Tina Young Poussaint facts for kids

Tina Young Poussaint is a very smart doctor and a professor at Harvard Medical School. She is a special kind of doctor called a neuroradiologist at Boston Children's Hospital. This means she uses special scans to look at the brains and nervous systems of children. In 2010, she was chosen to be the President of the American Society of Pediatric Neuroradiology, which is a big group for doctors who specialize in children's brain imaging.

Early Life and School

Tina Young Poussaint was born in Rochester, New York. Her dad, Lionel W. Young, was also a doctor who used X-rays to look at kids. He was a pediatric radiologist. Her mom, Florence, was a foot doctor before she retired.

Tina went to Mount Holyoke College where she studied math and biology. She was a fantastic student! She graduated with very high honors and was even invited to join a special honor society called Phi Beta Kappa.

After college, Tina went to Yale School of Medicine to become a doctor. She met another future doctor, Valerie E. Stone, there. In her class at Yale, only three out of 102 students were African-American women. Tina was also chosen for another special honor society, Alpha Omega Alpha, while at Yale. She finished medical school in 1983.

Her Amazing Career

Dr. Poussaint did her special training in radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She made history there! She was the very first African-American woman to complete this training at that hospital. In 1989, she became the first African-American doctor to work full-time in radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

In 1993, Dr. Poussaint joined the Department of Radiology at Boston Children's Hospital. She became the director of the Neuroimaging Center for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium in 2003. This means she helps lead the work of using brain scans to study and understand brain tumors in children.

In 2011, she became a full professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School. This is a very important teaching position. Her research focuses on making magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) even better. She uses MRI to help doctors find and understand brain tumors in children. She was also given a special honor when a new position at Boston Children's Hospital was named after her father, the Lionel W. Young Chair in Radiology.

Awards and Honors

Dr. Poussaint has received many awards for her important work:

• 2010: She was the President of the American Society of Pediatric Neuroradiology.
• 2013: She became a Fellow of the American College of Radiology. This is a high honor given to experienced radiologists.
• 2017: She received the Gold Medal Award from the American Society of Pediatric Neuroradiology. This is one of the highest honors in her field.

Her Family Life

Tina Young married Alvin Poussaint in 1992. Her husband is also a professor at Harvard Medical School, where he teaches about Psychiatry.