I am committed to living a life that has lasting positive impact in the world. I left a successful career in business in order to find purpose. I found a home in the social sector, focusing primarily on global health issues. The skills I learned as a business person have helped me to build and scale efficient and effective programs that have contributed to improving lives around the world. But it’s often been challenging to know to whether and to what degree my work has had the impact intended.

I graduated with a BS in Communication Studies and MS in Integrated Marketing from Northwestern University. I learned about business as a strategy consultant at Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman) where I worked in a variety of industries including airlines, consumer finance, and oil & gas. After receiving my MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I returned to consulting at Lippincott Mercer, where I focused on consumer insights and brand strategy. As a consultant, I learned how to analyze quantitative financial and operational data, using it to project profits and estimate the return on investment. I built skills in desk research and collecting data from stakeholders through surveys, focus groups, and interviews in order to understand the competitive landscape and gather customer insights. Based on these data, I developed and presented strategies to clients to guide important business decisions about product features, marketing campaigns, and operational investments.

Although I was successful, I didn’t feel like my work was aligned with my values. In 2006, I made a transition to work in the social sector, where I believed I could use the skills I’d developed in business to make a difference. I was drawn to the Clinton Health Access Initiative due to their use of market-based solutions to driving down the price of drugs to treat HIV in order to increase access among those most in need, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and India and to Project Healthy Children because the focus on the fortification of staple foods—like salt, flour and oil—in Honduras, Rwanda, Malawi and Liberia was recognized by economists as one of the most cost-effective interventions in global health.

My business skills were useful in these organizations and given the reaction of the global community to the results, it seemed clear it had impact. However, I learned quickly how limited they were in a context without a shared profit goal. Impact was harder to measure when successful implementation required changes to national and international policies, working within local health care systems to deliver care and treatment, and balancing the interests of government and philanthropic donors. I also came to recognize the role of academic medical centers in the United States as thought leaders, using research to drive global health priorities. So, in 2011 I returned to Stanford to launch the Center for Innovation in Global Health and work with students and faculty across the schools of medicine, business, and engineering in order to develop a pipeline of new products designed to improve health in low-income countries. This work supported initial research into over 50 projects, some of which launched organizations, such as Noora Health and Foldscope Instruments, and led to the development of an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

It was gratifying to work with social entrepreneurs, but their path to impact was long and uncertain. I was eager to learn more about more traditional approaches to research that could definitively prove whether and how much impact had been achieved. So, in 2013 I joined the Institute for Global Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in order to support the AIDS Research Institute and help build a Center for Global Health Delivery and Diplomacy. In these roles, I learned more about how research was designed, conducted, and used to inform policy. I worked closely with traditional researchers, particularly those pursuing a cure to HIV, and together we established the amfAR Cure Institute. In addition, I learned about implementation science, the study of how best to deliver the products and services we know improve health, and led projects using implementation science methodologies with Ministries of Health to improve health systems in Kenya and Ethiopia.

While working at UCSF, I also pursued a PhD in Global Health Science, which I completed in 2019. In my own research I was able to blend my business and public health interests, and focused on how investments in building leadership and management skills lead to improved health outcomes. My dissertation included a systematic review of programs that measured the impact of improved leadership and management and then designed and conducted impact evaluations for Born Free Africa and Global Health Corps, with the goal to develop evidence of a causal relationship between the work of these organizations and improvements in health indicators. In these studies, I applied techniques prized in the social sector as generating reliable evidence about impact, like randomized control trials or quasi-experimental designs. While the results were positive, they were not as clear as I expected. Issues with the availability and quality of data made it difficult to construct a model in which the appropriate factors were controlled and the programs were implemented to address real issues, rather than meet study design requirements of randomization or a single, definitive outcome. So, while I’d mastered the quantitative methods meant to provide evidence of causality, I was not convinced that they were the only or the most appropriate way to determine whether and how much impact had been achieved.

I’m convinced that while it is informed by quantitative data, impact isn’t only a number. What passes for evidence of impact these days is often just a measurement of achievement, but to discern true impact it’s important to have qualitative data about the experiences of those for and by whom the work is being done. In order to better understand how we create and measure impact, I’m researching and writing about this topic, gaining inspiration from the individuals and teams with whom I work, my three-legged dog, and the beauty of the San Francisco Bay Area.