Jefferson Award winner Sheryl Heron brings ‘lens of love’ to medicine

“I’m considered Black history at Grady. And I thought you had to be dead or old to be included during Black History Month,” laughs Dr. Sheryl Heron. Heron is this year’s winner of the Thomas Jefferson Award, the university’s highest faculty/staff honor, which recognizes significant impact on the intellectual and civic life of the Emory community. 

When Heron arrived in Atlanta as an Injury Prevention Fellow in 1996, she became Emory’s first Black female faculty member in emergency medicine.  

“It was striking when the elders (as I would call people in their 80s and 90s) would say to me, ‘I am so happy to see you, I’m so proud of you, I’ve never seen a Black woman doctor in charge here,’” she says. “History became palpably real to me when speaking with patients.”

Since 2020, Heron has served as vice chair for faculty equity, engagement and empowerment in the Department of Emergency Medicine, and she is currently an associate dean for community and engagement in the School of Medicine. 

Despite the additional responsibilities she’s taken on in the past three decades, Heron continues to take shifts in the Grady Memorial Hospital Emergency Care Center. 

“I continue to hold on to shifts because it reminds me of my purpose, my visibility and my intentionality to lead by example,” she says. “To care for people with kindness and love.” Heron explains that it’s part of her foundation of faith and family as a member of Antioch Baptist Church North, where she serves on the health ministry.  

Medicine rooted in public health

“My mom would say I wanted to be a pediatrician since I was 3,” Heron says. Born in Jamaica, West Indies, before moving with her family to New York City at age 5, Heron explains that while she’s the first physician in her family, she grew up surrounded by education and health care professionals.

Her grandparents were educators, her mom was a radiation therapy supervisor, her father an accountant in health care, and her aunts were nurses who were educated and trained in England.

Even so, Heron’s path to the medical field didn’t follow the typical trajectory.

After earning her undergraduate degree in biopsychology and a certificate in community health, she wanted to pursue medical school — but wasn’t accepted on her first attempt.

She pivoted to pursue a master’s degree in public health (MPH), a choice partly spurred by personal experience. Heron’s uncle was in the first wave of people in New York to contract HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. He died three months after his diagnosis. 

“It propelled me within the public health sphere,” she says. “My thesis was on HIV and homelessness in New York City. I was awakened to the public health lens around equity and justice, even though those terms weren’t being used at that time.”

Heron realized she needed to educate people on HIV/AIDS, so she went to the South Bronx to do just that, working in a homeless shelter for men with HIV.

Service, justice and equity became her clarion call, and a campus keynote address from Vivian Pinn near the end of Heron’s MPH program illuminated the next steps.

“I was in awe of her,” Heron says of Pinn, who was the only woman and the only Black person in her class at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Pinn, the first full-time director of the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health, encouraged Heron to reapply to medical school, specifically at Howard University College of Medicine.

It was sound advice.

“While my pursuit of medicine supposedly started when I was 3 or 4 in Jamaica, I got redirected with clarity and purpose through my experiences and recognized very quickly that through my uncle’s lens, through my parents’ education, through exposure, I could do something,” Heron says. “My MPH level-set what I could do and how I could do it in a powerful way through medicine.”

A life-changing rotation

Heron’s path once again diverged from what she had planned in the final year of medical school at Howard when she headed to Los Angeles with her best friend for a rotation in emergency medicine at Martin Luther King/Charles Drew Hospital — primarily, she noted, to escape D.C.’s cold weather for a few weeks.

Heron had planned to go into family medicine, but that rotation in emergency medicine “changed my life in two weeks,” she says.

“Emergency medicine is really the failure of public health,” Heron says, a realization that uniquely attracted her to the position. “Public health is prevention, so if you’re seeing me in the emergency department, something has gone wrong.”

That rotation is also where she became interested in intimate partner violence.

“While working in the emergency department in LA, I was seeing people being beaten and violently attacked by their partners, mainly women. I would take care of their injuries, but here comes my public health lens, asking why this is happening,” says Heron, who explains that what she experienced in her home growing up was worlds away from that reality.

Heron’s parents were married for 60 years and died six days apart. Because she had witnessed a true love story, partner violence didn’t make sense to her then or now.

“I still have imposter syndrome when I speak on this topic,” she says, “so I always share that I am not a survivor or witness of partner violence, so I am speaking on this topic from the lens of love; one’s home should not be terrorizing.”

