New task force director Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith Takes Aim at Racial Gaps in Health Care

Growing up in the United States Virgin Islands, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith saw firsthand what can happen in a community with limited access to health care. Her father, Moleto “Bishop” Smith Sr., was only in his 40s when he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him partly paralyzed and with slurred speech.

The cause was high blood pressure, which could have been treated but had never been diagnosed. Without prompt access to advanced treatments, “the stroke was allowed to run its course,” Dr. Nunez-Smith, 45, recalled in a recent interview. Her father never fully recovered.

“He was a champion and a fighter,” she said. “But my memories are of a father who had to live life with this daily reminder of how we had failed in terms of our health care. I don’t want another little girl out there to have her father suffer a stroke that is debilitating and life-altering in that way.”

Now, tapped by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to lead a new federal task force, Dr. Nunez-Smith, an associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale University, will address a terrible reality of American medicine: persistent racial and ethnic disparities in access and care, the sort that contributed to her father’s disability.

Dr. Nunez-Smith has an expansive vision for the job, with plans to target medical resources and relief funds to vulnerable communities but also to tackle the underlying social and economic inequalities that put them at risk. ...