School: School of Medicine
Degrees: Doctor of Medicine and Master’s of Public Health
Home: I’m from Philadelphia, but I have been fortunate to feel at home in many different places, from Botswana to Tufts.
What’s the origin of your passion in both medicine and public health?
It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to have a career in both fields, and it’s been a long journey to get to this point. My interest was inspired in part by my origin story: growing up with family members who struggled with substance use disorder and mental health challenges definitely directed me toward a career in medicine and gave me a deep interest specifically in the field of addiction medicine. Along the way I’ve developed additional passions in social justice, public health, and working with urban underserved populations. I absolutely love doing that kind of work.
Were there any particularly meaningful experiences outside of the classroom?
I had one experience that very much influenced my professional interests. The medical school puts a strong emphasis on service learning, and through the Community Service Learning program, I led weekly health education workshops at a jail in downtown Boston. That experience really opened my eyes to the challenges of individuals affected by the carceral system. I learned how to build trust and how to surmount barriers, and that inspired me to do similar work in the future, to figure out how I can combine working with this community and my clinical interests in addiction and infectious disease.
From your time here, you will always remember...
The communities that I’ve been privileged to be a part of and learn from, the classmates-turned-colleagues who continue to challenge and inspire me, and the mentors and faculty who taught me so much more about medicine and life than I could ever have learned in the classroom setting alone.
What are you most proud of about your time at the School of Medicine?
I’m personally and collectively very proud of an organization that a few of my classmates and I co-founded during my first year of medical school: the Tufts Student Advocacy Collective. That became a community and a movement that was born out of an idea that physicians are inherently advocates for patients, for their communities, and for the larger systems they’re a part of. We learned so much together, and we even worked on the campaign calling for the removal of the Sackler name, which has very strong ties to the opioid epidemic, from the Medical Education building. That was a real opportunity for us to take some of the advocacy skills we were learning and put them into practice. I don’t know that we expected to achieve our goal, but we succeeded. That was a huge moment for my classmates and me—and for the whole university—and I feel so proud to have been a part of that.
This profile originally appeared as part of the series “Profiles in Inspiration: Commencement 2022 Spotlights."