Anchored in her faith, the lens of love — and using that to understand the lived realities of the people she encounters — has carried Heron through resolve-testing situations and is demonstrated by the high quality of care she gives all patients and her role as a leader for all of those working on her teams.

A three-pronged focus

When she arrived at Emory in 1996 as an Injury Prevention Fellow, Heron brought all of that experience with her. To this day, much of her work can be broken into three prongs: cultural humility; diversity, equity and inclusion; and intimate partner violence.

“I don’t use the term cultural competency,” Heron says, “because how can I ever become competent in a culture I am not part of? But I can be humble enough to ask questions and try to understand other perspectives.”

Heron also says she didn’t set out to work in inclusion. The motto of Jamaica is “Out of many, One people,” a cultural tie that came front and center for her when she moved to Atlanta 30 years ago. 

And, just as Heron continues to work shifts at Grady, she also returned to Jamaica every year for 25 years, leading a mission trip and bringing a team of colleagues to provide pro bono clinical health care and education to patients and staff at Montego Bay’s largest public hospital. While the trips came to an end due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Heron says she marveled at being able to give back to her home country.

“Every single human being deserves the best possible care,” she says.

It’s a belief that she puts into practice in emergency departments as well as conference rooms.

She has served nationally, regionally and institutionally on more than 100 committees. Her current membership in professional organizations includes the American and the Georgia College of Emergency Physicians, the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, the American Association of Medical Colleges and the National Medical Association.

Building on what she witnessed in that life-changing rotation, Heron co-chaired Emory’s Intimate Partner Violence Working Group for a decade, which included representatives from Emory University and Emory Healthcare, and recommended an action plan to Emory with specific strategies for addressing the public health concern.

Her work resonates across Georgia, as well. Heron’s leadership has included organizations such as the Women’s Resource Center to End Domestic Violence, the DeKalb County Domestic Violence Task Force and the Georgia Commission on Family Violence.

In all her leadership positions, reaching back to residency where she served as a chief resident, Heron has looked for people who have the heart for medicine, beyond the requisite knowledge. “Patients don’t know you, but you walk into a room and they trust you. That is sacred.”

“More than awards, it is the fundamental kindness and empathy that we must have, because the emergency medicine department is the entryway now for many people,” Heron says. “The equitable care which we try to give to people tells me that the systems can do better.”

Reflecting on a life full of beginnings

“Receiving the Jefferson Award makes me reflect on my life,” Heron says. “I promise you I didn’t plan this day. I planned to return to New York in 1997. However, I have seen over the years the progression, more accountability, more representation, even when progress isn’t linear.”

Heron was wrapping up a meeting with Provost Badia Ahad when she was told she’d been named the winner of this year’s Jefferson Award.

“I didn’t even know who had nominated me,” she says. “But I’ve won this award that people like Carlos del Rio,Lobsang Tenzin Negi,and my mentor and friend Nadine Kaslow have won, and I shed a tear. This is so surreal."

Her nominator was Dr. Jada Bussey-Jones, the Carter Smith Sr. Professor of Medicine, who received Emory’s Exemplary Teacher award in 2021.

“Dr. Heron has been a passionate, tireless and innovative advocate for social justice in medicine and in the community,” says Bussey-Jones, who also serves as division director of Emory General Internal Medicine and associate dean for professional development at Grady. “Genuinely committed, caring, fearless and persuasive, she can bring people together in effective and empowering ways.

“A true champion and compassionate individual who fights for the underdog, she has a great ability to inspire others to give back to the community and partner in collaborative and supportive ways to ensure they are successful in their efforts,” adds Bussey-Jones.

Heron says she sees much of her life as beginnings, rather than endings, and that she lives on the side of love. In one case, it’s a full circle. Heron says she’s continuing to fight for the beliefs that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held, from training at MLK Hospital in L.A. to now working in the city of his birth and final resting place.

So the questions are, “Where are you with your heart and soul in the profession?” she asks those pursuing, working and leading in the medical field. “If you’re called to do this work, grounded in purposeful learning and engagement, the rest will work itself out.

“Is the journey one in which you are enjoying it, living it and making decisions through it that will help you be your best self, so that others can be their best self also? Those questions are ones we should all be willing to answer.”