Okay, hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the Young Career Lecture. I'm Captain Hunter Smith, and I'll be your moderator for this session. I'm the Chief of Preventive Medicine for the U.S. Army Medical Research Directorate Africa in Kisumu, Kenya. So that's why it's dark outside behind me, if you're curious. So our goal and hope for this session is to provide those of you who are early into your career, myself included, some insight into navigating this truly unique profession of ours, preventive medicine. So one of the strengths of our specialty is this unrivaled range of possibilities we have and that we can do with our career. But that itself also presents its own challenges, because with such a wide spectrum of what we can do, it leads you into these decision points for what is the type of preventive medicine I want to do, and is this the right career for me? So with that said, it's my absolute pleasure to introduce our three wonderful speakers, Drs. Ayanna Buckner, Lisa Hesse, and Bob Carr. And together, they represent a broad range of the careers available to us, and I'm excited to hear and learn from each of their preventive medicine journeys, because the way that we're going to do this session today is each of them is going to take about 15 minutes to describe what their career journeys have been, and through that, we'll hopefully be able to gain some insight into how to navigate those career decisions for ourselves as well. So if I can advance the slides here, okay, and so these are our objectives. So we're looking to hear and learn from this wealth of life and work experience from our seasoned preventive medicine physicians, really illustrating the breadth and diversity of career fields we have available to us as preventive medicine physicians, and really to engage with you and see what questions you might have for our panel, since at the end of this, we're going to have about 15 minutes left for question and answers from you. So if you have any questions for our speakers, please type them into the question and answer box, and we'll be sure to address them. So as I mentioned, this is our agenda, and if you haven't seen this on the ACPM website yet, there's this wonderful chart that illustrates the career pathways in preventive medicine you have available to you, just to give you an idea of what you have available to yourself. And there's no good Plenary's talk without a fantastic disclaimer statement for all of our members involved. And so first off, we have Dr. Ayanna Buckner. So I'll turn it over to you. Hunter, I'm excited to speak with everyone today. I mean, I've been on the other side of this presentation several times, starting in residency and since finishing residency. And then when I had a faculty position, I was still very interested in where my career might take me and kind of had some thoughts that I'll share with you. And so I continue to attend this session. So I hope that we've got certainly some folks who are younger, younger physicians, but I hope also some mid-career folks and perhaps even some folks who are maybe technically toward the end of their career, but still looking for what's that next step because they're just not quite ready to finish working. And I say that because for me, there are essentially two basic, I guess, maybe guiding principles that I looked at. And one is follow your heart and your interest. And so that's something that I always share with people whenever I do talks like this about my career. You know, how did you end up in this opportunity? And it's just doing the things that made my heart sing. The things that I feel like if you enjoy it and it doesn't so much feel like work, you should probably do more of it, especially if someone pays you for it. And that's pretty much what I did. And then the other piece is it's never too late to start on a path. And you might say, well, wow, she looks young. I'll tell you, I probably look younger than I really am, at least that's what people tell me. But I think especially, you know, being an artist, we always feel that pressure of, you know, I took so long in school and in training and now I'm X number of years in, you know, who am I? Am I different? My answer is, no, it's not. And so I'd like to start with a quote by a director. And she said, I made my first sound when I was 35. So I firmly believe that you don't have to be one thing in life. If you're doing something and you have a desire to do something different, give it a try. And so I think that's really been a part of also what I. I did my residency at the Griffin Hospital Program that's in conjunction with the Yale School of Medical. I finished residency, I thought, well, hey, what is it that I wanna do? And so I heard about the National Center for Primary Care at Morehouse School of Medicine. And I said, well, it's called the National Center for Primary Care. I'm trained in both internal medicine and preventive medicine. I took a look at the website and saw some really interesting programs. And I said, hey, I wanna go work with them. So I reached out to Dr. Dan Blumenthal, who many of you knew and worked with here at ACPM. He was my department chair. And so I reached out to him and did an interview and really loved what they were doing. And he said, you know, we're really looking for folks to help teach this community health course, which was a service learning course that was required for first year medical students. And so given my experience, starting really in college in medical school with doing community-based work, and, you know, obviously after residency, doing more community-based work in residency, he thought I was a good fit. And so one of the main tasks I was hired to do was to teach that course. And so in that course, it's one of the, at least at the time and maybe still, was the only required service learning course for medical students. And so all first year medical students at Morehouse School of Medicine took this course. And you'll see in a few minutes why I spend time talking about this. But we taught students how to do a community health needs assessment, at least a modified one to some extent, in the communities that they were assigned. And then they put together a project to address the identified needs. And I do a bit of that now in my consulting work. So I'll kind of jump ahead and tell you that that's why I mentioned that. But I did that when I was at Morehouse School of Medicine. And then also, I'm from New Orleans. I finished