“I never wanted to be in a lab or doing statistics, but I absolutely love asking questions about how to best provide care for kids.” – Rachel Vreeman, MD, MS, Director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health.

Rachel Vreeman, MD, MS, is Chair of the Department of Global Health and Health System Design at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health. A pediatrician and researcher, she also continues her research work around HIV, with a focus on East Africa, as well as other global work related to children and adolescents living with HIV.

In addition, Dr. Vreeman chairs the Global Pediatric Working Group for the International Epidemiologic Databases Evaluating AIDS (IeDeA) consortium, a global consortium of HIV care programs funded by the National Institutes of Health that compiles data for more than two million people living with HIV.

Prior to joining Mount Sinai in 2019, she served as Director of Research for the Indiana University Center for Global Health and for the AMPATH Research Network, and was an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Joe and Sarah Ellen Mamlin Scholar for Global Health Research. She received her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University where she majored in English literature. She has a master’s degree in clinical research from Indiana University School of Medicine and a medical degree from Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.

In this Q&A, Dr. Vreeman, who is also a best-selling author of books that debunk medical myths, discusses her vision for the Arnhold Institute for Global Health, how she has witnessed the transformation of care for children with HIV, and what it takes to be a good doctor and researcher.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

I am a pediatrician and researcher who specializes in trying to figure out how to improve care for children and adolescents growing up with HIV all around the world. I have worked for almost the last 20 years in a partnership in Kenya, growing a health care system for families with HIV and engaging with Kenyan partners around how we can best treat HIV in places like East Africa. I grew up in Michigan, then went to college at Cornell, medical school at Michigan State University, and trained in pediatrics at Indiana University. At Indiana University, I was introduced to global health through a long-standing partnership called the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare in Kenya, a 30-plus-year partnership between North American medical schools and a medical school and hospital system in western Kenya. I started spending about six months of the year living and working in Kenya, focused on the care of children with HIV.

One of the things that many people in global health don’t know about me is that I’ve co-authored three best-selling books that debunk medical myths people tend to hold about their bodies and health. This myth-busting has given me lots of interesting opportunities to talk about science and health; it has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, and many other publications and on various television and radio shows such as Good Morning America and CNN.

What is your vision for the Institute?

My vision for the Institute is that we would grow and deepen a small set of global health partnerships that radically improve the health systems in the places where we are partnering—and that these partnerships would model equity, sustainability, mutual trust, and mutual benefits. Through these kinds of partnerships, I believe the Arnhold Institute for Global Health will be able to move forward research, health care delivery, and educational opportunities that transform health care systems for vulnerable populations. Right now, we are growing these partnerships in Kenya, Nepal, Ghana, and New York City, and we are starting to see the first glimpses of how these partnerships can meet the health needs of populations such as adolescents living with HIV, neighborhoods with diverse populations struggling through COVID-19 spikes, pregnant people with unacceptably high rates of deaths and complications, and people seeking care for chronic diseases like hypertension in rural communities. I cannot wait to see our work like this continue to grow through the partnerships we have formed with academic medical centers, health systems, and government public health partners.

Nima Lama, left, Minister of Health for Bagmati Province in Nepal, presents Dr. Vreeman with a Nepali gift.

How did you get into the adolescent health field?

The most incredible privilege of my career has been the opportunity to become a pediatrician who can focus on supporting adolescents and young adults globally, including those who are living with HIV. In the early years that I worked in Kenya, our hospital wards and our clinics were full of young children who were dying from HIV. Two-year-olds, 3-year-olds, 4-year-olds. I did not take care of more than a handful of older kids. None of the kids born with HIV lived that long.

And now, our clinics in Kenya are such very different places. They are full of teenagers doing teenager things. Going to school, struggling through becoming adults, making friends and arguing with friends. All the good stuff and all the hard stuff. And HIV is now a chronic disease that they are living with. I love getting to watch youth transform not only their own stories, but also start to transform our world. It is the most inspiring, hope-bringing, sometime scary, but always precious thing.

Adolescence is this critical time for youth—the time that often decides whether a person stays in school, remains free of infections like HIV, whether they get pregnant young or not, what their use of drugs or alcohol might look like, and how their social circles develop. But most global health systems have very few services to support all aspects of adolescent health. There are often not places for adolescents to get vaccines or mental health support or family planning services—let alone basic check-ups. Now, I get to focus much of my own work on growing care programs to support adolescent health in places like Kenya.

What is the best part of your job?

I love new ideas. And I love tackling big problems. The very best part of my job is getting to support our multinational teams as everyone collaborates to dream up new ideas that provide better health care and better access to health care for people around the world.

What are you most excited about for the future of the Institute?

At the Institute, we now have the opportunity to change how health care is provided for big groups of people, often living in poor or remote places around the world. We even have the opportunity to work on national health systems and revamping how they provide care to populations like women and children. Being able to have this kind of impact, to be able to be part of scaling up better and more just systems—especially to serve children and women—is so exciting to me.

Do you have any advice for someone looking to go into your field?

I would not be afraid to bring all of yourself to the work that you want to do. For example, I thought that being a book-loving, former English major who loves stories was an interesting part of who I was, but I never thought that it would be part of what it looked like to be a good doctor. In fact, when I started medical school, I thought it might be a real liability that I did not have the kind of science background that many of my peers do. Instead, I learned over time that how we care for people as patients requires us to be very good listeners to their stories. Even more, it is critical to the work I do every single day that I can capture our ideas and their significance in writing.

And, it always helps to stay curious. Once I was in pediatrics, I did not really have any idea what kind of specialty area or focus I might want. I loved taking care of children and addressing the needs of their families, and I had never once thought about a research career. After seeking and questioning during my years of residency, it took a smart mentor to point out to me that I really love working to try to fix health care systems so that they provide better care for the most vulnerable children and their families—and that this was what health services researchers do. I begrudgingly agreed to try out a research elective and quickly discovered that my love of figuring out ideas for how to fix things was actually the perfect basis for growing research. I never wanted to be in a lab or doing statistics, but I absolutely love asking questions about how to best provide care for kids.