Waldron Career Conversation with Shruti Mehta '95 & Mirabella Johnson '24
In this episode of the “Weinberg in the World” podcast, student host Mirabella Johnson, a recent graduate of Northwestern’s Cognitive Science and Global Health Studies programs, interviews Shruti Mehta, a professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Shruti shares her fond memories of Northwestern, where she initially pursued a pre-med curriculum inspired by her physician father. However, her interactions with diverse peers, including an RA who was an Art Theory & Practice major, led her to switch her major to Art Theory & Practice. This decision profoundly influenced her approach to her work, despite not becoming a physician or practicing artist. Shruti emphasizes the impact of Northwestern’s diverse community on her career path and the realization that many career possibilities exist beyond traditional paths.
Shruti Mehta | LinkedInTranscript:
Mirabella Johnson:
Welcome to the Weinberg in the World podcast, where we bring stories of interdisciplinary thinking into today's complex world. My name is Mirabella Johnson, and I am your student host of this special episode of the podcast. I recently graduated from Northwestern's undergraduate Cognitive Science and Global Health Studies programs housed in Weinberg. And I'm currently continuing my education at Northwestern in the Accelerated Public Health Program to obtain a Master of Public Health degree through Feinberg School of Medicine's program in public health. Today, I am very excited to be speaking with Shruti Mehta, who is a Dr. Charles Armstrong Chair in epidemiology, and professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Thank you so much, Shruti, for taking the time to speak with me today.
Shruti Mehta:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.
Mirabella Johnson:
Likewise. All right. So to start us off today, I'm wondering if you could tell us a bit more about your time at Northwestern as an undergraduate, what you studied, and what were the impactful experiences for you that kind of led you to your current career path?
Shruti Mehta:
Yeah, so first, I guess I would start by saying that I absolutely loved my time at Northwestern. They were some of the best years of my life, from not just the training that I got, but to the friends that I made, to spending time on that beautiful campus that I still miss. So when I started at Northwestern, I think the only thing that I really knew or I thought was that I was going to go into medicine. So I started with the pre-med curriculum. My father was a physician, and so I had this really strong desire, I think, instilled in me by him to serve. And honestly, other than that, I didn't know very much. I liked biology, I liked math, and so I got kind of started in the pre-med curriculum. I started in chemistry and a really advanced calculus class.
And interestingly, my RA my freshman year was also pre-med. But one day I remember going to see her in her room to ask her a question, and she was painting. And she was actually an Art Theory & Practice major. And I had loved art in high school. I was always painting or drawing or creating, but I never thought of it as a major option for me. But it was really meeting her and so many others that were doing really diverse things at the time that I was at Northwestern, that led me to declare Art Theory & Practice as my major in my sophomore year. And I would just say that I'm forever grateful for that. It definitely changed my life. I didn't end up being a physician, and I'm not a practicing artist, but I would say that both of those things play a huge role in how I approach my work.
Other things at Northwestern that were impactful. I think one of the great things was just the diversity that I was surrounded by, and it's not just the diversity and who people were or where they came from, but it was what they were doing and what they were interested in. I had friends that were in the engineering school. I spent a lot of time in the Tech building, but I also had my pre-med friends. I had a lot of friends who were artists from my major, and then I had friends in Radio/TV/Film in Communications. And it just exposed me to so many different perspectives, and I think also made me realize that anything was possible.
Mirabella Johnson:
I love that. Yeah, that is so interesting. I have some similar experiences where there was a time where I really thought I was going to pursue medicine, and then everything gets really stressful at Northwestern as I'm sure you're familiar.
Shruti Mehta:
Yes, yes.
Mirabella Johnson:
And there are so many other ways to be involved in the field, and art is something I'm also passionate about. I loved painting, loved drawing, grew up performing. So that's not what I did for my majors, but I stayed involved with it through activities. And Northwestern is just such a great place, in my opinion, for exploring so many different paths. So thank you so much for sharing that. That's awesome. Kind of going off of that, with that all in mind, can you share a bit more on how you ended up landing in public health, and knew eventually that this was the field for you?