residency in 2005 and started at Morehouse in 2005. And you might be aware that there was a big hurricane, actually two. We from the Gulf Coast usually like to talk about two storms. There are Hurricanes Katrina and also Hurricane Rita, which came about a month apart and really decimated the Gulf Coast. And so as I was starting at Morehouse School of Medicine, my family said to me, hey, we thought you'd come back and help. And I said, well, you know, I kind of committed to teach this class and work at Morehouse School of Medicine. But it ended up being a blessing being at Morehouse School of Medicine because while I was there, the institution got funding to start something called the Regional Coordinating Center for Hurricane Response. And so I ended up being the community liaison for that project, which is a nice way of saying that anytime they needed someone to jump on a plane and go to a meeting with one of our partners and participate in a variety of programs and initiatives that they rolled out, I was usually one of the people who went. And being that I'm from the Gulf region, being from New Orleans and know the area, it really was for me very personally fulfilling, but also I think I was probably able to do more for the region than actually been physically in New Orleans by being a part of that project. And that's also important because five years later, there was an oil spill. And many of the community partners and academic partners who we worked with for our hurricane project, they were also a part of something called the Gulf Region Health Outreach Program, which is funded, which was funded, I'm sorry, with $105 million from the BP or Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Settlement. And so the attorneys for both of those groups decided to put together a program that would help to promote community resilience and essentially make a longstanding impact for communities impacted, as opposed to people in those communities just being able to file for individual claims and individuals having something. So that project had four different parts, one to build primary care capacity, one to build mental behavioral health care capacity, one using community health workers, and one around building environmental health capacity. The committee that oversaw that was composed of each of the directors of each of those projects and three external people. And so because of the work that I'd done in the Gulf Region, my name came up as someone who would be a good option to be one of the external members of the committee that coordinated the work of all of those projects. And so for me, it was very helpful to be from the Gulf Region, to be a part of it. But again, because I just kind of followed my heart and was interested in doing community-based work, ended up in a place where these opportunities were available to me through the Hurricane Project. And then subsequently I made connections through the Oil Spill Project. I mentioned that because while I was at Morehouse, I did those projects while still teaching community health through the Community Health Institution. So after Hurricane Project came Associate Director of the Morehouse School of Medicine, Permanent Medicine Residency Program, which gave me another opportunity to teach residents in addition to teaching students. So after being with the residency program for a while, at that time I was still doing the work with the Gulf Region Health Outreach Program. And I started to realize that I had enough connections in the community and enough professional connections to start my own consulting business. And one reason that the Oil Spill Project was really important in that is because it was a great way to demonstrate to me that someone was willing to actually pay for my expertise, the expertise that I'd garnered through the experiences that I had at Morehouse School of Medicine. And so I said, well, hmm, I'll save my money and then I think I'll go ahead and start a consulting business. Now that's important because I'd planned to do that probably about 10 or 15 years later than I actually did it. But the opportunity with the Gulf Region Health Outreach Program was the impetus to say, hey, I think you can do this now. And so people tend to ask, well, what do you do as a community health consultant? First of all, I'll tell you that people were pretty shocked that I left a pretty secure academic position to do it. But it was one of those things that I thought, if I, because I was spending so much time doing voluntary things while I was at Morehouse School of Medicine, working with nonprofit organizations that either I was on the board of or someone just kind of heard what I did and asked, hey, can you help us do this? I said, if I'm gonna be up late at night and using my spare time on evenings and weekends doing this work, if I love it that much, maybe I should consider doing more of it. So as those wheels turned, I said, yeah, I'll go ahead and do this consulting work. And as I said, the Oil Spill Project was a great entrance for me into that. So people say, what do you do? And so, especially when my former students asked me that, I say, well, remember all that stuff that we taught you in community health that you kind of thought was just a waste of your time? People actually pay me to do that now. And they're always really shocked because they really thought this was just something that we were giving them to distract them from gross anatomy and pathophys and all the things that they were doing. But it really helped to connect the dots. And I usually see the light bulb go off in their head and they're like, wow, people actually pay you for that and they do. And so people ask me, well, who are your clients? The way I described is that Community Health Cooperative is a health consulting company that works with community-based organizations. We work with nonprofit organizations. We work with sometimes governmental agencies and organizations, philanthropic organizations. They're some of my favorite groups to work with and occasionally corporate clients on the design, implementation and evaluation of community-based health programs. So it's a big mouthful, but the easy way I say it is doing all the fun stuff I love doing. And another way I describe it to people is, if there's an organization that's involved in doing health work and they just kind of wish they had a doctor close by to give them some advice, whether it's because of my clinical expertise or because of my community-based