions in the Atlanta University Center and other Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He serves on several boards including the advisory boards of Morgan State University’s School of Community Health, M D Anderson’s Center for Research on Minority Health, Harvard’s School of Public Health’s IMSD and Summer Programs.
Dr. Jenkins is a member of the American College of Epidemiology (ACE), the American Statistical Association (ASA), and the American Public Health Association (APHA), where he also served on the Governing Council and Executive Board. He was the chair of the Epidemiology Section of ASA, and a member of the Board of Directors of ACE. Dr. Jenkins obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Morehouse College. He holds a Master’s degree in Biostatistics from Georgetown University, and both a Master in Public Health degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has also completed post-doctoral work in Biostatistics at Harvard University’s School of Public Health. While at UNC he led the Minority Student Caucus and helped to found the annual Minority Health Conference. In 1991 he founded the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues (SAAPHI). Dr. Jenkins received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from UNC in 2004, the APHA Epidemiology Section's Abraham Lilienfeld Award for teaching excellence in 2009, and presented an address to the opening session of APHA in 2010.