Tene Hamilton Franklin
In her new job as director of the state of Tennessee’s Office of Minority Health and Disparities Elimination, former Chattanoogan Tene Hamilton Franklin is quite aware of how genetics and environment combine to affect physical health.
The trained genetic counselor also knows that the environment she was in as a pioneering female student at Baylor aided her academic and emotional wellbeing.
“It was hard, but you were able to overcome,” recalled Mrs.
Franklin of starting at Baylor in 1986 during its second year of coeducation. “The faculty members were accommodating to make sure we had the resources to make the transition.”
As black history month is observed in February, a look at Mrs. Franklin’s life shows a person who was able to thrive at Baylor before graduating in 1991, and someone who has continued to achieve and contribute in health-care education and support.
After graduating from the University of Virginia and then receiving a master’s degree in genetic counseling from Howard University in 1999, Mrs. Franklin helped provide educational and informational resources for the Human Genome Project. That comprehensive effort tried to map and understand all human genes.
From 2004 until assuming her current job within the Tennessee Department of Health in September, she worked at Meharry Medical Center in Nashville as a genetic counselor. In that work, she offered assessment, education and support for individuals with an inherited physical condition.
In her present position, she and her office work with all 95 county health departments in addressing and trying to improve the disparities in health among different populations and communities. That could include health problems specific to a minority population like African-Americans, or a lack of access to good health care in a low-income Appalachian community.
“My job is to streamline our resources and conversation to eliminate the health disparities in Tennessee,” said Mrs. Franklin, who lives in North Nashville with her husband, Middle Tennessee State University political science professor Sekou Franklin, and their two daughters, Sojourner and Langston. “The goal is to focus on resilience. And the key is balance – how people live their lives.”
Despite the challenges in combating such serious health problems as obesity, she has found the work quite enjoyable and worthwhile.
“What I find rewarding is to be able to help so many people in a meaningful way,” she said. “I’m actually part of creating solutions to help people be able to have better qualities of life.”
Mrs. Franklin has been trying to create better solutions since she was a seventh-grader at Ooltewah Middle School and decided to enroll at Baylor the next year, even though she had to leave her old friends behind.
“My parents made me go search for the best school,” she said. “I was very reluctant to leave. But (the late former admissions director) Jimmy Duke gave me a tour of the campus, and after the tour I fell in love with the school and decided that is the place I wanted to be.”
At Baylor she had a very eclectic experience, being involved in such diverse extracurricular activities as basketball, the Baylor Players drama group, soccer, track, and Walkabout.
“I had a very well-rounded experience and even played the clarinet in the band when Baylor first started one,” she said with a laugh.
To this day, she continues to sing praises of her time at Baylor, from the memorable experiences with classmates, to the influences of some of her teachers.
She remembers that her Advanced Placement biology teacher, Bill Tatum, taught her critical thinking skills, and that her basketball coach, Doug Moser, instilled in her and her teammates how to react at critical times. She has never forgotten a low-scoring upset the team had over Brainerd one year simply by focusing on defense.
Although she is no longer shooting a basketball competitively, the experiences help her when she has to shoot straight about the complexities of health-care education.
“Even now when I run into adversity, I think of my times on the basketball court,” she said with a fond remembrance.
Jcshearer2@comcast.net