Our talented leadership team guides our efforts in driving research, personalized patient care, and impactful education in the Division of General Internal Medicine and Population Science.
Meet Our Division Director
Andrea Cherrington, M.D., MPH
Andrea Cherrington, M.D., MPH, has been named the Director of our new Division of General Internal Medicine and Population Science (GIMPOP). She is currently Professor of Medicine, Associate Professor of Public Health, and the Triton Endowed Professor in Health Equity Research.
A graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Cherrington trained in Internal Medicine and served as Chief Medical Resident at UAB before being selected as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at the University of North Carolina, where she received the MPH degree.
She initially joined our faculty in the Division of General Internal Medicine before transitioning to the Division of Preventive Medicine as her research program flourished, eventually serving as Interim Division Director of Preventive Medicine and later becoming Division Director of GIMPOP. She was selected for a five-year Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Physician Faculty Scholar Award and developed an extramurally funded research program to reduce health disparities and improve care for people with chronic disease.
Cherrington serves as the principal investigator on the $21 million NIMHD P50 grant Deep South Center to Reduce Disparities in Chronic Diseases, now known as the Forge Ahead Center. The multi-institutional grant investigates the prevention, treatment and management of cardiometabolic diseases associated with health disparities in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. For this exceptional work, she was recognized as the 2021 award winner and lecturer for Richard B. Marchase, Ph.D., Interdisciplinary Research Symposium at UAB. She has also served as medical director for the Diabetes Clinic at Cooper Green Mercy Health Services since 2013.
In 2017, Cherrington established UAB’s Clinical and Population Health Sciences Program. This integrative program developed a thriving research environment for academic generalists and social-behavioral scientists focused on developing independent research careers. The program has trained physicians to conduct research and recruited and developed faculty, eight of whom now have K awards.
She also led a seminar series for faculty in the Divisions of General Internal Medicine and Preventive Medicine to explore shared academic interests, with focus on management of chronic disease and reduction in health disparities. The shared experiences of faculty in the two divisions led to a proposal to create a single division, the Division of General Internal Medicine and Population Science, which was recently approved by the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees.
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