expertise or sometimes my evaluation expertise, they think I'm a good person to have around and give them advice on things. And so it's really a lot of fun. One of my favorite things to do is to help philanthropic organizations figure out how to spend money. It's kind of like, I love shopping. So it's kind of like being a personal shopper, how you just get to show someone else's money. That's kind of how I think about it, but only with funding health programs. And so I help, in that way, I help philanthropic organizations to figure out smart ways to invest their money in community-based health programming and to figure out if they're doing it in a way that's effective. And so I really enjoy that. You probably see on the slide that it says that I still do in the Grady Health System. That's very true. My residency program was a combined internal medicine and preventive medicine residency program. And so I tend to spend 80% of my time doing the community-based health consulting work and about 20% of my time seeing patients. That's pre-pandemic. It's been a little bit different in the pandemic, but it's a great way to keep my feet into both worlds. And my time in academia was actually a great preparation for that. It's not unusual for folks in academia who still see patients to sometimes spend a full day or a half day in clinic seeing patients and then dividing their time between teaching and other activities. And so that's pretty much how my life was as I was doing some of the activities I mentioned to you earlier at Morehouse School of Medicine. And so when I transitioned to community health consulting, I just kept that same model. So it was a pretty seamless transition then. So I'll go ahead and I think I'll stop there and I look forward to questions. So thank you. Okay, I guess that's my cue. Can you hear me? Okay, and I am seeing nods. So hello, I am Lisa Hesse, and I'm going to talk to you about what I've been doing, I guess, for my career. So to start with, obviously formal training, we all had it. I am a little bit unusual in that I am one of those people, actually before I get started, let me just put this out in the open. Yes, I am on a treadmill desk. Yes, it is awesome. It was a great purchase right as the pandemic hit and CDC went to mandatory telework. It's great. If I sound a little bit winded, it's because I tend to get myself riled up when I'm talking and I'm also walking. So anyway, back to the story. So I'm a little bit unusual in that I went through medical school knowing that I wanted to do preventive medicine. I was one of those kids who grew up reading a lot of books about disease outbreaks in really cool places. I knew what Kuru was when I was at an inappropriately young age to know about cannibals eating people's brains in Papua New Guinea, and so I thought I'm going to do infectious disease and I'm going to chase these diseases around the world. So fast forward to 2005, and I at that point am at officer basic course for the Army. The Army is paying for my med school, and they sat us down in the auditorium at Brooke Army Medical Center, and every 20 minutes somebody from a different specialty would come forward and say this is what my specialty does in the Army. So the last one, right before lunch, was preventive medicine. So all of my, you know, fellow second lieutenants were pretty much half asleep because they had just been inundated with all these medical specialties, and you know, the presenter is talking about these outbreaks that he investigated when he was stationed in Thailand, and you know, this is something that happened in Vietnam while he was there, and oh by the way, this is something that he did in residency, and I was like, that's it. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do preventive medicine. So I was super excited about this over lunch. I was like, that's what I'm gonna do. I mean, I'm gonna do preventive medicine, and everyone's like, really? That seemed kind of boring, and I was like, I don't know what you're talking about because that sounds fascinating. So I went through medical school with that in mind. I started going to ACPM conference when I was still in medical school, you know, which was definitely a good experience getting to listen to, you know, versions of this lecture starting at very, very young in my career. So I came on active duty when I graduated medical school, did a transition year internship at Walter Reed, and then did preventive medicine residency with my academic year at USIS, getting a master in tropical medicine, and then my preventive medicine year at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. So my first assignment out of residency was with the 82nd Civil Affairs Battalion, which no longer exists, but we were the FORSCOM US Army Battalion that was focused on Africa. So FORSCOM is conventional forces. It's what most people in the Army are. They fall under FORSCOM. I was stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia from 2012 to 2015, and we did a lot of work in Africa because that was our region of focus. So I did a total of six medical readiness training exercises with various African military physicians and healthcare workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo and then also Lesotho. This picture here is from the clinic, the military hospital in Lesotho. The man in the uniform there is, as of the time of this picture in 2014, he was the only physician in the Lesotho Defense Force. So just to give you an idea of what we were dealing with, he was a brand new medical school graduate. He had graduated less than a year before and, again, was their only physician. So there was another physician who also worked at the hospital. He was a military officer from India who did a two-year rotation in Lesotho. And so what we did is we worked with, you know, these local military medical providers on infectious disease and public health preparedness using, essentially using the U.S., you know, the U.S. model or experience in order to help them figure out what works best for them. And at the same time, the U.S. military physicians were also getting training on the diseases that are local to those countries. So Democratic Republic of the Congo, we did a lot of malaria. We did cholera. There was a lot of yellow fever. Not a lot of yellow fever itself, but, you know, talking about yellow fever, GI disease was probably the most most prevalent thing that we did while we were there. In Lesotho, their biggest public