Soror Pamela Payne Foster is a Preventive Medicine/Public Health physician and currently serves as Deputy Director of the Rural Health Institute for Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Alabama.  Her career has focused on a variety of experiences in both academic and non-academic settings with the primary goal of decreasing disparities in health in underserved communities such as African Americans and Latinos.  She has recently authored her first book, “Is there a balm in Black America? aimed at educating and empowering African American church leadership on HIV/AIDS.  The book is part of the work she and her husband, William Foster, Jr, a social worker, started in the founding of AframSouth in 2007.  The nonprofit organization, AframSouth, aims to develop community-based health, social service, as well as cultural projects aimed at lifting up and enhancing the strengths of the Black family.

Dr. Foster received her B.S. from Xavier University of Louisiana where she pledged Gamma Alpha Chapter in Spring 1979.  After graduating from Xavier in 1981, she received both a M.S in Biomedical Sciences and M.D. from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee.  She completed her internship in Internal Medicine and residency in Preventive Medicine/Public Health at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  Dr. Foster also received her M.P.H. at Columbia University (NY, NY).  Dr. Foster’s faculty appointments have also included Tuskegee University’s National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, Morehouse School of Medicine, The George Washington University Medical Center, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

She resides both in Montgomery and Tuscaloosa with her husband where she enjoys tennis, foreign and independent movies, reading, especially biographies, and TV especially CSI, Cold Case Files and the Nancy Grace show.