Dr. Joia Mukherjee is dedicated to improving health care options in poor communities.
Why you should listen
Joia Mukherjee MD, MPH is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and chief medical officer of Partners In Health (PIH), an international medical charity that works to provide a preferential health care option for the poor. She is an internist, a pediatrician, an infectious disease doctor and public health specialist.
Mukherjee supports PIH's efforts to provide high-quality, comprehensive health care to the poor in partnership with local communities and health officials in Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Peru, Mexico, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Navajo Nation. Her clinical focus includes HIV, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, mental health, ebola and human resources for health and health systems strengthening.
Mukherjee collaborates with Harvard's Global Health Delivery Project and teaches social medicine, infectious disease and human rights to medical students, residents and fellows at a wide variety of US and international institutions. She helped create a new residency and fellowship training program for Rwandan and Haitian physicians and global health residencies and fellowships for US trainees at Harvard and other American universities.
Joia Mukherjee’s TED Talk
Joia Mukherjee, Chris Anderson, Whitney Pennington Rodgers
How to quickly scale up contact tracing across the US
11 minutes 50 secondsContact tracing -- the process of identifying people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus in order to slow its spread -- is a fundamental tool in the fight against COVID-19. How can we scale this critical work across the entire United States? Joia Mukherjee, chief medical officer of Partners in Health, discusses how her team is working with public health agencies to ramp up contact tracing for the country's most vulnerable communities -- and shows why it will take a compassionate approach to be truly effective. (This ambitious plan is part of The Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change. The conversation, hosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers, was recorded May 27, 2020.)Posted Jun 2020
