Dr. Vanessa Burrowes, PhD in International Health | Corporate Health Program Researcher at IBM

In this episode, we discuss Vanessa’s approach to defining her post-doctoral career path in international health, her experience working as a corporate health program researcher at IBM during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond, and her advice for current Public Health PhD students preparing for their future careers.

Hosted by Brooklyn Arroyo

To connect with Vanessa and to learn more about her story, visit her page on the PHutures #100AlumniVoices Project website.

Transcript

Brooklyn Arroyo

Hello I'm Co-host Brooklyn Arroyo and this is the 100 Alumni Voices Podcast, stories that inspire, where we explore the personal and professional journeys of a diverse group of 100 doctoral alumni from Johns Hopkins University. Today we're here joined by Vanessa Burrowes, PhD in international health, global epidemiology, and control program. Hello Vanessa, how are you?

Vanessa Burrowes

Doing alright. Thanks for having me today.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Thank you for coming. So, before we jump right in, I would just like to ask sort of your insight on international health and your PhD and what sort of brought you into that world?

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, so I guess I started looking into global health programs. I did a master’s of science and public health at Emory University and there was a practicum that all the master students had to complete in between their first and second year and one of the opportunities that was presented to me was to do sort of a global field project and I guess the first time that I really got onto the field was when I was given a grant to do HIV research in Zambia. So, I spent about three months down in Lusaka working with a really great team down there that was doing an intervention for couples that were discordant HIV status. So, one partner was positive, the other was negative, and I sort of helped with looking into all the aspects, both the behavioral interventions that were going on between the couples. How do you keep the other partner from becoming positive? And then also the lab side of it as well, doing a lot of sensitivity testing and making sure that somebody who may have tested negative was actually negative and making sure that we have these really high sensitivity assays for detecting the virus. So, that was my first exposure into it and I knew when I went to did that project that it was something that I wanted to continue pursuing, especially because I think as a scientist, it's good to get out in the field and see you know and design things that people, that are usable by people that we are looking to do projects with and collaborate with as well.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely definitely. And I do agree that I think that it's important to have that almost real-world exposure and experience and, and I feel like working with the couples and with HIV and in general it can come with a lot of emotional toll as well. Just because it's a heavy topic. So really like, do you feel that you learned the science aspect and that that experience but also the emotional mental toll that that that medicine can bring sometimes?

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, absolutely, and I think in that way it's good to get out in the field to sort of see the populations real impact of these diseases. I think it's different from writing a project proposals. It's different from doing even just lab work. You know here in the United States on samples of, you know stool samples, blood samples, things like that. Coming back from these countries that and just kind of getting more of the personal aspect behind these diseases. Seeing the actual like impact, and understanding, you know, sort of the real world. Yeah, how these diseases are playing out in different settings, so I think it's extremely important to get that kind of experience as well.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely, definitely. So aside from that real-world experience and more into the academia, as you're going through your PhD, did you often know what your destination was going to be? Did you have an idea of what you wanted to do with this?

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, sorry are you talking about more of like postgraduation? Or while I was going through the program?

Brooklyn Arroyo

Postgraduation but also your experience throughout the program as well.

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, so that's a really good question. I think when I went into the program, I definitely still wanted to do more field work. Up until then I had done a lot of lab work. So, it was more focused on doing sensitivity analysis, doing sort of like the statistical analysis around like the results. How do you interpret them and sort of how does this impact the next steps of a study, right? So, I had done a lot of work in that respect, but I wanted to do more work in the field of actually designing the studies. Doing the data collection. Understanding the difficulties around data collection as well are the different challenges that might be coming with that kind of work and then also you know getting out there and making sure that I was designing studies or interventions where the people that I was working with, like the collaborators and the teams in these countries were getting input as well, so they had actual buy in. They wanted to like—I’ll give examples from my actual PhD too—but making sure that the results were meaningful to them were we investigating questions that were important and making sure that they had a say in the design of it as well, and the actual execution of the study. So, I was interested in learning more about that. I think postgraduation, I still wanted to continue and I am continuing work with very widely, geographically distributed team. And as I was working throughout the pandemic with this team over at IBM, which is where I now work, it's been a very good application of the lessons that I learned from my PhD in doing international collaboration and understanding all the contributions that people have from around the world and how that informs everyone as well. Like how do you share that information in a really succinct way so that people can use it quickly too?