health concern is HIV. You know, almost a quarter of people who live in Lesotho are HIV-positive. And that does have a big impact on their military force as well. So that was what I did for three years, kind of bouncing in and out of Africa and also working as the primary care physician for the battalion, as well as training the medics to go to various countries in Africa and to sometimes be the only medical asset for their team. So a young medic in the Army, you know, between the ages of 20 and 25, I think is how old our medics were. They were specialists. They were sergeants. So they were very young. They were early in their careers. And they had to essentially keep themselves and three other people healthy. So it was kind of a big burden for them. It was a big ask for them. And so I was there to make sure that they were ready to do that. And, you know, Africa being Africa, make sure that they were aware of some of the things that they would have to to be protecting their team from. So after I was finished at Fort Stewart, I went to Army Public Health Center. And I was there for a year as the Chief of Disease Epidemiology. And that was right when Zika hit. So that was an interesting time to be the Chief of Disease Epidemiology. But then I went to Kuwait as the theater preventive medicine physician. So I was the only preventive medicine physician for the U.S. military in the Middle East. So I was physically stationed at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. But I covered everything from, well, everything in the Central Command. So I was the rabies advisory board chair. We would meet to discuss, you know, whether or not somebody met indications for rabies post-exposure prophylaxis, which pretty much if they had contact with an animal, they did. I also chaired the Kuwait Public Health Advisory Group, which was public health professionals. So not just, well, obviously, I was the only physician. So public health professionals at all of the installations in Kuwait. So in addition to Camp Arifjan, there was also Camp Buring, Ali Asalim. And we even let our Canadian friends from Camp Canada join in on that advisory group as well. I went to Afghanistan for a few weeks in order to do flu preparedness and to do health assessments of the installations in Afghanistan, and then did the same thing in Jordan for a week. And while I was in Jordan, I had to reschedule an interview for a pre-match position with EIS. I had applied for EIS right before I deployed, and I was notified while I was in Kuwait that I was accepted for an interview. So I interviewed from my room in Kuwait. I sat there. I was the only person who was allowed to interview via Skype because I was deployed military. So I sat there in my 7 by 20 foot room wearing my uniform top and a pair of shorts because they couldn't see me. I was on Skype. And then I ended up being waitlisted for EIS. And then they gave me a call in January saying, there is a pre-match position with the Immunization Safety Office. I think you would be a good fit. Would you be interested in interviewing with them for the position? And I said, yes, I love vaccines. This sounds great. And again, I had to reschedule the interview because my flight times coming back from Jordan got changed, which I think actually worked in my favor because it sounded pretty impressive to them that I said, I'm sorry, but I'm in Jordan and the Air Force can't get me back to Kuwait soon enough. So we pushed the interview back a few days. They liked me. I liked them. Although apparently at the end of the phone call at the other end, one of the men who became my secondary supervisor, a public health service captain, turned to the man who would become my primary supervisor to say, we need to work on training her out of saying, sir. Because public health service is a little bit more kinder and gentler of a service than the Army. So I got started on my inter-service transfer paperwork from Kuwait. It's kind of an interesting time to be working on an inter-service transfer while you are deployed down range. I don't know if I would recommend it, but it seemed to work out in my favor. Although I did technically not transfer services until September. EIS starts in July. So I did a month of permissive TDY in July so I can attend summer course. And then I had to go back up to Aberdeen Proving Ground until my transfer was complete in September. And I can return down to Atlanta to actually get started as an EIS officer right after Labor Day. EIS is a great experience for those of you who, well, yeah. So for those of you who've heard of it, it's fun. It's a good, it's a, it's kind of a secret little cult in, well not so secret little cult, in CDC. You get the EIS network, you get the EIS secret handshake. And it's a good group to be a member of. You know, it's got a lot of name recognition in the public health world, which actually spawned conspiracy theories early in COVID. They were, they were trying to figure out why there were so many public health professionals and leadership positions around the country who all had the letters EIS in their, somewhere in their CV. So not really much of a mystery there. Definitely not a conspiracy. So since then, when it was time to apply for a new job at the end of my EIS fellowship, I was looking at my CV and I said, okay, I've done a lot of things and I've enjoyed a lot of things, but I haven't really had a job in disaster preparedness and response. It was kind of one of those, you know, those empty fields in my CV. I said, I want to round out my preventive medicine experience and I want to do a job in this to see if I, if I like it. So I got a job with the division of preparedness and emerging infections. And then early in January of 2020, I was the, the division's representative to the unidentified disease outbreak group at CDC. And so an email came through that listserv saying, you know, 25 cases of unknown pneumonia in China. So I went over to our operational team lead and said, hey, is this something that, you know, is this going to be an UDO? Is this something that we were worried about? He said, no, National Center for Immunization, for immunizations, respiratory diseases has it, you know, they'll rope you in if necessary. And three weeks later, I got pulled in to do the, to be a supervisor in the people under investigation call center, which included a week out at Travis Air Force Base, taking care of people who were repatriated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. I