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Demi Dawkins M.D., a Charlotte native and a vascular and endovascular fellow at Semmes Murphey Clinic in Memphis, Tennessee, is one of 33 Black women neurosurgeons in the United States.

Dr. Demi Dawkins is one of 33 Black women neurosurgeons nationwide.

She doesn’t want to be the last.

“If I wanted to email a Black woman, neurosurgeon, right now to get advice, it'd be hard for me,” said Dawkins, a South Mecklenburg High School graduate. “I’d have to ask around and have to see if someone knows someone. While I would eventually get there, because neurosurgery is such a small field, I think we can do better for each other.”

Dawkins is a vascular and endovascular fellow at Semmes Murphey Clinic in Memphis, Tennessee where she focuses on the cerebrovascular, such as treating strokes, brain aneurysms, and brain vascular malformations. Dawkins wakes up every day around 5:30 a.m. and gets ready to go to the hospital she is assigned for the day. Once there, she checks on patients and to see what cases might have come in overnight.

Most surgical procedures typically begin around 7:30 a.m. or 8 a.m.

Dawkins assists with diagnostic surgeries in the operating room where pictures are taken of the blood vessels in the head and neck. She also could be assigned surgeries that treat blocked arteries in those parts of the body.

Dawkins serves across five community hospitals; therefore, her schedule varies depending on the day.

As a fellow, on weekdays, she is typically on-call one or two times and once a month on weekends, where she may be called in to treat unexpected emergencies like acute strokes, ruptured aneurysms, or brain hemorrhages.

“These can show up anytime, day or night – while you’re sleeping, while you’re eating with friends or family so that part of my life can be a bit unpredictable,” Dawkins said.

During the pandemic, Dawkins said she has noticed an increase in the number of people having strokes. With some elective surgeries getting postponed or cancelled because of COVID, that has limited the amount of care physicians can provide to their patients.

Dawkins, 33, grew up in south Charlotte where her favorite subjects were math and science. As a kid, she had dreamed of becoming a doctor one day. Her parents, Phyllis, a Johnson C. Smith University graduate and former Bennett College president, and Bobby, encouraged Demi and her sister Malia to be the best in everything they do.

“Our parents, being as successful as they were, both of them went on to get their PhDs,” Dawkins said. “My dad worked as a chemist and was very successful and my mom has been a trailblazer in higher education. It felt like they weren’t pressuring me to be educated. I just wanted to be like them.”

In 2006, Dawkins graduated South Mecklenburg High School and enrolled at Ohio State University, where she majored in chemistry and minored in African American studies. In 2010, she enrolled at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, where she discovered her passion for neurosurgery.

Like most medical students, Dawkins stumbled on which area to focus on. At first, she wanted to be a pediatrician, then an obstetrician-gynecologist. After stepping into an operating room for the first time as a medical school student, she was convinced neurosurgery was her passion.

“One night, when I was just taking call, I went into an OR,” Dawkins recalled. “I was like, ‘oh, I’ll never see something like this again. So why don’t I watch, and I stayed up all night watching and helping with the surgery, and I walked out the next morning, not feeling tired, just feeling completely excited about what I had done.”

In 2014, Dawkins graduated ECU and then went on to complete her residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, making her the first Black female neurosurgeon to graduate from the institution.

“It feels very strange, I’d say,” Dawkins said. “I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished. I’ve worked really hard putting in a lot of time to get where I am, but then at the same time, I sometimes sit back, and I think it’s 2021. Why am I just now the first? I feel like we should be so much further than that.”

There is a disparity of women doctors and neurosurgeons globally, according to a 2021 study by the Journal of Neurosurgery, and Black women physicians and neurosurgeons are even more scarce. In the U.S., women make up 35% of all doctors. In 2019, only 2% of Black women were practicing physicians. Women make up nearly 13% of practicing surgeons in U.S., but Black women represent 0.074%.

In 1979, the Women in Neurosurgery movement was started by eight female neurosurgeons to encourage leadership and create a supportive environment for women in the field. In recent years, WINS has gained more attention, but the disparity still lies between Black women in neurosurgery and their white counterparts.

“We have … women in neurosurgery, and those have been growing and booming and have definitely demonstrated an opportunity for us to find mentors that are appropriate for us,” Dawkins said. “But that same thing needs to be applied to all intersections – Black women, Black men, Black people in general, and other minority groups.”

Neurosurgery is a male-dominated field, with a lack of diversity and inclusion across racial and gender lines. As a minority in the field, it barely crosses Dawkins’ mind.

“Most days, thankfully, I don’t think about it,” she said. “I do my job, I do my surgeries, I see my patients. There are many days I could go the whole day and not think that. But it’s not like that every day, and it’s not like that with every co-worker and it’s definitely not like that with every patient.”

Dawkins said there have been times where she had experienced microaggressions while on the job and had patients who did not want her to operate on them because of the color of her skin.

Seventy percent of Black general surgical residents have reported facing racial discrimination, with Black female residents experiencing the highest rates of discrimination.

“There’s a couple of layers to it,” Dawkins explained. “I think there’s the more subtle things when you walk in, you examine a patient, people assuming you’re not supposed to be in the room, assuming you’re not the surgeon when you’re seeing a patient. These little subtle kind of slaps in the face that we have to swallow on a day-to-day basis, it can be discouraging and can lead to burnout and not knowing that there's anyone else out there also it does the same thing.”

However, Dawkins has had patients who were grateful to have a doctor that looked like them.

“It’s great for us to have representation in medicine,” she said. “But to see the reactions, when you have a Black patient or a Black family and you walk in and you tell them that you’re their doctor, just the pride that they have in you, and how much more comfortable they feel talking to you is all the reason you need to do this.”

Malia Dawkins Jennings, Dawkins’ older sister, is forever proud of the barriers that her sibling has broken within neurosurgery.

“She’s so humble,” Jennings said. “There are no words for the level of intensity of pride I have and everything that my sister has achieved and how she’s paved her own path.”
Outside of work, Dawkins enjoys watching movies, spending time with her sister, and watching the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy.”

As a mentor to young aspiring neurosurgeons, Dawkins helps mentees navigate through the process of becoming a doctor.

“It’s such a small field and I’m one of very few. I can provide that kind of mentorship,” she said. “I think the issue is for those people who don't know I exist or don't know that many of us exist. They don’t know who they can look to for that kind of aid.”

Aaliyah Bowden, who covers health for The Post is a Report for America corps member.

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