Reflections on a Conversation with Dr. Margaret Hamburg: Career Shifts and Work Straddling the Fields of Medicine, Public Health, and Policy Blog Post
by Lydia Good (C’21)
On Tuesday, March 9, 2021, Dr. Margaret Hamburg joined the Conversations in Global Health class for a discussion spanning the many facets of her career, from her early medical training to her recent work as FDA commissioner, founder of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, and foreign secretary for the National Academies of Medicine. Dr. Hamburg began the conversation by reflecting on her career path, particularly how her experience as a medical student at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic fostered her interest in public health and ultimately led her to leave her residency in New York to learn more about health policy in DC. Her move was a sudden shift from the career in academic medicine she was pursuing, but, as a basic scientist interested in policy, I appreciated that Dr. Hamburg was not looking to abandon her interests in medicine. Instead, she wanted to contextualize how medicine related to other issues like public health, social justice, law, and policy.