Tamera Coyne-Beasley, MD Awarded Outstanding Community Service Award

Tamera Coyne-Beasley, MD, MPH, FAAP, a native of Boston, earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry at Brown University, and completed her medical degree and medicine-pediatric residency at Duke. Post graduate work at UNC included a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, Masters in Epidemiology, Preventive Medicine fellowship and a Medical Management program at the Kenan-Flagler Business School. She is a Professor in the UNC Departments of Pediatrics and Internal Medicine and a Faculty Research Fellow at the Sheps Center for Health Services Research.

Dr. Coyne-Beasley is an accomplished leader in adolescent immunizations, firearm safety, youth violence and suicide prevention. She has assisted in the development of national and state policy initiatives to reduce these injuries, including collaborating on the NC Youth Suicide Prevention Plan and efforts sponsored by the National Academies of Science, The President’s Cancer Panel, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the American Medical Association, National Firearm Research Collaborative, NC Department of Health and Human Services, NC Department of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, NC Adolescent Health Task Force, and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM). As a member of SAHM, the international society of adolescent health practitioners, she has been a Board member and regional president of the Virginias-Carolinas Regional Chapter, serving 3 consecutive terms. She is currently SAHM’s liaison to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Pediatric Research. She is also currently a voting member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), serving as a Special Government Employee appointed by the Obama Administration.

Dr. Coyne-Beasley is the Founding Director of the NC Child Health Research Network (NC CHRN) and the Co-Director of the NC Multidisciplinary Adolescent Research Consortium for Health (NC MARCH), both are affiliated networks of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. She is also the Associate Director of Child Health Community Engagement Service within the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, and the Principal Investigator of the Metamorphosis Project with the purpose of developing an evidenced-based road map to improve the health of the 1.4 million young people aged 10-20 in North Carolina.

The NC TraCS Institute is the integrated home of the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program, administered by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). The CTSA Consortium, made up of 60 medical institutions across the US, aims to improve human health by transforming the research and training environment to enhance the efficiency and quality of clinical and translational research.

Locally, Dr. Coyne-Beasley founded the Durham County Gun Safety Team which continues to provide, in partnership with the Durham County Health Department, firearm safety programs and gun locks for Durham residents. This team has served as a model for many firearm safety teams. She also served as a volunteer physician and Director of Teen-Link services at the Lincoln Community Health Center for 8 years. Her interests and reach extends to children and adolescents globally as a provider of spiritual and physical healing through medical and disaster relief missions in Africa, Central America, South America and the Caribbean.

Dr. Coyne-Beasley’s efforts over the last 15 years have improved child and adolescent health and wellness in NC. She has accomplished this through clinical practice, teaching, mentoring, and research, as well as through program and intervention development, advocacy, and public policy development. Her broad and diverse interests and skills in adolescent health have been focused in research on two areas – reproductive health and injury prevention with an emphasis on engaging clergy, churches, and community members as active participants in intervention development and implementation.

Dr. Coyne-Beasley states that her proudest accomplishments are her teenage children, Keith and Kayla who she describes as scholar-athletes and her 20+ year marriage to Darryl Beasley. More information about the award and the North Carolina Pediatric Society is available.