Potter Will Be Vanderbilt’s First Black Female Neurosurgery Resident

Medical student Tamia Potter made history earlier this month when she became the first Black woman to match into a neurosurgery residency at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

The video of Potter finding out where she’d matched was posted on social media and shared widely. Vanderbilt confirmed in an email to MedPage Today that Potter will be the neurosurgery program’s first Black female resident since it welcomed its first trainee in 1932.

“We met Dr. Tamia Potter in the summer of 2022 when she spent a month on the Vanderbilt neurosurgery service as a visiting student from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. We were immediately impressed by her brilliance and passion for Neurosurgery,” Reid Thompson, MD, chair of the department of neurological surgery at Vanderbilt, said in an emailed statement to MedPage Today. “We are thrilled that Dr. Potter will be training with us!”

Thompson added that Potter “joins a diverse group of 21 remarkably dedicated physicians, all destined to be future leaders in our field.”

Before medical school at Case Western Reserve, Potter had graduated from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), a historically Black university in Tallahassee. She is a third-generation alumna of FAMU, according to Vanderbilt’s student newspaper, the Vanderbilt Hustler.

“Everyone has a different journey in the field of medicine, specifically neurosurgery,” Potter told MedPage Today. “I liked the physiology of the nervous system and its neuropathology interested me. I also love to problem solve, and each step of surgery is like a mini puzzle.”

As a clinician, Potter says her goals are to provide the highest quality of care possible and find innovative ways to make care more affordable and accessible.

Potter is one of 240 neurosurgery residents who matched this year, according to 2022 data from the National Resident Matching Program. For context, there were nearly 40,000 residency positions across all specialties.

Ashley Denmark, DO, MS, the CEO and founder of Project Diversify Medicine, which was among the outlets that posted Potter’s Match Day video on social media, said there have only been 33 Black women neurosurgeons in the U.S.

Alexa Canady, MD, became the first Black woman neurosurgeon in the U.S. in 1981, according to the National Institutes of Health Changing the Face of Medicine project.

“I really feel that at an institution level, every med school, residency program, and hospital needs to foster relationships with HBCUs [historically black colleges and universities] … to get more Black and brown people there,” Denmark told MedPage Today.

She added that institutions need to implement culture corrections when biased or racist incidents happen in order to protect and support minority patients and clinicians.

“You should not have to get healthcare with a side of bias,” Denmark said.

Potter told the Vanderbilt Hustler that current Vanderbilt first-year neurosurgery resident Kwadwo Sarpong, MD, only saw a few other Black men go through the residency before him.

She told MedPage Today that she’s excited about her match at Vanderbilt, and to be headed back to the South: “I finally get to do the job I have dreamed of all my life,” she said.

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