I got the opportunity to make a lateral transition from clinical operations into medical education at Mount Sinai as residency director to establish a residency program. That really came about through a personal connection with Shelley Jacobson, who had just been selected as the first chair of emergency medicine in the new department of emergency medicine at the medical school at Mount Sinai. He had been the director of the emergency department when I was at Albert Einstein College of Medicine as a student and actually had a lot to do with my going into emergency medicine. It was really that personal connection that gave me the opportunity.

Then I got another opportunity offered to me, which was to do a midcareer fellowship in health services research, which gave me the tools to then make another lateral transition from graduate medical education into research.

KK: I’ll ask Leon first. Can you share some of the positive experiences and maybe some of the challenges that you encountered as you were starting to move into leadership roles?

LH: From a positive standpoint, I think I was fortunate and blessed to have two mentors early in my career, both of whom were white men, who were very supportive of my growth and development and were very out-front as it relates to making sure that there was improved or increased diversity in their respective departments. Initially, when I was at Henry Ford [for residency], my first advisor, Michael Tomlanovich, was the vice president of administration for the health system and had been the chair of the department when he was still a faculty member in the department. Mike was really the first person who started to help me guide my administrative career and think about combining academics, administration, and clinical care. He has been supportive always. I actually got my master’s degree while I was still working full-time, and Mike was very supportive.

Arthur Kellermann recruited me to Emory back in 1996–97, and I think Arthur has been a good, if not a great, role model with really trying to promote diversity in his leadership team. He had a very diverse leadership team—white, black, homosexual, heterosexual. I think he’s also been very promotive of my career and making sure that I could advance appropriately up through the ranks.

You know, there are negative things that have always popped up that people probably never notice. At Grady, for example, we have two medical schools that support the institution from a clinical standpoint, both Emory and Morehouse. Morehouse is a largely African-American medical school with a lot of history in terms of producing African-American physicians. One of the things that I always encountered was there were patients and sometimes even staff who could not assume that I was an Emory physician. Not to say that Morehouse is bad or Emory is bad, but the assumption was that, as an African-American male, I could only work for Morehouse. Those were just some of those little things we had, subtleties we had. I had to tell people, “Yup, I work for Emory, and I’m pretty qualified.”