came back to Atlanta to do the clinical on-call, which is another, another call service. Clinicians, health departments can call in to just ask questions about, about COVID, what they should do. And we would either answer their questions or direct them to the relevant people at CDC who could. I went to West Virginia in April to work on a community protection project. West Virginia at that point had had fewer than a thousand cases and four deaths. And so we were trying to figure out how do we keep West Virginians safe? And, you know, the fact that they are so rural kind of gave them a head start against everybody else. They were, you know, they were much better at social distancing than most people. But then, you know, we all know that COVID eventually hit everybody and hit everybody pretty hard. From May and June, I was back in Atlanta working on doing an investigation into reinfections. I went out to Arizona to work on the Navajo Nation in July and August, and then the U.S. Virgin Islands in August. I started working on vaccination planning for the DoD in September, did that through November, took the month of December off of the response, and then came back to do vaccine safety in January. Because again, I had two years of experience doing it as an EAS officer. And so it seemed like a good fit. And then in January, my deputy division director in my day job, so in DPI, sent me an email saying, hey, do you want to go up to D.C. to work with the DoD on vaccine planning? And I said, you mean like Operation Warp Speed? He said, yes, except it's not called that anymore. So it's now the Countermeasures Acceleration Group, if anyone was wondering what happened to Operation Warp Speed. Exact same group of people, different name. And so he said, we need you to come up for 30 days. So went up there in early February, near the end of February, he said, they like you here, you fit in well, you speak Army, you speak vaccine, they want you to stay here until the middle of May. So I have been up in D.C. up until this past Friday, got back down to Atlanta on Friday, immediately packed my bags to drive to Augusta, did a couple triathlons, and turned in my travel voucher yesterday, and now I'm here. So it's been kind of a whirlwind of a few months, kind of a whirlwind of a year. But I have very little time left, and I will... Okay, so my take-home messages, don't be afraid to broaden your horizons. Some of the best jobs that I've had are those that I wasn't really that thrilled about, and I've learned a lot from them. I have my rated G version of this middle point. If the grass is greener, it's just because they used different fertilizer. I'm sure you can imagine what the not rated G version of that is. There is no perfect job out there. There is no job where you don't have to deal with something that you don't want to deal with. So the question is, what is your top priority? Is it living where you want to live? Is it working with people you want to work with? Is it doing what you want to do? Is it... Figure that out. You're always going to have some part of every job that you don't necessarily like. There is no perfect job. Don't always look for the perfect job. Enjoy the job that you have, and of course, don't forget to have fun. So I went a few seconds over, but happy to answer any questions afterwards. Thank you. Well, thank you. What a great set of speakers. I am honored, Hunter, to be with everyone today and my fellow speakers to share some insights. And I talk about this as living your purpose and crafting your career. Because I think as immediate past president of the ACPM, I really feel we have an amazing community of professionals who have a wide array of roles and who are constantly reinventing what preventive medicine really means in many different traditional as well as non-traditional organizations and parts of society here in the U.S. as well as across the world. I think Drs. Heese and Buckner did share their examples of what kind of career crafting is all about. It's intentional and active changes you make in your life that reflect, in my mind, what matters most to you, your why, your purpose. And the Center for Positive Organizations has a whole array of research around job crafting, relationship crafting as it's related to careers because people want to have authentic experiences in life that align with their deep values, with their passions. And sometimes, you know, it's the awareness. You need to develop that muscle of awareness so that you can begin to chart that crafting of career. I think I would like to kind of start with, you know, one advice I usually give to early careerists as well as, you know, people who are thinking about change is, you know, what is your purpose? And this is a definition used in health, you know, around the impact of purpose and knowing your purpose and aligning your actions and your goals to that why and how it can fulfill both a life of meaning but also positive health, well-being, mental well-being, etc. So I think asking yourself those questions, as Dr. Heast and Buckner have shared, what energizes you? What kind of organizations do you like, big, small? Who do you like to work with? Do you like to be kind of solo? Do you like collaboration? Do you like a lot of mixed areas? Just begin to self-reflect on that and that really helps you begin to define your own why. And then with that why, I think, you know, I can share with you my experience. In fact, this month marks 40 years since I left medical school. So I have four decades, I guess, out in the world and, you know, my silver hair is probably evidence of that a bit. And I think the first, I have like three chapters I've kind of looked at my life. The first was kind of an emergence from medical school. I didn't know really what I wanted. I wasn't like this medical student who had a really strong clinical drive. So I was in the Air Force and they paid my way through medical school. And I really was interested in the impact of the health and the human, mental and physical, on performance. And it turned out that I was able to look into aerospace medicine and performance testing as a part of an F-15 squadron for many years. Testing and looking at cardiovascular conditioning and all of those areas. But then as many of, as the panelists have shared, sometimes there's a point in your life where there's an issue and with me it was a personal tragedy. One of my dear friends and colleagues died of an emerging disease back in the 80s called