My long-term career goal is to be an independent clinician-investigator focused on cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention and treatment in low-income countries. My interest in global health research began as a medical student when I examined chief complaints of patients in Cambodian emergency departments. A surprising number of patients had acute presentations of untreated chronic illnesses due to poor healthcare access, poverty, and limited knowledge. This early experience inspired my interest to work on chronic disease prevention in global health. My first CVD-specific research project was in Zambia as a Doris Duke International Clinical Research fellow (2014-2015), where I identified major gaps in hypertension diagnosis, treatment, and control in rural clinics (BMC Public Health 2015). A mixed-methods follow-up study revealed medication shortages and staff hesitancy as major reasons for hypertension undertreatment (BMC Health Serv Res 2017). I then chose a combined residency program at Boston Medical Center in Internal Medicine and Preventive Medicine, and also completed a Masters of Science in Health Systems and Services Research. In residency I worked on several projects focused on health disparities in low-income settings, including evaluating the multidimensional poverty of patients in rural Haiti, the impact of poverty and distance on visit adherence, and quality of maternal-child healthcare in Zambia.

In July 2020, I joined Weill Cornell Medicine as a Global Health Research Fellow in the Center for Global Health and Division of General Internal Medicine. My goal is to build additional research skills to create an independent research program in CVD prevention and treatment in low-income countries—specifically working with the well-established Weill Cornell-GHESKIO partnership in Haiti. My mentors are Drs. McNairy, Pape, Fitzgerald, and Safford—all of whom have provided in-depth mentorship on the epidemiology of chronic diseases, CVD clinical trials, and CVD-related implementation science. I currently oversee data collection, data adjudication, and analysis in the Haiti CVD Cohort Study (NHLBI R01 143788), a longitudinal study evaluating risk factors and CVD events among 3,005 participants in Port-au-Prince.