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely. So, you would say that within your PhD you feel prepared for the work that you're doing now and you really learned lessons that that propelled you into the work you're doing now. Do you feel that in any way how did your PhD fall short for preparing you for your career? If it did, and how did you pick up the pieces within your career?

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, that's a great question. I can give a really good example for COVID right? So, and this wasn't just through my education, this I think was a good exercise of the world of public health in general, the field of public health in general. So, I would say one thing that I would have loved to learn more about during my PhD that, there's only so many hours in the day, but I if I had had the time looking back, I would have focused on risk communication. I would have learned how to do that better. And I would have been able to take really like learn how to take really, really complex ideas, information, a lot of stuff that might have been unclear the time, and be able to get it into an actionable message as quickly as possible. So, it's not just that that kind of exercise is not just helpful for public health. I think it's good for all sciences in general. It's sort of that mantra of like, well, if you can't, if you if you're not as effective at communicating the work that you do, you know, sort of like how can we take that and make it actionable and get it to people that need it, right? So, a good example is like COVID right. There was so much information flying around and there's like there was uncertainty around of a lot of the research that was going on, like academically or governmentally around COVID and it wasn't just the United States, it was like everywhere. There's just different things coming out. And how do you succinctly put that together so that you have actionable things that people can use and make decisions with in a short period of time? Because there is so much changing the situation around the outbreaks was changing so quickly, like how do you protect people and you know protect health and safety in an effective way. If there's so much going on, so that's kind of what I wish I had learned. More about and you know you get some of that you get with practice, right? You get that through your job as well, but definitely we're brush up on risk communication and I think that's just a good practice for any field, really.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And COVID pandemic definitely threw us into the deep end for all sorts of stuff so.

Vanessa Burrowes

Sure, yeah.

Brooklyn Arroyo

You had no idea how to prepare and so that's something that's come up in almost every interview, and so I would like to ask sort of yeah, what were you doing within your career when the height of the pandemic was going on and what were some of the biggest lessons you learned? Because I think that that was probably the biggest lesson time where all of us were learning lessons. So, what were some of those?

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, so let's give a timeline. I defended my dissertation in 2019. That was October. I finished applying and got offered the job that I currently have at IBM in November or December of 2019. I started working at IBM 2020, January 6th actually and then almost two to three weeks later because IBM has so many offices in China and the sort of like greater Asia Pacific region, we started hearing reports about COVID emerging and it was so interesting because I think I feel like the impact to the US was really felt in March, right? So, the time between when I started hearing reports of it coming out and affecting offices or employees you know with shutdowns and quarantines and everything as it was spreading from like China across Asia Pacific through Europe through the rest of the world, I could just sort of see it and it was, I don't know. It was very scary to hear about. Like you can sort of see in an oncoming ways, but it's not the reality on the ground around you at the time. So, it was very disorienting, I would say when that was happening, and yeah, I mean, it was definitely a dive into the deep end for me because I was using because there was so much unknown about COVID at the time, right? I was using literally everything I had ever learned through my entire educational career all at once. So, I was working on—more immediately my PhD, I did airborne or like air pollution, sort of related research and so I was looking into ventilation controls. I was looking into sanitation and hygiene controls. I was looking into mask guidance, every sort of thing you could ever think of, and it was all just coming together so and it was a great use of like again, everything I'd ever learned because there was so much unknown right? So, by default are just tapped into for every single question that comes in. And yeah, it was definitely a dive into the deep end immediately after graduation, and then it remains like that for about, I would say almost, what are we now two years out? It just has been pretty much that ever since, but hopefully tailing off soon. Fingers crossed, but to be seen, to be seen.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Yes, and so it seems like the work that you were doing with ventilation and sort of that area that you were speaking on of knowing the most about within your research. Did you find that it was the biggest struggle was that it was like ever changing and constantly evolving? And how did you go about like that constant evolving of like from my end from the citizen level and I'm sure that you've you also experienced the citizen level. It's like OK now it's airborne now it's not airborne. So from your end, how did that look and how did that go?

