Following the baseball great’s death in October 1972, Jackie Robinson’s family established the Jackie Robinson Foundation to carry on his legacy for social change. This included a focus on youth development through education with a scholarship program.
Currently, there are more than 1,500 Jackie Robinson Foundation Scholars positively impacting communities across the globe including UConn Health’s Dr. Biree Andemariam, a 1996 graduate of the Scholars program.
“As a little girl growing up in Boston we all knew about Jackie Robinson. We understood what a pioneer he was, how he paved the way for little brown children like ourselves who later became Jackie Robinson Scholars,” said Andemariam, founder and director of the New England Sickle Cell Institute at UConn Health. “But I had no idea at the time that I applied how impactful being a Jackie Robinson Foundation Scholar was going to be. And what it could do for young, college students like myself in terms of career building, confidence and a sense of the importance of always giving back to community just like Jackie Robinson did throughout his life.”
As associate professor of medicine at UConn School of Medicine and a hematologist specializing in sickle cell disease at UConn John Dempsey Hospital, Andemariam has been leading the way forward in transforming the care of patients living with sickle cell disease.
Her New England Sickle Cell Institute is the first and only dedicated center of its kind in the region for management of the disease with its own dedicated clinical center to help adults combat the daily suffering associated with sickle cell disease and improve their overall quality of life. Andemariam works hard to raise awareness and to identify more sickle cell patients in the surrounding communities to help them better manage their health, reduce their pain symptoms and disease complication risks, and to keep them out of the hospital so they could enjoy their lives more. Her once small program has now grown from just a dozen patients to now comprehensively serving more than 220 patients.
Sickle cell is a devastating and painful inherited red blood cell disease. Sadly, life expectancy for the majority of people with sickle cell is age 40 or less. In the United States, African-Americans and Latinos are predominantly affected. Currently there are about 1,000 adults in the state of Connecticut affected by the disease.
“I’ve really been fortunate to experience a lot of professional successes and I really credit the Jackie Robinson Foundation for giving me literally the foundation, and support, and guidance and love, and community that I needed to launch me on my way,” said Andemariam.
She adds: “I certainly can’t compare myself to Jackie Robinson, but I do strive in everything that I do with respect to sickle cell disease to emulate what he did, to have that courage, to make a difference, and to be the voice of the voiceless.”
Watch the MLB Network’s powerful profile about Andemariam and how the Jackie Robinson Foundation’s Scholars program accelerated her education, career, and unique patient care efforts at UConn Health, here.
