Mercedes Becerra

What inspires or motivates you in your role at HMS/HSDM?
My colleagues at the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and our many collaborators. It is a great gift to work every day with not only intelligent but intellectually generous and kind individuals who share my passion: to apply our skills toward decreasing human suffering due to disease, by closing gaps in health equity - that is, reducing gaps in access to quality health care and gaps in the outcomes that care can achieve.
 

Are there activities outside of your job at Harvard that you feel enrich or inform who you are as an individual at Harvard?
My work is tied closely to Partners In Health, a group that provides health care to poor patients and advocates for global health equity. I have been part of Partners In Health for 20 years, since I was a student, and this has led directly to the research questions I have pursued, which arise from the daily challenges of delivering quality care to poor populations.
These questions include studying the best possible regimens and strategies to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis and the best possible outcomes of contact tracing in the homes of tuberculosis patients
 

What is the significance of the object you brought with you to the photo shoot?
My son's first shoes: he took his first steps on his first birthday, in 2010. During the year of his infancy, one million children across the globe fell sick with tuberculosis. This is a deadly airborne infection that is curable: it can be stopped in its tracks by treating the sick. And preventive therapy can avert cases among those quiescently infected. Contact tracing around tuberculosis patients is highly effective in finding and treating more sick patients and also delivering preventive therapy. Among child contacts especially, tuberculosis cases and deaths are entirely preventable. So each child sick with tuberculosis is a signal of system failure - one million signals every year. As a society, we can do far better. I study ways to end tuberculosis in children, and these little shoes remind me why.