HIV. And with that I had to really re-evaluate, do I want to spend time in this role or do I actually maybe want to make a bigger difference? So I pivoted and I went into preventive medicine at Hopkins and did my MPH. And that really just opened up an array. My first assignment, very, very similar to Dr. Heast, was to be in the Air Force's Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. And then be a mini EIS for the Air Force. So I had two years of that. But in that time the Air Force and the other DoD services started testing everyone for HIV. And all of a sudden we had this wealth of data from no tests to two million a year. And that created a whole rich knowledge about early transmission vectors, those kind of things that the world really didn't know yet. And the actual DoD, kind of in a paradox, had a lot of really rich information. So I went across the world sharing that in the first HIV global conference, the second, the third, across the world. And it was then that actually as time, as things happen, you were actively recruited by the industry. And I really loved what I was doing in the federal space. And yet, you know, there were some enticements that industry can give that not always can the federal space match. And I had, you know, young kids and, you know, I was looking at life in the future. So I think the next, it was 25 years within this life sciences company. But the purpose of me bringing this array of experiences is that it afforded me an opportunity to re-engineer myself in that same company in many different ways. We had a diagnostics business, which was spun off and became Quest Diagnostics. We had, you know, basic research where I started in HIV. But it also, as many, as both of the speakers have mentioned, you know, don't be afraid to do something that, you know, is out of your comfort zone. So I really was passionate about the environment. And they said, well, you know, human renewal, you know, preventive medicine, it's all about renewing the human. So why not renew the environment? So they added to my roles, this whole area of sustainability and focusing the organization on, you know, reducing carbon footprint and zero water use and just a really different shift. And all of a sudden, my team was now in environmental engineers and, and, you know, a whole group of people that I'd never ever, you know, would imagine being able to work with on a day to day basis. And they taught me a lot. In fact, I think Fleck, a philosopher in early German, Germany in 1900, said that, you know, we have thought collectives. And so preventive medicine is a very diverse thought collective. But we really only have significant and transformational ideas and change when two thought collectives come together, like engineering and medicine, and all of a sudden, you have a transformational, disruptive event, events. So I think that is, is, you know, the beginning of my getting out of my comfort zone and moving into things like leadership, things like, I think, did I think I see a slide? Yeah, sorry. In leadership and health performance and understanding, you know, through a, an insight into people that there are other skills outside of medicine that actually can help you in life, and help you be a better leader help you be, you know, a more productive and higher impact of the actions that you do. And that's really what it's about is, you know, that purpose is, you know, not just making a difference, but are you really making the best difference you can with within the frame of your roles. And so that moved me into executive coaching and really opened up my, my vision to, okay, so how can I how can I actually be a great ambassador for the company and community partnerships, and actually lead our foundation across the world for HIV for early childhood education and health and a whole array of programs that the company wanted to work with in the communities in which our employees live and the communities and countries in which we operate. So that was, you know, that chapter and this, you know, now I'm in my third chapter, you know, my fourth decade of medical life. And I kind of see this as now I'm this trusted advisor, I have all this experience, and I'm still learning and I'm still being mentored by everyone. I see mentoring both by directionally up and down the age span. And it led me to a more formal education role at Georgetown, where for five years, I was a full time professor teaching leadership in health systems. So building the next level of health system leaders, through the experiences I had, in a way that was, you know, not just theoretical, but actually practical and applied leadership, and working on board. So I'm on the board of Hopkins School of Public Health. I'm on several other boards in private and helping startups and helping investment groups understand the nature of digital health is where my passion is now. And this led me to taking on this role as chief medical officer at Kumano, which is a precision well-being company that focuses on using technology to improve scale and impact for behavioral change and positive mental well-being. And that's a passion of mine. And I think the final kind of sets of thoughts is that, you know, how do you look at your role? How do you look at your job? Do you see that you're working for, you know, the CDC or Morehouse or for GSK? Or do you actually flip it and say that those entities are channels through which I can achieve my purpose and meaning in life? And with that, you, you know, Nietzsche said, if you have a why to live, you can survive anyhow, right? So if you use that thinking, that these roles that you've picked are ways in which you achieve growth, you achieve new challenges and new insights and new impact. And when that channel no longer serves or provides that sense, you know, you move to a different channel, sometimes in the same organization, other times you move out of that organization. But your goal is to have a life that allows you to flourish, right? It's that flourishing, thriving concept. And that's what, you know, roles provide you. They shouldn't be, you know, overly tedious, overly non-meaningful. And if they are, then this is the time to do some self-reflection and move on. So I have just a little diagram that, you know, basically you start with experience and interest and you get your kind of first, you know, kind of role. And then that gives you insights about yourself, insights about what kinds of people you like to work with, what kinds of