Mary Tate, MPH ’17, is studying to be an obstetrician and to help reduce disparities in maternal and neonatal health
May 24, 2017 – Mary Tate remembers raising her hand in elementary school to ask her teacher, “How do you spell obstetrician?”
Her mother had told her that obstetricians bring babies into the world, and Tate thought that sounded like a fine thing to do when she grew up.
Years later, Tate realized that being an obstetrician was only one way to help mothers and children; she also became interested in working to reduce disparities in maternal and neonatal health. That led her to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she’ll graduate with a master’s degree in public health in quantitative methods in May.
“I want to work in communities of black and brown folks who look like me,” said Tate. “And I want to use the quantitative skills I learned at Harvard Chan School to help evaluate various efforts to lessen racial and ethnic inequities in birth outcomes.”
Care giver
Growing up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tate—the youngest of eight children—helped care for a disabled brother. Another brother died at age 30. Both brothers were hospitalized at different times, so Tate spent many hours watching physicians at work. The experience made Tate surer than ever that she wanted to spend her life caring for patients and their families during momentous or difficult times in their lives.
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, Tate learned some unsettling facts—that certain populations around the globe face significantly higher risk of maternal and neonatal mortality than others, and that, in her home state of Wisconsin at the time, black children were about three times as likely to die in their first year of life than white children.
Concern about such inequities led her to a year-long stint after college at a nonprofit called One Heart Worldwide, which aims to reduce the risk of death among mothers and infants in the world’s most remote and rural areas. Tate worked in the organization’s San Francisco office on fundraising and grant writing, then traveled to Guachochi, Mexico, where she studied paternal influences on pregnancy outcomes in rural communities.
In 2013, during her first year at Harvard Medical School, Tate decided to start her own community health initiative. With classmate Dodie Rimmelin, she cofounded a program called MOMS—Medical Students Offering Maternal Support—which pairs medical students with pregnant women at community health centers in Boston. The matches are months-long, and the benefits go both ways: The women get support from the students during their pregnancies, postpartum period, and well-child visits, and the students get to work with individual patients over an extended period—something they’re not typically able to do during medical school.
“We try to connect medical students with patients who could use some additional support—recent immigrants, differently abled women, or people of lower socioeconomic status,” Tate said.
Number cruncher
In a class on survey methods for community health research, Tate and Rimmelin got valuable feedback from instructor Thomas Mangione in redesigning the surveys they used for the MOMS program. “That’s a concrete example of exactly why I came to Harvard Chan,” Tate said. She also cited a class on applied multiple regression for clinical research taught by E. John Orav as particularly useful.
Tate did a practicum earlier this year in Nevada, through a program run jointly by Harvard Chan School and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Working with Nevada’s Department of Health and Human Services, she worked with Harvard Chan students Jeeyun Kim and Shenrui Li to design an evaluation plan for programs across the state that were aimed at improving maternal and child health outcomes. “The work was amazing—and right up my alley,” said Tate.
Tate was also one of 16 Zuckerman Fellows during her year at Harvard Chan. The fellowship, for students or professionals in the fields of medicine, business, or law, provides financial support and leadership training. “The fellowship has been one of the highlights of my year,” Tate said. “It’s been so exciting to be a part of this incredibly diverse group of people—to be able to learn from the perspectives of students in other fields and see some of the issues that I care about through their eyes.”
In the future, Tate hopes to use the analytical skills she learned at Harvard Chan to both develop and evaluate existing programs aimed at closing racial and ethnic gaps in birth outcomes, with a focus on gaps here in the U.S.
“I think we need to reframe how we think about global health—by thinking about it as all of us, and not just something that’s happening someplace else,” she said. “There is a lot of great work happening all around this country to close the gaps that we see—and now I will be able to help evaluate the efficacy and outcomes of this work.”
Performance enhancer
In high school and college, Tate wasn’t just hitting the biology and chemistry books—she was also taking the stage in plays and musicals. She says her performance background is an asset for a full-time career in medicine and public health.
In addition, it could help her if she pursues her interest in medical journalism. She’d like to help translate scientific or jargony medical information into useful messages for the lay public, and her performance training would come in handy if she were to seek out work in television.
Tate has already been using her knack for engaging with an audience as she interacts with patients during her clinical rotations. Sometimes she draws on a technique used in improvisational comedy known as “Yes, and…” thinking, in which one participant accepts what another participant has stated and then expands on that line of thinking—beginning with the phrase “Yes, and.”
Using this technique helps affirm what patients experience and keeps conversations moving, Tate said. “I think it’s a wonderful lesson for taking care of patients—to walk into a clinic room and meet a patient where they are and really hear their lived experience, and support them by saying ‘yes, and’.”
photo: Sarah Sholes