Carmen Renee Green, M.D.

Carmen Renée Green, MD, was appointed Dean of the CUNY School of Medicine on October 4, 2021. An immediate priority was getting CUNY Medicine full Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) accreditation, which had been operating under provisional-probationary status since 2015. With Dean Green’s leadership, it earned a full five-year accreditation. CUNY Medicine is the only public medical school in Manhattan and the first of the two to be founded in New York City in more than 160 years. Located in Harlem, a Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA), CUNY Medicine is home to one of the oldest public Physician Assistant MS programs in the United States (currently ranked in the top 50 nationally and #3 in New York State by U.S. News & World Report), and to an accelerated 7-year BS/MD that has eliminated the MCAT exam as a barrier to entry. In October 2023, Dean Green successfully petitioned the CUNY Board of Trustees to expand CUNY Medicine’s offerings to include a traditional four-year MD, with entry at the first year of medical school. This milestone is the first step in a multi-year strategic growth plan.
Dr. Green recruited an executive leadership team to spur innovation, expansion, and improvement across the quadripartite mission with a focus on curricular, student success, facilities, and development. She and her team have strengthened and built pathway programs to nurture prospective students from communities historically underrepresented in medicine and underserved. To further address the social determinants of medical education, Dean Green created the Bridge to Clerkship program that prepares second-year students for the USMLE, while adding a mandatory Pre-Matriculation Program to provide incoming undergraduate students opportunities for community-based research and an introduction to health disparities and biomedical education before the start of their college career. To improve the recruitment, retention, and success of Black male students in medicine in particular—a population that makes
up less than 3% of doctors today—the school’s Black Male Initiative was repositioned and invigorated as the Brothers, M.D., Initiative.
Other curricular innovations during Dean Green’s tenure include a wholly modernized Virtual Anatomy program with 3D simulation and a re-engineered Objective Structured Clinical Examination. Dr. Green is also developing more clinical and academic partnerships, with an eye toward strategic growth. Dr. Green has improved the campus environment for students by opening and upgrading spaces for study and socializing, and by creating a Student Wellness Center that provides onsite individual and group counseling programs.
A Renowned Scholar, Clinician, and Educator
Prior to joining CUNY Medicine, Dr. Green was a tenured Professor of Anesthesiology, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and Health Management & Policy at the University of Michigan’s Schools of Medicine and Public Health, and an attending physician in the Back and Pain Center. She holds faculty appointments at the Institute for Social Research and Institute for Health Policy and Innovation, and is a faculty associate in the Program for Research on Black Americans, Depression Center. Dean Green is an award-winning academic physician who is an elected fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, Gerontological Society of America, and Association of University Anesthesiologists. She was the inaugural Associate Vice President and Associate Dean for Health Equity and Inclusion at the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS), Executive Director of the Healthier Black Elders Center and Co-Director of the Community Core for the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research. Dr. Green was the founding chair for the American Pain Society’s Special Interest Group on Pain and Disparities and chair of the Public Policy Committee. She is Professor Emerita in the U-M School of Medicine.
Dr. Green received her undergraduate degree from University of Michigan-Flint and her MD from Michigan State University College of Human Medicine where she was also inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha honor medical society. Dr. Green completed an Anesthesiology residency, subspecialty training in Ambulatory and Obstetrical Anesthesia, and a Pain Medicine fellowship at UMHS as well as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Aging Butler-Williams Scholar program, van Hedwig Ameringen Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine (ELAM) fellowship, and Mayday Pain & Society fellowship. Dean Green was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy fellow at the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) of the National Academies where she also worked in the U.S. Senate Children and Families subcommittee (Sen. Christopher Dodd, Chair) within Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (Sen. Edward (Ted) Kennedy, Chair), she helped draft the National Pain Care Policy Act, incorporated in the Affordable Care Act, and was thanked in the Congressional
Record by Sen. Kennedy for contributions to the FDA reauthorization, i.e. including gender and race variables to assess outcomes.
At the nexus of public health and healthcare quality, equity, and policy, Dr. Green’s research agenda focuses on pain and the social determinants of health. She is the author of germinal and seminal papers that poignantly reveal unequal treatment, disparities, variability in decision-making, and diminished health care quality; revealing suboptimal access to health and pain care across the life course for women, minorities, and low-income people. An innovator, she often uses narrative medicine and photo-voice techniques to promote empathy and healing, an approach she brought to CUNY Medicine’s Pre-Matriculation Program. Dr. Green published a selective review focusing on the unequal burden of pain in Pain Medicine which remains the most cited article in the journal’s history and was the guest editor for the its special issue on disparities. She was the first to identify hospital security errors and the genesis of social inequities in pain care.
Honors, Recognitions, and a Lifetime of Service
Dr. Green received several honors including UMHS Employee of the Year, U-M Woman of Color of the Year for Human Relations, Consumer Checkbook’s Top 100 Doctors, Top 1% of Pain Doctors by U.S. News and World Report, Who’s Who in America, U-M Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award, John Liebeskind Pain Management Research Award, Elizabeth Narcessian Award for Outstanding Educational Achievements, and MSU CHM Distinguished Alumni Award. In 2022, She was named to the Forbes 50 Over 50 Impact list. Her board service includes NAM’s Health Care Services Board, Michigan Governor’s Pain and Symptom Advisory Committee, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee and HHS Oversight Committee for the National Pain Strategy (Disparities Committee Co-Chair) as well as NIH’s Advisory Committee for the Eunice Shriver National Institute of Child and Human Development, Advisory Committee for Research on Women’s Health, and National Center for Medical Rehabilitation Research, and Associated Medical Schools of New York Executive Board (Vice Chair). Dr. Green has made invited presentations across the globe including the U.S. Congress and Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. She has worked assiduously to achieve a critical mass of minorities and women in academic medicine, biomedical sciences, and higher education. Her former students lead, teach, and inspire others.
An avid swimmer and genealogist, Dr. Green enjoys travel, photography, college football, creative writing, and time with family and friends. Dr. Green also enjoys the arts, attending operas and recitals, and appeared as the Narrator and Lincoln in Aaron Copeland’s Lincoln’s Portrait with the U-M Life Sciences Orchestra at the historic Hill Auditorium (Ann Arbor).