roles and activities you like to do. And it also starts to create a brand for you. Your brand is important, you know, in terms of how you use that to take roles that you want. Even if it's out of your space, like, you know, even though I am not an environmental engineer to take on the leadership of EHS, I must have had a pretty credible brand in my company that they would trust me to not necessarily be the subject matter expert, but to lead the subject matter expert. So sometimes we get hung up in, oh, we're a physician, but, you know, we're more than just a physician. We are a wealth of life experiences that can, you know, be directed and focused on a variety of areas. So I think, you know, this then leads to a circuitous group of opportunities, pivots, reflections, but it is about growing your self-awareness, that muscle that helps you have insights about, you know, are you happy? Is this work meaningful? Is this the type of role and life that you want to live? And then the future opportunities will be limitless. And, you know, just think about your way in which you connect is about agility. Sometimes it's lateral, sometimes it's linear, but always it's about growth. And it's about you understanding, you know, even this last year, don't just look back and say, oh, you know, what was there, but how did you grow? How did you show up? What did you learn about yourself? What things do you want to pull into your future from this last year that maybe you never, you know, thought was something about you, right? Those are learnings. So again, I think these are the types of areas that may help you create a life and a career that's crafted into your authentic being that aligns with your values, aligns with your passions, and gives you, you know, meaning and allows you to thrive and flourish. So with that, I think I will end and allow Hunter to take over for questions from the audience. But I do want to thank my fellow speakers. They provided me a rich insight into a whole variety of careers. So thinking of those as maybe some future opportunities for me as well. So thank you. Okay, terrific. Thank you very much, each of you, for sharing your career journeys with us. And I'm looking at the Q&A submission site here, and it looks like we have quite a few questions that we can look at. So to start out with, there's a question here that asks, what is the best way to advocate and look for jobs that provide administrative time for programs, committees, and public health work instead of purely clinical work with patients? So I'll open that up for the group. It sounds like, Dr. Buckner, that that would be a good question for you. Okay, sure. One of my favorite websites, in fact, I just shared it with someone yesterday evening. Emory has something called, I think it's the Public Health Connection website, which I found that to be a really good source for people at various stages. You've got to just take a look at each of the job descriptions and see what works. The other thing, though, is really thinking about your network. And it's the advice I think that people give all the time, which is, you know, look for people who are doing the types of things that you want to do. See how they got there. Make connections with them. Perhaps they know of job openings. And think, you know, not just for short-term, but also for long-term. So it's about building a network, I think, and also leveraging a network. So that would be my advice. Hunter, I may just build on that, that, you know, oftentimes we look at our resumes as a set of experiences. But I try to refocus people to build their resume as a set of competencies that are transferable in a whole array of roles that may not be an experience like a physician experience, but those things that you learn, analytic, diagnosis, all of those understandings in the preventive medicine world of population health and public health, they're transferable in so many organizations in so many different ways. So think about what are your muscles that are really strong, and how do you use those in other organizations, in other roles? The other thing, and that's a really great answer, you know, as I think about, you know, how you build that, you know, I would use opportunities like a preventive medicine conference and say, you know, who are these speakers? And I read their bios. And so when I see someone who, and I think I actually started doing this in college, when I would see someone who had a job that I thought was interesting, I'd look at what their job was, you know, where they worked, but also what they did to get there. And it helped me to figure out what the job opportunities were. So anytime you can see someone's bio, they pretty much list all the different things that they did. So you may not want their current job, but you might like some job that they did previously. And so for me, it really helped me to understand what the landscape of preventive medicine really is. And the thing that I didn't take time to say is, don't be afraid to think outside the box. I can think about when I was in residency and people ask, you know, what do you want to do? People thought I was kind of unusual in the approach that I took. But people have studied every step that I took. You know, why do you want to do that? And why are you doing that? It was really clear to me. And I'm not advising you to do things that are ill-advised, because it also made sense to my trusted advisors, but it was okay if everyone didn't understand what I was doing. And I'm not perfect, my path hasn't been perfect, but it's worked out pretty well for me so far. All right, great points. Thank you. Another question we have here is, did you feel there were skills that you didn't get enough exposure to in residency? The skill set for preventive medicine is very broad. So I'll leave that open to everyone. I can touch on this one. Go ahead. Yeah. Oh, so yes, definitely I learned more on the job than I learned in residency. And that being said, I had an excellent residency. So Jamie, Eric, if you're listening, you guys ran a great program. I learned a lot in residency, but because it is such a broad skill set, and there is no possible way for a residency program to teach you everything that you might need to know in preventive medicine, I had to do a lot of on-the-job learning. I had some great mentors at my various physicians, and I learned a lot just from watching people. One of the things that I thought about when I was trying to decide what I wanted to do