Kari Yacisin, Medical Student, Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Not all philosophy majors become epidemiologists, but Dr. Marty Roper experienced the transformation, albeit over decades. Originally from Wisconsin, as a young girl Marty dreamed of being a doctor. She went to college, majored in philosophy, and traveled to Germany to work as a lab technician and to study German in order to read Hegel in the
100 original. She realized that she was “not brilliant” in philosophy and that she had
“aspirations to do something socially and politically useful.” Following her young girl’s dream, Marty headed to medical school.
After graduating with a medical degree from NYU, she crossed the continent to begin a residency in internal medicine at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California, and seemed to have settled in to life in the Bay Area. For 15 years, she stayed in Oakland, worked as a supervisor in the Medicine and Emergency departments at Highland, served as medical director of the ambulatory wing of the emergency department, and immersed herself in improving hospital capacity and resident teaching. Dr. Roper became Medical Staff President, and also became antsy. She had achieved much in her career in hospital administration but was eager for fresh challenges. That’s when she took a year to travel.
A Traveling Epidemiologist
During this year, Marty volunteered in the south coast swamps of West Papua (Indonesian New Guinea). For 4 months, she conducted a study of malarial drug
resistance, assisted with patient care, and took calls for the local medical missionary. She recalls, “I had a wonderful experience…truly in the middle of nowhere….[with] three beds in a little hut.” The challenge of medicine in such a remote area —where one “had to use any and everything,[including] your senses”--enthralled her. Global health had hooked her professional and personal interests.
Going from medical practice and hospital administrative responsibilities in the United States to international public health work seems an imposing career change, but for Marty, it was not too radical. In her training in New York City and in Oakland, she treated many immigrants, and she had had an “interest in working with people from around the world” for many years.
Two ingredients have been critical in Marty Roper’s global health career: “meeting people and luck.” After her experience in Indonesia, she returned to California, and, following the advice of a mentor, earned an MPH in Epidemiology at the University of California at Berkeley. She then decided to go to London to attend the diploma course in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene at the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine, where she decided that leishmaniasis was a disease she would like to pursue. Her interest in this tropical disease arose from it being a “forgotten, neglected disease, affecting the poorest of the poor…[with] not a lot of competition; a great place to start.” On the advice of London faculty, she contacted a researcher at Harvard who needed a visiting scientist to go to Salvador, Brazil, for an NIH-funded project on the inflammatory response to heat treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis. Marty went to Brazil, where she met a U.S. Army physician working on the development of a malaria vaccine who needed an
epidemiologist in the Peruvian Amazon. Marty went to the Peruvian jungle. She later worked for the World Health Organization as a consultant in the Global Polio Eradication Program, spending a year in Pakistan. After a few consultancies for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), including one in Kenya, she joined the CDC as staff where, as neonatal tetanus were rampant, she helped develop surveillance guidelines for neonatal tetanus in Nepal and reviewed progress in neonatal tetanus elimination in high-priority
101 countries in South Asia. Last fall, through a friend in the CDC, she had dinner with Bob Gilman, a doctor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and met David Moore, a physician at Imperial College in London, and is now in Peru working to implement the microscopic observation drug susceptibility assay (MODS) in Lima and other sites. After surviving a mid-life career change, Marty has thrived, and she offers thoughtful advice. She suggests that those interested in careers in global health identify the types of organizations with which they wish to work: do they want to participate in larger
organizations that can have greater, albeit slower impact and present the challenges of working in large bureaucracies, or do they prefer to be more independent and join smaller groups, such as non-governmental organizations? If the latter, Marty recommends
investigating their histories: are they connected with other organizations, what is their relationship with the local governments, and what is their track record?
Dr. Roper also acknowledges the often complicated dynamic with working in poor- resource settings. She says, “We can go in with best intentions, really listen to the communities, but what keeps things from falling apart? You [have] got to keep asking.” To ensure that working in developing settings does not burden health systems and efforts, Marty recommends reflecting on “how to help in a way that makes sense,” adding that, when first arriving in a new setting, it is “best to assume you know nothing about how things work; [problems [persist for] reasons beyond lack of creativity and know-how; solutions that occur to you may already have been tried.”
One final challenge that Marty has faced has been that with living and working in so many countries, she lacks a “real” home. So she recently bought a house in Vermont. Overall, this life as a wandering global epidemiologist has invigorated Marty Roper; she says, “I’ve had a lot of fun, have met really extraordinary people around the world, different points of view, [and] satisfactions from being useful; what I’ve done is consistent with who I am.” Sounds like a true philosopher.