Carol Bennett retired in September 2026 as the Henry E. Singleton Chair in Urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, thirty-nine years after she became the first Black woman board-certified by the American Board of Urology.
The certification came in 1987. What she did with it is the part that took four decades.
Bennett decided on medicine at fifteen, working a summer job in the administrator’s office of a Pittsburgh community hospital. “I’d see these men, they were all men then, with these white starched coats,” she said. “They would float in, have a meeting with the administrator and float out.” What stayed with her was the room they commanded. “I liked their presence, something about their gravitas, the respect people have for them, the knowledge they clearly had,” she said. “I decided, you know, I can do what they’re doing, so that’s what propelled me.”
She took a bachelor’s degree at Boston University and went to medical school at Georgetown, where she found a small group of friends who were all African American and all headed the same way. “One was my roommate. To this very day, we’re friends,” she said.
Her postgraduate training was at the University of Michigan, where she joined the faculty as an instructor in 1983 and worked with her mentor Dr. Edward McGuire on a spinal cord injury fertility program. She moved to USC in 1988 and to UCLA in 1996, where she was the first woman on the urology faculty and became chief urologist at the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Hospital. In 2022 that clinic was renamed the Carol J. Bennett Urology Clinic. She was appointed to the Singleton Chair in 2019.
The record behind the title is more than eighty peer-reviewed papers and nearly four million dollars in research grants. The 2010 Planetree Physician Leadership Award went to her for rebuilding the West Los Angeles urology facilities. “We made a clinic that was respectful of the patients and respectful of the clinicians,” she said.
Asked what the job turned out to be, she named teaching. “You become a role model,” she said. “You’re teaching the resident, you’re teaching the student nurse practitioner, you’re teaching the LVN, the nurse’s aide.” The part she said she is proudest of is not a paper. “I was able to have a lot of my staff move on and move up and move out,” she said.
