{"id":245536,"date":"2026-03-31T19:54:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T19:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/245536\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T19:54:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T19:54:10","slug":"on-the-oakland-campus-global-health-careers-start-local","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/245536\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Oakland Campus, Global Health Careers Start Local"},"content":{"rendered":"

OAKLAND \u2014 The term \u201cglobal health\u201d might conjure up images of medical tents in tropical places. A train station with brutalist architecture in Oakland, California, may not fit that picture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more than meets the eye at the city\u2019s Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit station.<\/p>\n

Tiffany Rose Naputi Lacsado, chief program officer of The Unity Council, said the 34-year-old BART station was transformed in 2004 from acres of parking lots into a resource hub for its largely Latino immigrant neighborhood, offering access to vital resources like a senior center, health clinic, library, preschool, high school and law offices.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they\u2019re trying to find their place in America, they come to places like Fruitvale,\u201d said Lacsado, emphasizing that it was college students who partnered with The Unity Council in the early 1990s to create the mixed-use village for the immigrant Fruitvale community.<\/p>\n

Lacsado was one of several local professionals who spoke at the first East Bay Global Health Consortium, which was held on Northeastern University\u2019s Oakland campus on Saturday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGlobal health is both an international challenge and a local imperative,\u201d said Northeastern Oakland Dean Dan Sachs, who attended the event, which drew 125 attendees, including doctors, community organizers, faculty and 60 first-year students interested in learning about global health strategies, both abroad and here in the United States.<\/p>\n

Partnering with Kaiser Permanente East Bay and The Permanente Medical Group, Northeastern organized the daylong event with formal presentations, roundtable discussions and networking mixers at Lisser Hall and The Lorry I Lokey Graduate School of Business building. Northeastern associate clinical professor Maria Catrina D. Jaime was actively involved in the program.<\/p>\n

Jaime, whose mentorships with her Northeastern students focus on the importance of collaborating with community organizers, lined up a broad selection of speakers because she wanted to highlight that it takes everyone \u2014 not just doctors \u2014 to advance the goals of global health care.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be in community, learn from community and have the humility that you\u2019re not supposed to know everything but you\u2019re open to learn,\u201d Jaime said. \u201cThat\u2019s why it\u2019s also important to work with community champions and leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n

The event not only exposed students to career paths in global health but also advanced the fundamental objectives of the university\u2019s Bouve College of Health Sciences of improving patient outcomes and community wellness.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is always the goal,\u201d said Caroline Hewitt, assistant dean for clinical affairs and partnerships on the Boston campus, who flew to Oakland to attend the event. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to prepare a workforce that is skilled and educated and doing that work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A03\/28\/26 \u2013 OAKLAND, CA. \u2013 Scenes during the East Bay Global Health Symposium held at Northeastern\u2019s Oakland campus on March 28, 2026. Photo by Scott Chernis for Northeastern University<\/p>\n

\"Four03\/28\/26 \u2013 OAKLAND, CA. \u2013 Scenes during the East Bay Global Health Symposium held at Northeastern\u2019s Oakland campus on March 28, 2026. Photo by Scott Chernis for Northeastern University<\/p>\n

\"A03\/28\/26 \u2013 OAKLAND, CA. \u2013 Scenes during the East Bay Global Health Symposium held at Northeastern\u2019s Oakland campus on March 28, 2026. Photo by Scott Chernis for Northeastern University<\/p>\n

\"A03\/28\/26 \u2013 OAKLAND, CA. \u2013 Scenes during the East Bay Global Health Symposium held at Northeastern\u2019s Oakland campus on March 28, 2026. Photo by Scott Chernis for Northeastern University
\nThe first East Bay Global Health Consortium was held on Northeastern University\u2019s Oakland campus on March 28. Photos by Scott Chernis for Northeastern University<\/p>\n

First-year Northeastern student Xiaoyi Jiang, 18, from Atlanta, Georgia, volunteered as a note taker and at the registration table because she was inspired to learn more about global health after a family safari trip to Africa gave her a front row seat to disparities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think everyone should have fair access to medicine,\u201d she said, remembering the lack of available health care she saw in the tribal communities surrounding the big city of Nairobi.<\/p>\n