was, can I do this day every day for the next 40 years? And, you know, going through med school, asking myself that. You know, if I decided that, you know, maybe I don't want to do preventive medicine, maybe I want to do cardiology instead. No, I didn't want to do any given day for 40 years. I knew that I would want to do a bunch of different experiences. And so I knew that in residency as well that, you know, chances are that they would not be able to teach me everything that I wanted to do. And so every time I started a new job, it was, you know, there's going to be a learning curve, and I'm here to learn. Somebody once said, somebody at CDC once said that they knew it was time to find a new job each time when they felt like there was nothing left in that job for them to learn. They viewed their entire career as a lifelong learning experience, and I think that that's a good way to go about it. I absolutely agree with that. I was just going to say, I also think about, you know, education, residency included, as being something that opens a door. And so it may not keep you in the room, but it'll open the door to get there. So you can't expect that you've learned everything that it takes to stay in that room once you've crossed through that door, but your education or your residency program will open it for you. And so you've absolutely got to be willing to to keep learning. And I'm someone who actually gets bored easily. So preventive medicine was a great specialty for me because there's so many different things that you can do. So when you get bored, do something else. Yeah, I think one thing that when you move out of clinical medicine into administrative and leadership roles, one thing you have to unlearn that medical socialization kind of embeds is being vulnerable, showing that, you know, you don't always have the right answer. And I think that is, you know, one of the successes of leaders throughout, you know, the humility and the sense of vulnerability, not taking away from decision making and showing that you have confidence. But that is one of the biggest learnings. It took me about 10 years to kind of get out of it. You know, I always have to have the answers. I always have to, you know, be there, you know, from the way we round in medicine. Right. So anyway, that was just another thought as you move to administrative to think about your own persona and, you know, what do you have to change to be this other role from the role that you currently have, you know, the future state? Okay, terrific. And the highest voted question on the Q&A actually is, how easy is it for preventive medicine docs that are exclusively board certified in preventive medicine to participate in direct patient care? That's a good question. Probably not easy. So I'm only PrevMed boarded. I don't have a clinical specialty. And I don't have a clinical billet at all, not part time, nothing. But I also haven't been looking for one too much. Pre-COVID, I asked the Emory Travel Clinic if I can volunteer with them. They were currently full of CDC volunteers. So they added me to the waitlist. I do love Travel Clinic. That's just about the only clinical thing I love. One of the PrevMed conferences I went to as a med student, somebody asked a similar question. And the answer has always stuck with me. The panelist said, I don't look for a clinical job because every half hour that I spend with one patient is half hour I'm not spending with 1,000. So I don't miss clinical care. I never really enjoyed it to begin with. Like I said, I was PrevMed from the beginning. So it's not a gaping hole that I have in my life. So I don't really know how hard it is to fill that. I would say I have some friends and colleagues who are only in PrevMed. And it's about looking in the right places. But I'd say also make sure that you have the skill set to provide whatever clinical service it is. And I say that as someone who's in a medicine residency also. But there's certain things I prefer to do. And I work in a primary care setting when I see patients. But I think it's about looking, asking the right questions. First of all, making sure that the employer recognizes preventive medicine as a specialty. Even within the Grady Health System, they didn't really know what preventive, and maybe I shouldn't say that, but they weren't really quite clear on what just preventive medicine is. But they figured it out. And I also had the internal medicine training, so it worked out. It's about making sure that the employer actually understands your skill set, and that it's a good match, and that you feel comfortable providing that care. So I know some people who have found some clinical settings, some individual clinics and health systems. I've also seen people work in, I think, in the prison system. So it's just really about finding a place that's a good fit for you and your skill set. Some places are desperate, and they'll just take anyone, but you want to make sure that you're comfortable there. Sure. Okay. So I think that just about takes us to the end of time here. So I wanted to, you know, deeply thank all three of our panelists here today for telling us about your journeys, and for giving us better insights into careers in preventive medicine. And I think that, you know, these conferences serve as an excellent platform for us, you know, young in our career, or mid in your career, or even late in your career. One of the questions I saw in the chat was, is there an age limit to applying for EIS fellowship? So I think that, you know, reaching out during these conferences is one of the best things you can do. There's the chat function, if you haven't seen it yet, in the conference website. And so I would advise each of you who are looking to either make a change in your careers, just, you know, ask further questions about what's out there, or just trying to get a feel for what you can do in preventive medicine to reach out. And as each of our panelists recommended, you know, looking at people you admire, their backgrounds, their biographies, people who are in, you know, what sound like exciting career positions to see what it took to get there. And just thank you again to our panelists. And so with that, we'll sign off here. Thank you very much. Thank you, Hunter. Nice meeting you. Take care, everyone. Bye, Yana.

panelists

career journeys

preventive medicine

passion

new opportunities

experiences

clinical medicine

variety of roles

administrative time

network

fulfilling career