Vanessa Bradford Kerry (born December 31, 1976) is an American physician, public health expert, and advocate. She is a founder of the non-profit Seed Global Health, director of the Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change at Harvard Medical School, and serves as the Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health for the World Health Organization (WHO).
While in medical school, she interned with the Vaccine Fund of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization and conducted a study on immunization in Ghana.[4] She later studied and advised on government relations for health and development in Rwanda in partnership with Partners in Health.[5]
Career
Kerry completed her internal medicine residency and critical care fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She is now a physician specializing in critical care. Kerry has continued work in global health and has collaborated on projects in Haiti and Rwanda through the Harvard Medical School Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She has worked on public sector partnerships in Uganda, Malawi, Zambia and Sierra Leone through Seed Global Health and supports education and public policy at the MGH Center for Global Health.[6] Kerry also serves as director of the Program in Global Public Policy and Social Change and is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.[7]
Active in global health for many years, in 2011 Kerry started the non-profit Seed Global Health. Seed's flagship program was the Global Health Service Partnership (GHSP),[8] a partnership with the Peace Corps. The Partnership sent health professionals abroad to work as medical and nursing educators and to help build capacity. With the Peace Corps through GHSP, Seed helped send over 191 physician and nurse educators to train more than 16,000 health professionals in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, Seed launched a new strategy, Sharing Knowledge, Saving Lives.[9] The program is currently active in Malawi, Uganda, Sierra-Leone, and Zambia and has trained almost 40,000 health workers in seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in total.[10]
In 2010, Kerry wrote an op-ed on the idea of sending American health professionals to teach for The New York Times.[11] She has also published in the New England Journal of Medicine[12] and The Lancet on the topic.[13] The program also partners with academic medical centers such as the Massachusetts General Hospital and the MGH Center for Global Health. In 2013, Kerry, as CEO was named a Draper Richards Kaplan Social Entrepreneur.[14] In 2014, she was featured in Boston Magazine's Power of Ideas for her work with the organization.[15] In 2015, she earned an Honorary Doctor of Public Service degree from Northeastern University.[16] In 2016, she was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.[17]
Seed's work has promoted the need for a strong workforce and health systems for better health, economic growth, security and wellbeing. In 2021, Seed started promoting the connection between and health and climate change at the Conference of the parties 26.[18]
Kerry is the Director of the Program in Global Public Policy at the Mass General Center for Global Health and spearheads the program in Global Public Policy and Social Change at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and serves on its faculty.[19]
In June 2023, Kerry was appointed as the first Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health at the World Health Organization (WHO). At WHO, Kerry's responsibilities include raising awareness of the impact of climate change on health, helping to mobilize resources to advance the work of WHO, and to advance high-level advocacy.[20]
Personal life
On October 10, 2009 in Boston, Kerry married neurosurgeon Brian Vala Nahed, who specializes in brain tumors and spinal disorders.[21] As a surgeon and scientist, Nahed leads a research lab, which aims to develop the first blood test for brain tumors.[22][23] They have a son born in 2012 and a daughter born in 2015.[24][25]
Advocacy
Dr. Kerry delivers remarks at the International Women of Courage Award Ceremony at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 2014
Kerry took a leave from her medical studies in order to campaign for her father's, then SenatorJohn Kerry, presidential bid in 2004, even introducing him at that year's Democratic National Convention. She campaigned by herself and with her sister, mostly focusing on campaign stops at university campuses. She made speeches in support of her father and focused on health care issues and tuition costs for students, two Democratic campaign issues she felt personally attached to.[26] She also appeared with Alexandra on the MTV Music Video Awards show in Miami where she joined George W. Bush's daughters Barbara and Jenna, who were campaigning for their father George W. Bush, to encourage youth and citizen voting. Jenna later confirmed that Barbara and Jenna also developed a friendship with John Kerry's daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa.[27] Through her work with her father and her public health policy education, she has not ruled out running for political office in the future.[28]
↑ Kerry, Vanessa Bradford (February 13, 2010). "And One for Doctors, Too". The New York Times. Retrieved May 6, 2019.
↑ Bradford Kerry, Vanessa; Auld, Sara; Farmer, Paul (September 23, 2010). "An International Service Corps for Health — An Unconventional Prescription for Diplomacy". New England Journal of Medicine. 363 (13): 1199–1201. doi:10.1056/NEJMp1006501. ISSN0028-4793. PMID20860500.
Alexandra Forbes Kerry is an American actress and filmmaker. She is a partner at Locomotive Films and co-founder of Fictional Pictures, a film production company based in New York and Los Angeles. She is married to contemporary art curator Julien Dobbs-Higginson and they have two daughters named Isabelle and Allegra.
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The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first graduate training program in population health, which was founded in 1913 and then became the Harvard School of Public Health in 1922.
Barbara Pierce Bush is an American activist. She co-founded and is the chair of the board of the nonprofit organization Global Health Corps. She and her fraternal twin sister, Jenna, are the daughters of the forty-third U.S. president, George W. Bush, and former first lady, Laura Bush. She is also a granddaughter of former president George H. W. Bush and former first lady Barbara Bush, after whom she is named.
Carola Blitzman Eisenberg was an Argentine-American psychiatrist who became the first woman to hold the position of Dean of Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1990, she was the dean of student affairs at Harvard Medical School (HMS). She was a long-time lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at HMS. She was also both a founding member of Physicians for Human Rights and an honorary psychiatrist with the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. After retiring, she was involved in human rights work through Physicians for Human Rights, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and elsewhere. She turned 100 in September 2017 and died in Lincoln, Massachusetts, in March 2021 at the age of 103.
Joia Stapleton Mukherjee is an associate professor with the Division of Global Health Equity at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Since 2000, she has served as the Chief Medical Officer of Partners In Health, an international medical non-profit founded by Paul Farmer, Ophelia Dahl, and Jim Kim. She trained in Infectious Disease, Internal Medicine, and Pediatrics at the Massachusetts General Hospital and has an MPH from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Mukherjee has been involved in health care access and human rights issues since 1989, and she consults for the World Health Organization on the treatment of HIV and MDR-TB in developing countries. Her scholarly work focuses on the human rights aspect of HIV treatment and on the implementation of complex health interventions in resource-poor settings.
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Allan Macy Butler (1894–1986) was an American pediatrician and Chief of the Children's Medical Services at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. A pioneer in health services, Butler sought to change the structure of the American "fee-for-service" system of health care to one based on government-paid medical care for the elderly and low-income people.
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