The 150th Commencement Exercises of Meharry Medical College will be held at The Temple Church, 3810 Kings Lane, Nashville, TN, on Saturday, May 17, 2025. On Commencement Day, there will be two
two ceremonies, to accommodate the friends and families of the graduates. The MMC Schools of Medicine and Dentistry will hold their Commencement Exercises beginning at 8:30 a.m., and then will be followed that afternoon by the Schools of Graduate Studies, Applied Computational Sciences, and Global Health at 2 p.m. Both events will be available to view, streaming on the Meharry YouTube channel.
Ralph Alvarado, M.D., FACP will be the Commencement Speaker for the 8:30 a.m. Commencement Ceremony, and Georges C. Benjamin, M.D. will be the Commencement Speaker for the 2 p.m. Commencement Ceremony.
Ralph Alvarado, M.D., FACP, assumed the duties of the 15th commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Health in January 2023. Dr. Alvarado has spent a decade in public service and in 2014 was the first Hispanic member elected to the Kentucky General Assembly where he represented Kentucky’s 28th Senate District. During his service in the Kentucky Senate, Dr. Alvarado was chairman of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, led the Substance Abuse Recovery Task Force and was a member of several committees, including the Medicaid Oversight Subcommittee, the Banking and Insurance Committee and the State and Local Government Committee.
Dr. Alvarado has been a practicing physician for the past 29 years, working in a variety of clinical settings. He has served as a small – town primary care physician, a hospitalist and continues to see patients at skilled nursing facilities. Dr. Alvarado has served as medical director for Stableview Health and Signature Advantage, Medicare health plan operators in Lexington, Ky. He has also served as medical director and finance chairman for Kentucky One Health Medical Group in Louisville, Ky. and as vice chairman of the board for Quality Independent Physicians, an accountable care organization also in Louisville. Dr. Alvarado earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, Calif., in 1990, where he went on to receive his doctorate in medicine in 1994. Dr. Alvarado completed his residency in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Kentucky in 1998.
Georges C. Benjamin, M.D., is a well – known health policy leader, practitioner and administrator. He currently serves as the executive director of the American Public Health Association, the nation’s oldest and largest organization of public health professionals. He is also a former secretary of health for the state of Maryland. Dr. Benjamin is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He is board-certified in internal medicine, a master of the American College of Physicians, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, a fellow emeritus of the American College of Emergency Physicians, an honorary fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Public Health and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.
He serves on several nonprofit boards such as Research! America, the Truth Foundation, the Reagan-Udall Foundation and Ceres. He is also a former member of the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, a council that advises the president on how best to assure the security of the nation’s critical infrastructure.
The College will host various social and educational Reunion and Homecoming events May 14 -18.
