Expressing a lifelong commitment to advancing global health, Gail H. Cassell, Ph.D., DSc (Hon.), and her family have generously donated $1 million to the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Marnix E. Heersink School of Medicine to establish the Cassell Family Bidirectional Training Initiative within the Mary Heersink Institute for Global Health (MHIGH). This innovative program addresses global health initiatives and medical training in Peru through bidirectional training of physicians in a UAB clinical fellowship program with Partners in Health (PIH), known locally as Socios En Salud, in Lima, Peru. Physicians in senior training from Peruvian medical schools will receive clinical exposure at UAB. “Dr. Cassell has been a champion for global health,” said Alan Tita, M.D., Ph.D., senior associate dean for Global and Women’s Health at the Heersink School of Medicine, professor in the UAB Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Mary Heersink Chair for Global Health. “This investment will allow us to provide training for UAB fellows across different specialties, in partnership with Socios En Salud, and will set a strong foundation for the next generation of global health care leaders.”
Enhancing Knowledge Through Reciprocal Training
Cassell, who serves as senior lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior scientist in the Division of Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said it was important to establish a bidirectional fellowship to enable crucial learning opportunities for both Peruvian and UAB physicians. “Trainees from Peru will learn from the highly advanced technologies at UAB compared to what is available in Peru,” she said. “Also importantly, UAB faculty and trainees will learn a great deal about community health, including the challenges and opportunities to make an impact on the health of those in the more rural communities of the United States but also populations in low- to middle-income countries,” explained Cassell, who is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Microbiology at the UAB Schools of Medicine and Dentistry. She is also former vice president of Infectious Diseases Drug Discovery and Development and former vice president for scientific affairs and distinguished Lilly research scholar for infectious diseases at Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis, Indiana.
A vital component of the training in Peru for UAB physicians is on-the-job learning and hands-on experience, working alongside Peruvian residents. Trainees will participate in initiatives that focus on tuberculosis (TB) and other health threats as well as promote optimal health and development of pregnant women and children, providing specialty care in infectious disease, pulmonology, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, cardiology, and psychiatry. Peru has one of the highest TB incidence rates in the Americas and one of the highest burdens of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in the world. “Our UAB fellows will make significant contributions in all clinical areas, but particularly in pulmonology and maternal-fetal medicine,” Cassell said, who also serves as co-chair of the Heersink School of Medicine Board of Visitors. “These are areas of particular need among Lima’s population due to the high burden of TB as well as chronic malnutrition and other challenges that affect maternal and child health.”
UAB fellows will train under the guidance of Partners in Health, known locally as Socios En Salud, one of Peru’s largest non-governmental health care organizations serving an estimated population of 700,000 inhabitants, many of whom have fled from poverty and political violence in Peru’s countryside. As a partner to the Peruvian Ministry of Health, Socios En Salud has influenced national policies for preventing and treating MDR-TB, treating tens of thousands of people and achieving cure rates among the highest in the world. “Partners in Health and Socios En Salud, through the leadership of its founders Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., and Jim Kim, M.D., Ph.D., have changed the paradigm of treatment for MDR-TB,” said Cassell. “They also innovated care delivery for TB patients in Peru by converting vans to mobile clinics to perform X-rays for patients in remote areas of the countryside.”
An Enduring Family Commitment
Cassell said her passion for advancing global health began early in her career in microbiology at UAB as a president of the International Organization for Mycoplasmology. “In that membership of 300, about 30 different countries were represented, and I traveled to many of them early in my career. When you experience these environments firsthand, you realize right away there is so much that could be done and should be done but that doesn’t get done,” she said. Cassell’s commitment to global health was reinforced when she led drug development efforts for the Lily TB Drug Discovery Initiative, a program launched in 2007 to combat worldwide MDR-TB by bringing together specialists from around the world to accelerate TB drug discovery. The program was an extension of the Eli Lilly MDR-TB Partnership established in 2003 as a philanthropic, public-private partnership of 14 organizations committed to stopping the global spread of MDR-TB. “By the end of 2017, the Lilly MDR-TB Partnership had committed $170 million to stop the spread of worldwide MDR-TB,” she said. “It was inspiring and rewarding to have been a part of one of the largest philanthropic efforts for a single disease in Lilly’s history.”
As the name implies, the philanthropic investment that established the Cassell Family Bidirectional Training Initiative represents a family commitment to improving global health. Cassell’s husband, Ralph H. Cassell, MBA, was a senior executive with Compass Bank, now PNC bank, and played an important role in shaping the bank’s strategy as it pioneered the multibank holding concept. Mr. Cassell served as the bank’s first president in Texas and later as city president, Compass Bank of Birmingham, and executive vice president community banking and regional executive (Alabama) of Compass Bank. He said that prior roles serving on boards of non-profit organizations throughout his career allowed him to see firsthand the power of local, national, international philanthropic partnerships to bring about enduring change. “By training and working alongside Peruvian physicians in these clinical areas, UAB fellows can help to implement impactful change to improve the health and lives of Peruvians,” he said. “This change can be permanent because Peruvian physicians will be better equipped to address the needs of people in their communities.”
The Cassells’ daughter, Cynthia H. Cassell, Ph.D., has extensive expertise in public health surveillance, epidemiology, data management, and global health, including maternal and child health, and has previously focused on children with special health care needs. She has had a career with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spanning more than 14 years, where she currently serves as the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) Team Lead in CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health. PRAMS is one of the longest-running maternal and infant health surveillance systems in the country. “My first introduction to global public health was in 2015 assisting CDC’s response to the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa,” she said, adding that this experience led her to change careers briefly at CDC where she worked seven successive years in global health. In her spare time, she has volunteered with Socios En Salud since 2012.
Cynthia, a former U.S. Fulbright student scholar, said the Bidirectional Training Initiative will not only improve Lima residents’ access to quality prenatal and postpartum care but can also help provide needed mental health care for pregnant women and mothers who experience chronic stress associated with a lack of basic resources. “The bidirectionality of the training ensures that the partnership is sustainable and ongoing,” she emphasized, adding that the initiative reflects her family’s vision and commitment to improving global public health. “It is an immense honor and privilege for our family to be able to establish this initiative at UAB that will leave a legacy in advancing global public health for decades to come.”