Shruti Mehta:
Yeah, no, and I think you said it well, right? There are so many different ways to be engaged in the field of health and medicine. And I think when I was an undergrad, there wasn't really public health as a major. Well, there certainly wasn't at Northwestern. There wasn't the major that you were, that the minor that you have. And most schools, I think it was probably very rare. I think many people found their way to public health much like I did, going through the medicine route. I don't think I knew what public health was. In undergrad, I don't think I knew what epidemiology was. Like I said, I chose pre-med because that's what I knew, and many people in my generation chose that if you were kind of interested in science and math, and you had that desire, you were medical school bound. So when I graduated, I did apply to medical school.
I didn't get into the schools that I wanted to go to, and honestly I wasn't sure because I had this art side. I found myself applying to medical school, but also looking at advertising jobs. And I was a first-generation Indian American, and kids didn't take time off after undergraduate, you went straight into a serious career or you went into a graduate school program, but I really just needed some time. And the way for me to get that time was to find a job and live in Chicago. And so I was pretty scrappy, knocked on doors, the medical school, because I wanted to stay in Chicago. And I thought that the way to do that and the way to kind of figure out if medical school was for me was to do research. And so I didn't find a posted physician, so I literally knocked on doors.
I knocked on doors, and I made phone calls because that's what you did at that time. And I met this assistant professor named Mary McDermott, who took a chance on me. She didn't have a job, she didn't really have an opportunity listed, but I think she saw some potential in me, and she hired me to be her research assistant. And I eventually became her research coordinator, I worked for her for two years. I think I started making 850 an hour. And she was doing studies in congestive heart failure and peripheral vascular disease. And I started off just seeing study participants and conducting assessments on them. But I was just hungry to learn and to go beyond just kind of recruiting and seeing participants. So I found myself looking at the data, asking questions. She kind of taught me how to ask those questions, how to answer those questions.
I started learning how to do analyses, design research protocols, and then I just wanted to be better at my job. So I asked her about courses, and I found a clinical epidemiology course at the School of Medicine, and I took it. And at the same time as I took that class, another faculty member that I worked for, Joe Feinglass lent me his copy of And the Band Played On. And that is a book that chronicles essentially the early days of the AIDS pandemic, the HIV pandemic. And I'd say it was those two things that kind of together led me to public health and epidemiology. So the clinical EPI course, it just bit. You know when you take a class, and you're just like, "Oh, this makes sense. I get this." It kind of brought together everything that I liked and everything that I was good at, elements of problem-solving, asking questions and answering them.
It still had that quantitative side, but in many ways, EPIs, we live in the gray. So it's a little bit of an art as well as a science. And then I was working cardiovascular disease research with Mary, but the And the Band Played On kind of got me interested in HIV. And it was really that it was not just the biology of the virus and all the questions that were unknown at that time, but it was the social issues, the structural issues, and the kind of interplay between those different factors. And so with that, I found myself applying to master's in public health programs, and that's landed where I am today.
Mirabella Johnson:
That is amazing. And I will say Dr. Feinglass is actually one of my professors.
Shruti Mehta:
[inaudible 00:07:48]
Mirabella Johnson:
So him and I are working together on some research potentially for the impact of reforming policing and gun violence prevention, since that's my past. And I also work in behavioral health as a behavioral support specialist. So talking about trauma-informed approaches rather than this tactical approach that really can blow things out of proportion when you're doing mental health and wellness visits. Or even just intervening in a crisis.
Shruti Mehta:
Absolutely.
Mirabella Johnson:
Which is awesome.
Shruti Mehta:
Oh, I love that. Yeah.
Mirabella Johnson:
Yeah, he's really, he's great.
Shruti Mehta:
Small world.
Mirabella Johnson:
Yeah, it is a small world. And I was going to say, I also just worked on a project for one of my classes on congestive heart failure and the low-sodium diet. Because there's surprisingly a small amount of research for how effective the low-sodium diet actually is for congestive heart failure management in terms of symptoms, and morbidity, and mortality. So we were working on that paper literally last quarter.
Shruti Mehta:
Oh, that's great. Were you collaborating with folks at the School of Medicine as well?
Mirabella Johnson:
Yeah, yeah. Actually, the majority of my professors in that class were through Feinberg, but then they-
Shruti Mehta:
Feinberg, okay.
Mirabella Johnson:
... in ISGMH, so the Sexual and Gender Minority Institute.
Shruti Mehta:
Okay, okay.
