I have spent more than 25 years working in local public health for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, currently serving as the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Health Officer Association (MHOA), where I oversee an organization with 600+ members, including staff from 300 of the 351 health departments in the state. For much of this time, I have advocated, with my
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The COVID-19 pandemic spread to the United States during my last semester at the Boston University School of Public Health. By March of 2020, I was working full-time from my apartment at the time, taking all my classes online, and I hadn’t been outside for days. My parents in Vermont, less than 200 miles away, continued their normal lives, going
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I relish any opportunity to apply knowledge gained throughout my studies in public health to resolve a real-world conundrum. When I learned that SARS-CoV-2 was spreading rapidly within our country and that it could overwhelm our health systems, I admittedly became obsessed. I read every pre-print that came out, whipped up my own spreadsheets to track the numbers, and cheered
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Over the summer, JPHMP Direct’s “Boots on the Ground,” is running a series, “Answering the Call: A Public Health Response to COVID-19,” featuring posts from the Academic Public Health Volunteer Corps in Massachusetts. When I first arrived in the United States from the Dominican Republic, I was a young 17-year-old with both dreams and doubts. I had no clear image
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