CHICAGO — Dr. James E. Bowman, a widely recognized expert in inherited blood diseases and population genetics, was the first tenured African-American professor in the University of Chicago’s Biological Sciences Division.

Dr. Bowman, 88, died of renal cancer Wednesday at the University of Chicago Medical Center, according to the university and his daughter, Valerie Jarrett, who is a senior adviser to President Barack Obama.

On Thursday, Jarrett recalled that in all the times she played chess with her father, she won only once — he never let her win just to boost her ego.

He took a similar approach to at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, where he was an assistant dean for minority affairs at the U. of C’s Biological Sciences Division.

“His goal was try to increase the number of underrepresented minority students who came to Pritzker, but he really wanted to emphasize that they had to be excellent,” said William McDade, deputy provost for Research and Minority Issues at the University of Chicago.

“He didn’t want to see different standards for minority students, he just wanted to have the most excellent minority students that we can train.”

Bowman was born Feb. 5, 1923 in segregated Washington, D.C.

After graduating from Howard University in 1943, he entered Howard’s medical school that fall and was then drafted into the U.S. Army as part of a three-year medical training program.

Bowman eventually came Chicago for an internship at Provident Hospital then accepted a residency at St. Luke’s Hospital (now part of Rush University Medical Center). According to the University of Chicago, he was the first black resident to train at St. Luke’s.

Around this time, he met Barbara Taylor, the daughter of Robert Taylor, the first black chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. The couple married in 1950.

Bowman was chairman of pathology for three years at Provident Hospital, then was drafted again into the military, serving as chief of pathology for a laboratory in Denver.

After his release, he found himself being offered jobs at pay far less than that of white counterparts, his daughter said.

Unhappy with pervasive racial discrimination., Dr. and Mrs. Bowman left the country in 1955 and settled in Shiraz, Iran, where they worked with other foreign doctors to establish Nemazee Hospital.