Sherman James
Sherman A. James was born in Hartsville, SC, in 1943. He received his A.B. (Psychology and Philosophy) in 1964 from Talladega College (AL). After service as a commissioned officer (1965-1969) in the US Air Force, he pursued graduate study in social psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, earning the PhD in 1973. James joined the faculty of the Department of Epidemiology at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1973. Under the tutelage of John Cassel and Herman (Al) Tyroler, he became a social epidemiologist focusing on the role of chronic exposure to adverse social conditions in the epidemic of hypertension and related diseases among Black Americans. He is best known for originating the John Henryism hypothesis which posits that repeated, high-effort coping (John Henryism) with systemic adversity – poverty and racial discrimination – accelerates physiological wear and tear on the cardiovascular system of Black Americans fueling the early onset of hypertension.
Dr. James taught at the University of Michigan from 1989-2003 where, as a professor of epidemiology, he taught the school-wide Introduction to Epidemiology course for non-majors, a yearly seminar in social epidemiology, chaired 17 doctoral dissertation committees, and from 1993-1998, served as the School’s Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. In 1998, he was appointed the John P. Kirscht Collegiate Professor of Public Health, Chair of the Department of Health Behavior, and Founding Director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture and Health (CRECH) whose mission, as the first Center of its kind in any US School of Public Health, was to promote the development of new paradigms for public health research in an increasingly diverse America. Read more