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, it was—it felt very much like sort of straddling two different worlds, right? It's like as somebody who had just come from academia, you understand all the nuance, right? You sort of understand like there's gonna be limitations to the stuff that we know, and you understand that it's like everybody is never like they're probably never going to say something like conclusively like we know for sure. This is going to be it. They're definitely gonna make a point in the all of these papers that I had to review of like here are the limitations of the study. Here's what's unknown, and here's what needs to be answered beforehand. But it's like when you're trying to communicate that to the general public, and then even a newspaper that refuted the stuff from yesterday's publication comes out and you're sort of like, yeah, I guess you know, as somebody who was helping out a lot with the employee Health Communications that we're going out to the larger global population within IBM, it was very much like I need to get a message out, that is like 30 seconds or less, gets the main points out about how to keep the healthiest and safest during this really turbulent time. How do I take what I understand to be the this a good scientific principle of knowing your limits? And how do I actually communicate that to somebody who needs this now, right? So, there was definitely like a huge disconnect. I think the way that I was trying to figure it out, I was I was kind of seeing how other governments around the world were also communicating out because they're dealing with the same stuff. I'm sure that they have scientists on their advisory committees and whatnot that are also trying to consolidate and get this out in the best way possible. That doesn't make it so. And like you know, people are flip-flopping all over the place and can't make up their mind. And so, I was taking a lot of direction from different governmental agencies and especially within countries that seem to be doing a good job of controlling it. I was definitely taking notes from them as well to just be like how are they keeping all of this like straight and how are they taking like just fluctuation and making it stable, you know, how do they do that? So yeah, definitely learned, like I said earlier, a lot of stuff about risk communication. Just so important, just cannot overemphasize it enough.

Brooklyn Arroyo

That that's definitely some real-world experience, right there?

Vanessa Burrowes

Oh yeah.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, you really jumped into the deep end like we've been talking about right after your PhD and didn't really have a transition period I feel like between like the, your career—dreams of your career and all of that. So, what factors really went into where you went Post PhD and like which job you went for and that sort of thing?

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah so. I yeah, that's really good question. I think the way that I had sort of decided to sort of pursue industry versus like a postdoc like or a traditional sort of Professor route, is that I did want to—I don't—I've always been sort of a generalist, like if you took a look at my resume, I've you know worked on a bunch of different topics and I'm more broadly interested in environmental health as a principle and sort of you know how our disease is transmitted throughout a person's lived environment, right? So, I had always sort of wanted to pursue a more generalist route and more like I guess, like application-based science. And so, I was looking into a bunch of different things. I was looking into government agencies, state health organizations departments and whatnot. I did look into a couple of fellowships as well, but I knew that I sort of wanted to continue pursuing that route of like application-based science. That's really what I wanted to do, and you know, again, I ended up taking everything I knew and sort of putting it into the fire as well, with trying to help with the COVID-19 pandemic, but yeah, I guess that's sort of the mindset that I went about it. I was like I wanna do more sort of a generalist route. I want to do application-based stuff and then I just went after those different, you know opportunities as they were given to me. And admittedly, it was a bit of a tough road at first. I think nowadays I think people understand public health a little bit better. I think they understand what the role of it is in, you know, generally protecting health and safety of people. But at the time I think it was still a little bit nebulous of how what does a public health scientist do? And so, I did have to go through a lot of different applications. Some you know, came through, others didn't. But this was ultimately the one that I felt, you know, as a corporate health program researcher was the best fit for me. It was a new environment I've never worked in a corporate setting before and in the past, I have worked in different government agencies and NGO's and so this felt like both a new opportunity to take on a different challenge and also fitting my interests and sort of more application-based stuff.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Right, you feel that there is a big difference between the work that you were doing prior to your PhD with working directly with patients and partners and what you were talking about with HIV, and then the work you're doing now because I feel like the biggest misconception or the way that public health is viewed by the general public is that it's very almost devoid of the public, it's like deciding what's going on without being invested and involved, and I feel like that's not the fact, and that's not the truth. So, can you speak on how the work you're doing really does impact the public and how you work alongside the public rather than almost viewing it from bird bird's eye view?

