Angella Dorothea Ferguson (born February 15, 1925) is an American pediatrician known for her groundbreaking research on sickle cell disease.
[3] Though her father was a high school teacher, had his own architectural firm, and was a U.S. Army reservist, the family struggled financially, especially during the Great Depression.
[7] Her early research required her to understand normal development in African American children, but to her surprise no such baseline data existed.
She attributed this trend to the fact that the parents of African American infants often did not have playpens or high chairs for them; hence they learned to sit and stand earlier than their white counterparts.
[2] While collecting data to correlate children's height and weight with age, Ferguson noticed a high prevalence of sickle cell disease among the infants she treated in her practice.
[9] In 1965 Ferguson was given the responsibility of overseeing the design and construction of Freedman's new pediatrics wing, and eventually the renovation of the entire hospital, completed in 1975.