When she started her medical career 30 years ago as a pediatrician, Helene Gayle, MD, MPH, said she never imagined she’d find herself at the helm of one of the world’s biggest poverty-fighting organizations.
Now the president and CEO of CARE, Gayle has reinvented herself along the way, continually acquiring new skills and taking on major leadership roles as an epidemiologist and public health specialist, AIDS-fighter, advocate for women and children and global health expert. The driving force throughout, she said, has been her desire to address issues of social equity, both in the United States and abroad.
Gayle will expand on that theme as the featured speaker June 13 at commencement ceremonies for the Stanford University School of Medicine.
“I want students to think about how they continue to apply what they learn to increase overall social benefit,” said Gayle. “That may be doing research on ways to innovate so we have a better solution, or going into health policy so one day we actually have a true health system in this nation, not a fragmented approach to health care. I think students need to continue to look at issues of inequity, not only in this country but around the world.”
Gayle was raised in Buffalo, NY, in a socially active family during the politically turbulent 1960s and early ’70s. She began her medical training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, completing a residency in pediatrics in an inner-city hospital in the nation’s capital, where she got a vivid lesson in the shortcomings of the country’s health-care system. She went on to obtain a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University.
“I chose public health because it’s the marriage of medicine and medical technology as well as social factors — how do you make a difference not just in a patient’s life but at a population level, in a community or a nation,” she said.
She joined the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta when HIV/AIDS had just emerged. The AIDS epidemic, she said, “brought together interesting science but also the societal imperatives, given the fact that it isn’t randomly distributed. It hits those most marginalized throughout the world. It pulled together all the strands of my life: How do you use medical technology to drive the broader social good?”
Gayle spent 20 years at the CDC, rising through the ranks to become the first director of the National Center for HIV, STD and TB Prevention. While at the CDC, she worked on issues related to child malnutrition, child survival in Africa and HIV/AIDS research and policy.
In 2001, she joined the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she directed HIV, tuberculosis and reproductive health programs. Moving to CARE in 2005 has broadened her portfolio, as the agency seeks to expand access to clean water and sanitation, improve education and expand economic opportunities, among other goals. The Atlanta-based agency, with a budget of more than $600 million, has programs that reach 55 million people in 66 countries.
“The work at CARE is not just about health but global poverty — what are the real underlying causes,” Gayle said. “Children in Africa or Asia may be dying of diarrheal disease, but what they are really dying of is poverty. If they had safe drinking water, they wouldn’t be dying of diarrhea.”
Gayle’s work already has taken her to Afghanistan, Guatemala, Haiti and Bangladesh, where CARE’s projects seek to improve the lives of women and children, who are disproportionately affected by poverty. At the same time, Gayle remains involved in health-care issues closer to home.
In the United States, she said, “We have the most expensive system — or non-system — in the world, but we were ranked 37th in effectiveness by the World Health Organization. So we put a lot in, but we don’t get a lot out. We have to ask why. A lot of it has to do with disparities.”
The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation’s top 10 medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://mednews.stanford.edu. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. For information about all three, please visit http://stanfordmedicine.org/about/news.html.
NOTE TO REPORTERS: Members of the media are invited to attend the School of Medicine graduation ceremony, which will be held at 2 p.m., June 13, on the Dean’s Lawn, in front of the medical school and bordering Campus Drive.
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