Jiang, who is studying behavioral neuroscience, data science and chemistry, hopes to give immigrants and people in other countries better access to medicine through AI-powered drug development. Jiang said she met doctors on Saturday who were spearheading that kind of work abroad.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really great meeting the actual people who have the experience,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

One of those doctors, Peter Le from Kaiser Permanente Northern California, had just returned from working at ChoRay Hospital in Saigon, Vietnam. The largest hospital in the country, Le began an ICU rotation there twenty years ago.<\/p>\n

Born in Los Angeles, but self-described as \u201cculturally Vietnamese,\u201d Le outlined several obstacles he faced in starting an English language training program in 2016 for the Vietnamese residents he worked with on his missions, who didn\u2019t have full access to cutting-edge medical literature and exchange programs because of their language barriers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to develop doctors,\u201d Le said, who encouraged the audience to both work with and around entrenched systems in different cultures to create meaningful collaborations with local health care professionals.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sometimes, building those bridges takes a little creativity.<\/p>\n

For example, Le persuaded ChoRay\u2019s attending doctors with wine and boxes of candy to secure a conference room in the hospital to hold his English classes. He also enticed the residents, who are unpaid and often have other jobs to support themselves, with a free lunch if they showed up.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can see what works in a resource-poor environment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When Le\u2019s program was cancelled, he regrouped and decided to use his resources to rent a house nearby, offering the residents a place to live while they completed their residencies, shouldering some of their financial burden.<\/p>\n

Another doctor, Scott Kaiser from Kaiser Permanente Northern California, spoke about his work with Operation Rainbow, a nonprofit started in 1978 that runs 12 to 14 missions a year in different countries, providing free orthopedic surgeries to children and young adults.<\/p>\n

The decision to participate in these life-changing surgeries was a no-brainer for Kaiser, whose last trip was to Guatemala.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not an innovator,\u201d he said. \u201cI say yes. I show up. I get involved.\u201d<\/p>\n

That involvement doesn\u2019t come without some ethical dilemmas, he admitted. With more families vying for the free services than they can handle, Kaiser sometimes has to make some hard choices. He developed an ethical system to choose his surgical candidates: Can their needs be met elsewhere, will there be low complication rates, will the post-operative care be simple and will the surgery offer the child a better quality of life?<\/p>\n

He presented a case in which a child had hip dysplasia, a problem that \u2014 if left untreated \u2014 results in lifelong pain and a gait disorder.<\/p>\n

Kaiser showed photos \u2014 ones that the families consented to share \u2014 of himself alongside recovering children, with Spiderman-themed bandages and big smiles, whose lives were forever improved because of Operation Rainbow.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have that direct impact with individuals\u2019 lives,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s enough for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t only the medical doctors who are making a difference in global health care \u2014 it was also attorneys, social workers, psychiatrists and educators in the field that were advancing health care on a global scale, in other countries and right here at home.<\/p>\n

Naomi Adler, an emergency physician at Kaiser Permanente East Bay, helps immigrant patients seeking asylum write a medical affidavit, a document that requires an intensive four to five hours of exams, assessments and interviews.<\/p>\n

One patient in particular stands out, she said: a woman with a history of sexual trauma, who was able to tell her story in the privacy of Adler\u2019s exam room, rather than a court where she\u2019d be in front of a large audience and cross-examined about painful memories.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the first person she told these stories to,\u201d said Adler.<\/p>\n

The presentations culminated in students being paired up with doctors for roundtable discussions about career pathways. Moderated by Jaime, the students could rotate tables every 10 to 15 minutes, getting to as many doctors as possible, leading to potential internships, co-ops and experiential learning opportunities.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really was just an amazing day,\u201d said Jaime. \u201cThe Bay Area is so diverse and there are opportunities to be doing global health work locally.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OAKLAND \u2014 The term \u201cglobal health\u201d might conjure up images of medical tents in tropical places. A train…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":245537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[109859,465,75034,1280,143,145,144],"class_list":["post-245536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-bouve-college-of-health-sciences","tag-global","tag-global-health","tag-health-care","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}