Before Dr. Bettina Drake stepped onstage to have Washington University’s custom, engraved professorship medallion draped across her neck, the audience understood why she was being honored.
Drake, a cancer epidemiologist at WashU Medicine and Siteman Cancer Center, has built much of her career around taking cancer research into communities disproportionately affected by the disease, particularly addressing racial disparities in breast, prostate and colorectal cancer.
That work was recognized Monday when Drake was installed as the Michael F. Neidorff Professor. Neidorff, who died in 2022, was chairman, president and CEO of Centene and supported community-based approaches to health and economic challenges.
Sarah London, CEO of Centene, said Drake’s outreach and research are “incredibly aligned with the work we do at Centene and the work we want to continue to promote and amplify as we go forward.”
Drake, a professor of surgery, also directs the Confluence Collaborative for Community Engagement.
Lawrence Bryant | The St. Louis American
Dr. Bruce D. Levy, dean of WashU Medicine, credited Drake with helping improve cancer outcomes through her community outreach.
“She’s led efforts that have significantly reduced breast cancer disparities and improved breast cancer outcomes for African American women in our region; lowered colon cancer fatality rates and expanded vital smoking cessation programs,” Levy said.
Dr. Timothy J. Eberlein cited Drake’s development of Health on the Move, which pairs community health workers with mobile mammography and lung cancer screening services.
Drake also co-leads the Prostate Cancer Community Partnership, part of the Program for the Elimination of Cancer Disparities, which works to reduce prostate cancer disparities in the region.
Her approach, Drake said, requires researchers to go beyond identifying unequal health outcomes.
“You just can’t identify problems; you have to engage with the community and then implement interventions to have a greater impact,” she said.
Drake began her presentation with a reflection on the humble beginnings that helped shape those values.
She was born and raised in “micro-politan” Marshall, a small town that “sits in the piney woods of East Texas with its farmland and cattle ranches.” The town, she noted, was featured in the Denzel Washington movie “The Great Debaters.”
Drake is the youngest of Leroy and Bettye Fisher’s five children. She grew up on “Fisher Drive,” named in honor of her father, who spent his career in community development as a construction supervisor.
After her father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Drake became involved in community outreach through area churches, providing information about cancer prevention and screening.
“The combination of my outreach experiences and my father’s diagnosis fueled my interest and passion in disparities research,” Drake said.
But her pride goes beyond the street bearing her father’s name to the sense of community she experienced growing up in Marshall.
“It was a town where you could borrow a cup of sugar or a half dozen eggs from your neighbor, which I literally did,” Drake recalled. “Kids playing in the Texas heat could pause our play and always get a cup of water or a popsicle from the family down the street. And when tragedy happened to one of the families in our community, we would physically come together to support each other and pray for one another.”
The importance of “faith, service and community are values that I carry with me and inform the research that I do today,” Drake said.
She began researching prostate cancer as a doctoral student at the University of South Carolina. Another key influence was the late Dr. Bill Carter Jenkins, an epidemiologist and activist associated with exposing ethical abuses in the U.S. government’s Tuskegee syphilis study.
“What I learned from Dr. Jenkins was the methods of identifying problems and the risk factors that cause them, but I was even learning how to engage communities to refine the problem,” Drake recalled. “Bill Jenkins’ methodology was not just identifying problems; it was trying to understand why the problem existed in certain communities and then taking actions.”
“When we do research, we want our patient population to resemble the people who will be receiving the treatment in the future,” she said.
Drake earned a doctorate in epidemiology from the University of South Carolina and a master’s degree in public health epidemiology from the University of North Texas Health Science Center. She completed postdoctoral studies at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
WashU Chancellor Dr. Andrew D. Martin praised Drake for demonstrating “how to take research out into the community to serve the people of St. Louis and our region.”
“And for that,” Martin added, “we are all in awe.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow.