Explore Global Health with Rob Murphy, MD Northwestern University

Forging a career path in global surgery was not on the radar for Juliet Lumati, MD, MPH when she was growing up in a poor area of Lagos, Nigeria. But after her family immigrated to Chicago during her childhood, she excelled in school and was drawn to biology and political science and eventually decided to pursue a career in the field. In this episode, Lumati, now an assistant professor of Surgical Oncology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, talks about her challenges as an underrepresented minority pursuing a career in global surgery and the progress she has made to bridge the gap between clinical medicine and healthcare policy in low- and middle-income countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, where she is working to improve access to cancer care.

In this episode, Lisa Hirschhorn, MD, MPH, talks about her trailblazing career filled with challenges and opportunities that led her to become Director of the Ryan Family Center for Global Primary Care at the Havey Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Ashti Doobay-Persaud, MD, dreamed of a career in global health before she knew what to call it. Although she knew the general career path she wanted to follow, she struggled to find training opportunities specific to global health. Now an international leader in global health education, Doobay-Persaud has been building the global health training she wishes she could have had. At Northwestern, she founded the Master’s in Global Health and McGaw Global Health Clinical Scholars program

Carlos del Rio, MD, didn’t set out to launch a career in global health, but while training to be a cardiologist in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic took hold and forever changed the way he approached medicine and his career. In this episode, Dr. del Rio talks with Dr. Murphy about his path from medical school in his home country of Mexico, to his many leadership positions in global health and at Emory University School of Medicine. He also explains how the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics offer many lessons for the next generation of people interested in global health.

Robert Breiman, MD, FIDSA, FASTMH, is an internationally known researcher whose career in global health, infectious diseases, and epidemiology has taken him around the world and into many leadership roles within the Centers for Disease Control, Today, he is combining his many skills and interests to address the growing cancer burden in Africa, by establishing the Infectious Diseases and Oncology Research Institute at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In this episode, Nadia Sam-Agudu, MD, Director of the Global Pediatrics Program at the University of Minnesota Medical School, talks about her career as a physician-scientist in global health. From a childhood in Ghana that inspired her to pursue a career in medicine to becoming a driving force in the field of implementation science in global health, Sam-Agudu talks about her unique journey and what inspires her work.