Vanessa Burrowes

That's a really good question. I mean, I would say like right now I'll tell you about the structure of my current team. So, I'm seated right now in Durham, NC, but I am part of a leadership team within corporate health and safety within IBM, and so it's a small team. But we do help design policies, practices, healthcare plans, and even Wellness programs that are for the global population within IBM so. Right now, it's, I mean I still travel to some of the countries in which we work, but I'm not working directly with like say somebody in Kenya that I'm trying to design a Wellness program for. So, it's a little bit different, I think. I think public health is a big spectrum of interaction with the, you know, the individuals that you are doing conversations with or collaborating with the work that I did improve was very direct. I mean I was I was living there for the better part of two years in Puno, Peru, and I was most days going out to people's farms and doing the measurements and interacting with patients and taking, you know, blood pressure measurements, things like that, so that that's much more direct. But I would say both of them are public health, right? I think there's a place for public health and policy that does affect large populations like the NIH is a good a good example of that. They're setting policies. They're putting together budgets for different research things, but I think there's a big element as well, especially when you're designing smaller programs where you do need to talk to directly to the populations in which you are, you know either doing an intervention or you're doing a study or trying to do some sort of like community development program where you do need people's input. You need to talk to them. You need to make sure that they have buy in and input and you know, make sure that even after you leave or your study is finished, it continues beyond you, right? So, I think there's a very wide spectrum of interaction with people throughout public health, and I mean, I guess medicine is more traditional in the fact that you're doing a one-to-one patient, but I would say in a lot of different aspects, it's still one-to-one within public health as well, depending on sort of the work that you want to do.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Right, so aside from the pandemic from the COVID-19 pandemic, do you feel that what you learned in your PhD and the general work you're doing now within your career there was any surprises for you? Any aspects of the that work you're doing that you didn't necessarily think we're going to be under public health, but you find yourself doing now?

Vanessa Burrowes

That is, that is a really good question. I don't know. I guess the range of topics that I've been asked to advise on has been really surprising. Besides COVID, I mean there's a litany of topics that come up every day within corporate health and safety. I mean, we're helping address anything from natural disaster response stuff, emergency response, all the way up to you know there's new chemicals in the lab. What do we do about that? What's the toxicology reports on that? So, I think the range of topics has been the most surprising to me. And I in that way I feel that I was well prepared to advise on those different topics because I've always taken that generalist approach. But in that way, you get a good set of tools. You get a good set of, like resources that you can draw upon and a good set of skills that you can use to address a whole range of different topics. And I would say that's the biggest. It's what I wanted. You know, it's I wanted to work on a wide range of things, but the actual width of it has been surprising to me as well. I sort of assumed it was going to be more like database stuff, more like statistical analysis and sort of environment health, but I have been drawn into a lot of different projects that have been really great and definitely challenging in a lot of different ways, but I've been able to like draw upon my skills to help address that in different ways as well.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Right, and it was that constant academic always learning.

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah exactly, I got to always be open to learning new things too.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Yeah, so within your career, as you're talking about it, what are some of your favorite parts? Your favorite experiences? Let's speak on that.

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, I. Yeah, I was hoping, I was hoping to do a lot more travel when I first started out right, but that was kind of set aside for a bit with the pandemic, but in that way, I mean, I think the pandemic gave a really good opportunity for me to work with a lot of people that I don't know I would have been able to work with. Had I been focusing on the projects that I started out on in my job, so for example, I mean we have a really large team across at least I would say the 40 or 50 different countries around the world, and that's really been the most rewarding part of my work. Just being able to interact with you know people in Europe or Australia or South America and it's just been, it's been really great to have that global team and even throughout even throughout we were having weekly reports where everybody around the world was saying, you know what's going on in the grounds? How is the government changing their guidance? All this other stuff. And it was just so it was really nice to be able to get those sort of like in person reports, because I feel like a lot of the news in the US has filtered through a bunch of different stuff and you just don't get that kind of information right. But you kind of get the yeah, the real world on the ground challenges and stories from everyone that I work with, so that's definitely been the best part for me.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Yeah, sensing all of the different people and all. I feel like that would that would just be amazing.

Vanessa Burrowes

Yeah, exactly.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Because we're just now I feel on the tail end of the pandemic and you're still doing this job. Do you know yet what the next phase would be for you career wise?

Vanessa Burrowes

I do not. We do have a lot of different projects that are ongoing right now that I'm leading for my job, and so yeah, I would like to complete those as well, so definitely some of the longer-term goals are still in the works right now. But yeah, I don't have a good answer right now, yeah.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, what advice would you give to somebody who might be interested in the same career, or even just in public health or international health in general? What advice would you have to them? Who is pursuing their PhD?

