Minnie Joycelyn Elders is an American pediatrician and public health administrator who served as Surgeon General of the United States from 1993 to 1994. A vice admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, she was the second woman, second person of color, and first African American to serve as Surgeon General.
Charles Everett Koop was an American pediatric surgeon and public health administrator who served as the 13th surgeon general of the United States under President Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989. According to the Associated Press, "Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name" due to his frequent public presence around the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s.
Antonia Pantoja, was a Puerto Rican educator, social worker, feminist, civil rights leader and the founder of ASPIRA, the Puerto Rican Forum, Boricua College and Producir. In 1996, she was the first Puerto Rican woman to receive the American Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Audrey Forbes Manley is an American pediatrician and public health administrator. Manley was the first African-American woman appointed as chief resident at Cook County Children's Hospital in Chicago (1962). Manley was the first to achieve the rank of Assistant Surgeon General in 1988 and later served as the eighth president of Spelman College.
Nitza Margarita Cintrón is a Puerto Rican scientist and Chief of Space Medicine and Health Care Systems Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center.
Second Lieutenant Carmen Maria Lozano Dumler, RN,, was one of the first Puerto Rican women to become a United States Army officer. During World War II, she served as a nurse and interpreter, and provided support for patients who spoke Spanish. Lozano Dumler has since been featured in promotional and recruitment materials that celebrate diversity in the US military.
Pedro Nestor Rivera Lugo was a United States Air Force officer who in 1994 became the first Hispanic to be named medical commander in the Air Force. He was responsible for the provision of health care to more than 50,000 patients.
Mary Ellen Beck Wohl was Chief of the Division of Respiratory Diseases at Children's Hospital Boston, and served as Associate Director of the General Clinical Research Center until 2002. Since the 1962, when she first joined the staff at Children's Hospital, Wohl specialized in the respiratory diseases of children. She was also a leader in the field of clinical research on cystic fibrosis. She developed a number of techniques to evaluate the function of the lungs in young children and is the author of many research papers in this field.
Rear Admiral Kathleen Lousche Martin served as Deputy Surgeon General of the Navy/Vice Chief, Bureau of Medicine and Surgery from October 2002 until her retirement in September 2005. She also held the position as the 19th Director of the Navy Nurse Corps from August 1998 to August 2001. She serves on the board of directors for Caliburn International, a military contracting conglomerate that also oversees operations of Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children.
Major General Enrique Méndez Jr. Grau, was a United States Army officer who was also the first Puerto Rican to hold the positions of Army Deputy Surgeon General, Commander of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. He was also the Dean and President of the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. Also served as Secretary of Health of Puerto Rico.
Helen Rodríguez Trías was an American pediatrician, educator and women's rights activist. She was the first Latina president of the American Public Health Association (APHA), a founding member of the Women's Caucus of the APHA, and a recipient of the Presidential Citizens Medal. She is credited with helping to expand the range of public health services for women and children in minority and low-income populations around the world.
Alexa Irene Canady is a retired American medical doctor specializing in pediatric neurosurgery. She was born in Lansing, Michigan and earned both her bachelors and medical degree from the University of Michigan. After completing her residency at the University of Minnesota in 1981, she became the first black woman to become a neurosurgeon. This came after Ruth Kerr Jakoby became the first American woman to be board certified in neurosurgery in 1961.
Dr. José F. Cordero is a pediatrician, epidemiologist, teratologist, Head of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Georgia's College of Public Health, and former Dean of the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Puerto Rico. Cordero was an Assistant Surgeon General of the United States Public Health Service and the founding director of the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. In 2017, Cordero was awarded the Sedgwick Memorial Medal from the American Public Health Association.
The recorded history of Puerto Rican women can trace its roots back to the era of the Taíno, the indigenous people of the Caribbean, who inhabited the island that they called Boriken before the arrival of Spaniards. During the Spanish colonization the cultures and customs of the Taíno, Spanish, African and women from non-Hispanic European countries blended into what became the culture and customs of Puerto Rico.
Werner Henle and Gertrude Henle were a husband and wife team of German-American virologists. The National Library of Medicine called them "a prodigious force in virology, immunology and viral oncology during the second half of the 20th century".
Patricia Kilroy Donahoe is an American pediatric surgeon and a leading researcher in the field of developmental biology and oncology. She was the president of the American Pediatric Surgical Association from 2006 to 2007. She currently serves as the director of pediatric surgical research laboratories and chief emerita of pediatric surgical services at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Carmen C. Deseda is a Puerto Rican pediatrician. She is a medical officer and commander in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. Deseda served two terms as the state epidemiologist in the Puerto Rico Department of Health, first from 1994 to 2001, and later from January 2017 to March 2020.
Ruth L. Collins-Nakai is a retired Canadian cardiologist, educator, researcher, physician leader, healthcare advisor, and public health advocate.
United States
Vice admiral 
USPHS Commissioned Corps 
