Physician. Systems Thinker. Writer.
About me
I'm a community emergency physician with a passion for applying systems thinking concepts, approaches, and methods to transform health systems. After medical training, I received a master's degree in public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
I have taught international health and health systems at Brigham Young University, and published in journals such as the Lancet and PLoS Medicine on topics related to health systems strengthening and global health.
I am the founding co-chair of the American Public Health Association’s working group on systems sciences and health. I was also the primary organizer of a high-level conference at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in August 2012 that focused on increasing organizational capacity in low-income countries to strengthen health systems. More recently, I led a research, advocacy, and social media campaign supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
I am married, and enjoy reading, hiking, and dancing in the kitchen with my 5 children and 2 grandchildren.
My journey
2005
During my early medical career, I saw how HIV/AIDs wracked communities around the world—there was far too much suffering. Volunteering in Mozambique only solidified my commitment to equity.
As a physician I could make individual change, but I wanted to do even more. I realized we needed to better act and think in term of populations.
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2010
So I pursued a Masters in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg school. Finally, the solution to healthcare woes: complex systems thinking, which focused on dynamic interactions and emergent events that described real life in ways that felt authentic and useful.
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I organized a high-level conference (sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation) to gather other health professionals and make systemic change.
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2015
Along the way, I've done research and published academic papers in scientific journals like the Lancet.
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Still focused on change, I was a founding board member of the International Society for Systems and Complexity Sciences in Health.
To reach more people, I created and taught an undergraduate class on complex systems thinking.
Today
I've realized that to create fundamental, transformational change in the way we approach healthcare, we must understand the human elements. We need a story.
So I'm writing a book—a true story about the past and about what could still be in health and medicine.