Dr. Angelo Moore has credentials that fill a line and a story that fills a room. A nurse, military veteran, researcher, and fatherhood advocate, Moore serves as the inaugural executive director of the Center of Excellence for Integrated Health Disparities and Equity Research at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the largest HBCU in the country. He joined the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder’s 4UR Health podcast, hosted by Dr. Ronda Marie Chakolis-Hassan and Clarence Jones of Hueman Partnership, for a wide-ranging conversation on men’s health, community trust, and the urgent need for Black Americans to shape the future of artificial intelligence in health care.
The episode aired during Men’s Health Month and arrived at a moment when the hosts say conversations like this one are more necessary than ever.
From the Projects to the Podium
Moore grew up in New York City and first enrolled at Winston-Salem State University, another HBCU, with dreams of becoming a dentist. When that path did not pan out at 18, he enlisted in the military, eventually earning an ROTC scholarship that brought him back to Winston-Salem State to complete a nursing degree. What followed was a career that took him from enlisted soldier to second lieutenant, from medical-surgical and ICU nursing to a deployment in Germany during the Iraq War, where he cared for wounded soldiers as a flight officer.
Moore later earned a master’s degree as a family nurse practitioner from Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in research from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he became the first African American male to graduate from the School of Nursing. He retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel, worked at the VA in Fayetteville and later at Duke University, before joining North Carolina A&T in his current role.
“I’m really just a kid from the projects of New York City,” Moore said. “I always stay grounded in who I am.”
Men’s Health and the Call to Show Up
Prostate cancer, Moore said, represents the worst health disparity facing African American men. He also works to address breast and colon cancer disparities affecting Black women. His approach goes beyond clinical care.
“I tell fathers, ‘Take care of yourself. If you don’t do it for you, do it for your daughter,'” Moore said.
He is developing a fatherhood program aimed at helping men stay present in their children’s lives and separate relationship challenges from the responsibility of parenting. He emphasized that Black men need safe spaces to be vulnerable, learn from one another, and prioritize their well-being.
“We don’t want to leave our families in disarray because we didn’t take care of ourselves,” he said.
Access Is More Than a Card in Your Wallet
Moore pushed back on a common misconception about health care access. Having insurance, he said, is not the same as receiving care.
“Access truly is getting the care that you need when you need it,” he said. “You can have health insurance, but if you don’t know how it works, it won’t work for you.”
His work is rooted in helping community members navigate a health care system that can be overwhelming even for those who work inside it. He takes that mission literally, deploying mobile units from North Carolina A&T to go directly into neighborhoods, churches, and community spaces to conduct screenings, discuss clinical trials, and build trust on people’s own turf.
A recent research study used nursing students as community health assistants. Moore said the experience changed how many of those students understood expertise.
“They thought they were the expert,” he said. “But they realized the community members were the experts. They were learning so much from the people.”
The Language of Health Equity
One of the episode’s sharpest exchanges centered on words. Chakolis-Hassan noted that nursing has led a shift from “social determinants of health” to “social drivers of health,” a change she compared to the difference between calling yourself a dropout versus saying you simply were not successful at something yet. Moore agreed that language shapes how people understand their own power.
He also noted that when he counsels patients managing diabetes, he deliberately avoids labeling people by their diagnosis.
“You’re not a diabetic,” he said. “You’re just a person who has the disease of diabetes.”
Jones added that Hueman Partnership has worked with the University of Minnesota to bring clinicians and community members together specifically to align their vocabulary so each understands what the other means when health topics come up.
AI, Equity, and Getting in the Room
The conversation turned to artificial intelligence and what is at stake if Black communities remain on the outside of its development.
“If we’re not involved in the process, our voices and the things that matter to us are not accounted for,” Moore said. “In research we say, junk in is junk out.”
He explained that when AI and machine learning systems are built without diverse data, the decisions those systems generate reflect only the populations represented in that data. The risk, he said, is that health tools trained on narrow datasets will produce recommendations that simply do not apply to Black patients.
His advice: get involved now, at whatever level is accessible.
“Volunteer to be on a committee,” he said. “Even if there’s not a chair at the table, you bring your own chair.”
Moore said AI, used well, could help patients quickly identify the medications, procedures, or clinical trials best suited to their individual health profile. He pointed to pharmacogenomics as an emerging field that looks at how individual body chemistry, not race or ethnicity, determines how people metabolize medication, as one example of where personalized, data-informed care is headed.
He closed with a message about community relationships that go beyond grant cycles.
“Be in the community when you’re not needing anything from the community,” he said. “So when you come there, you’re not a stranger.”
Dr. Moore can be reached by email at admoore16@ncat.edu or found on LinkedIn. More information about his work is available through North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, North Carolina.