Vanessa Burrowes

I guess I would give different guidance for depending on the journey of the PhD. It has a lot of ups and downs of course, but I would say for people that are maybe starting out in international health, I would say be open to projects that people will offer you. I would say that I think initially going into the program there's a lot of ideas that people have about like I only want to work on one specific topic. I only want to work on this one question right, but the reality is, is that the skills that you learned throughout your entire PhD are never wasted. You never know when they're going to come in handy. And it's never. It's never time wasted to invest, you know, brain-width and learning a different skill, a different analysis. You know, learning how to sample water, process samples, whatever it is, lab work wise. It's never wasted because it will come back. Like public health, I feel like we always are responding to the next illness, the next pandemic, the next wave of disease, and you never know what it's going to be right? So I always think and I've always held this belief, that skills that you gather along the way, even if they're not in a topic that you love and adore, and it's like your dream, it will never go to waste. And will come back and you will be able to use it again, so that's kind of the advice that I would give for people that are starting a PhD in international health and I think when I was finishing up my degree, the thing that I became also very interested in was how do you in addition to maybe conducting research or studies in different countries, how do you also train and you know, train people and get them interested in investigating questions for their own communities too? I think that was one thing that I had learned over my PhD, that I was like, yeah, I mean we do a lot of work in different countries, but like everybody here that I worked with everybody that I collaborate with that's on my immediate team, like in Peru for example, they also have great questions. They're also great scientists and I you know, how do we get them the tools and the training to investigate these questions themselves as well? And I think that's also, you know, something I'm interested in doing more broadly, like educational outreach and also capacity building. And yeah, I would say that's also a really good goal and something that I think the field of global health is moving towards as well.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And back to the point of constant being constantly being an academic and pursuing more knowledge is just never ending.

Vanessa Burrowes

Always a student, yeah.

Brooklyn Arroyo

So, our final question, and we're asking this of all interviewees, and I think that it is an important one, and then we've highlighted a little bit throughout this, but, that question is what inspires you right now?

Vanessa Burrowes

It's, you know, I had been told that this question was coming and I gave it a lot of thought and I think that I'm sure it down to, but it's kind of threefold, but it's going to be really nerdy, so it's all related to science. It's related to expansion and outreach. And it's this stuff has always been really great. I think the one thing that I would say is that, as I mentioned earlier, science communication is the leaps and bounds that we've made over like the past two years, especially emphasizing the importance of it is going to go a long way towards outreach and training and getting people excited in science and wanting to pursue it more. I think that's one part of it. The second part is that I'm seeing now, especially really, after the pandemic, even before it, a little bit, a lot of collaboration between different fields of work that have never talked to each other before. I think that's really exciting and I'm really excited to see where that goes, especially in terms of like citizen science. Coming together with policymakers and you know, people that are affected by diseases directly having a lot more say in how things are designed and you know seeing how it's executed in the real world. And yeah, just a lot more participation by everyone in that field. And I've seen a lot of art stuff coming together as well with science, so it's just really great. It's just really great. I think I don't know if I'm allowed to promote another podcast on this podcast, but Radiolab has been excellent in helping me, just like get out of my own field of work and understanding how like you can draw from different fields and different paths of knowledge to sort of make a better product overall. So that's been really great. And then the last thing I will say is that traditionally, underrepresented groups are becoming, I don't know, they just have a better presence and a stronger presence in science now too. So, for example, I volunteer every year with the Kentucky Science and Engineering Science fair. And so, I over the last, I think I started this over COVID but, I was virtually judging different projects that were coming forward from mostly high schoolers, some middle schoolers as well, and I was just so excited to see that there's so many more women. And so many more women from different backgrounds too. And it's they're going on a huge range of topics. I've been judging mostly the microbiology fields, but also being drawn into other events as well. And it's just so great. It's just so great. I mean, I, I remember when I was in elementary school, we were mandatorily told that we had to be in a science fair, but as it became more voluntary overtime, right, like when it started to be optional for our participation, I did notice more and more, at least within my lifetime in elementary school that there were just fewer women. There just were fewer as it went on and on, and even like when I was an undergrad, most of my classes, say were male, so I’m really, really glad to see there's so much more representation, especially by women in this field. So those are the things that are inspiring now. But yeah, it's real nerdy. It's a lot of science stuff.

Brooklyn Arroyo

I think that the process in the future is very inspiring to many people. Thank you so much for coming today. I feel like we had a great conversation and I learned I learned a lot about international health and global health. So, thank you again for coming to the PHutures podcast. 

Vanessa Burrowes

Thank you so much, I appreciate it.