HSPH Student Commencement Speaker

Candy Liang, SM2, HPM

Candy Liang is originally from Guangdong, China, and immigrated here to the United States right before high school. As a first-generation immigrant, Candy experienced and witnessed poverty and health disparity first hand. Candy studied biology and pre-med at Amherst College, graduated with distinction and decided to join a global strategy consulting firm because of its potential international and multidisciplinary opportunities. She focused on healthcare, especially in creating innovative market access strategies for new drugs and medical devices in US, Japan and China. Through her consulting work, she met top health ministry officials, insurers, and hospital administrators and she came to admire their vision and commitment of providing sustainable high-quality healthcare to the public. She decided to attend Harvard School of Public Health and study Health Policy and Management, to achieve her goal of improving public health institutions’ operations and management, to find the sweet spot between private and public health care delivery to better provide accessible, affordable and high quality health care especially to vulnerable populations.

During her two years at HSPH, Candy was a Student Ambassador working with the Office of Diversity to promote diversity and community outreach initiatives that would improve cultural competency among members of the HSPH community and increase HSPH contributions to surrounding under-served communities.  Candy was also part of Project Antares, a collaborative project between the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Harvard Business School (HBS) that brings together the strengths of the fields of public health and business to identify high-impact public health interventions that lend themselves to a commercial model. She devoted her last semester at HSPH working with a social entrepreneurial telemedicine company in India, to improve their operations of providing high quality primary care to urban low-income residents in northern India.   After graduation, Candy will join Deloitte Consulting in New York City to continue her quest of improving public health through private enterprise.