Regina Benjamin , (born Oct. 26, 1956, Mobile, Ala., U.S.), American physician who in 2009 became the 18th surgeon general of the United States. Prior to her government appointment, she had spent most of her medical career serving poor families in a shrimping village on the Gulf Coast of Alabama.

Benjamin received a B.S. (1979) from Xavier University of Louisiana. After first attending (1980–82) the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Ga., Benjamin obtained an M.D. (1984) from the University of Alabama and completed a residency in family practice at the Medical Center of Central Georgia in 1987. Benjamin attended medical school with the aid of funding from the National Health Service Corps, a U.S. federal program that paid medical school tuition in exchange for a commitment to work for a defined period in an area with few or no doctors. In 1990 Benjamin founded the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic, and the following year she obtained an M.B.A. from Tulane University, New Orleans.

Throughout her career Benjamin was active in medical organizations and advisory groups. From 1986 to 1987 she served on the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) Women in Medicine Panel, and in 1995 she became the first African American woman and the first person below the age of 40 to be elected to the AMA’s board of trustees. As president (2002–03) of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama, she was the first African American woman to preside as president of a state medical society. From 1996 to 2002 she served on the board of Physicians for Human Rights, and in 1998 she received the Nelson Mandela Award for Health and Human Rights. Benjamin worked with the University of South Alabama’s College of Medicine, and from 2000 to 2001 she was in charge of the university’s telemedicine distance learning program, which offered medical education and health care to clinicians and patients in rural areas through a telecommunications network.

Benjamin achieved distinction for the dedication she showed in providing health care