Mirabella Johnson:
And they were a wealth of knowledge as well. They were awesome. But I definitely resonate with that, especially as an individual starting out in the field. And I'm sure also it will resonate for so many other students as the interest in Global Health Studies and the related concepts of public health have really, I've seen continue to grow amongst our undergrads, myself included. So with that being said, as someone currently getting an MPH, what encouraged you to then pursue a PhD?
Shruti Mehta:
Yeah, I think it just wanted more. The expression, sort of, "The more you learn, the more you realize you don't know." I still think I sometimes feel that same way. But I will say, and I say this often that, "When I came to Hopkins, I was going to get my 11-month MPH, and I was headed back to Chicago." I loved Chicago, and that was my plan. But I think that I realized that I wanted to lead work, right? I think there's a lot of things that you could do with an MPH, and you can be a part of incredible work, and people lead programs, but I wanted to lead my own research. I wanted to build my own program, and I wanted to be able to ask my own questions and figure out how to answer them. And I just realized that I had kind of only scratched the surface of what I needed to know to do that with my MPH. And so that was the reason why I stayed to do my PhD.
Mirabella Johnson:
Yeah, that's awesome. Super helpful. Thank you for going more in-depth about that. So I'm actually from the Chicago and suburbs myself, so I'm kind of in the same boat where I'm very much so on that track, right?
Shruti Mehta:
Yeah.
Mirabella Johnson:
I want to stay in the city, and there's so much work to do here. But I also like the idea of potentially doing research. So I'm very grateful to be getting my MPH right now. I knew this is what I want to do, but I've also thought about potentially going for a PhD as well. So that just provides me a lot of food for thought personally.
Shruti Mehta:
And I think it's great to get that experience in between. I think it can be really just being on the other side now and mentoring PhD students, we see a lot more, and we actually require work experience and see that people who come in with that work experience, that helps to really inform their questions, right?
Mirabella Johnson:
Yeah.
Shruti Mehta:
So they come in with a lot of questions, and we help to give them those tools to help to teach them how to answer those questions.
Mirabella Johnson:
Exactly. Yeah, that's awesome. So tell me a bit more, if you don't mind, about your current projects as well as any future aspirations or goals for your career personally, or for public health as a whole, which is a very-
Shruti Mehta:
Big question.
Mirabella Johnson:
... big question. But I'll let you take it away.
Shruti Mehta:
So there are a lot of research projects that I'm involved right now. I would say that one of the things when I became chair, so I started as chair in June. And I kept getting asked at that time, and I continually get asked now, "What are you going to give up? What things are you going to stop doing?" But I still find my research really fulfilling and an important part of what I do. And I'd say my whole career, I feel like you answer one question, and then that question leads to the next question. And that's kind of how my career has really developed. I trained as an observational epidemiologist like many do. It was about following people over time, understanding the burden of disease, why some people had morbidity and mortality rates that were higher than others. What were the risk factors for those things? All with an eye of how we intervene, but really the focus was on those observational studies.
And my work is always centered in populations that have particular barriers to engaging in services, that we have to prevent and treat predominantly infectious diseases. So a lot of my work is focused on people who inject drugs, men who have sex with men, transgender persons, again, groups that bear a really high burden of infectious diseases, but have these challenges to accessing care. So I spent my early years trying to understand why this is, why were there these barriers to care, what were the challenges people were facing? And then honestly, the past 15 years, we just couldn't observe anymore, we had to actually do something.
And so we've learned how to design, implement, evaluate interventions to really support engagement in treatment and prevention services for HIV, for hepatitis C that I also studied. We have incredible tools to prevent and treat infection, but people don't necessarily access them the way that they should because there are challenges with both in their own lives, but also with the systems that deliver them.
So I do a lot of work in Baltimore, I also do work in India. And really it's been about exploring different creative interventions to improve engagement. Everything from giving people actually incentives to engage in HIV treatment, right? To say, okay, we know that a person loses daily wages to actually go to the clinic to get treatment in India. So can we actually compensate for that and then improve outcomes? Another project that I'm involved in is actually trying to change the way we deliver services. So in many of the countries where there are large HIV programs, free treatment is delivered through government centers. But they're government centers, so some of the populations that I mentioned don't necessarily feel comfortable going to those government centers. They want to get their care in the community, and they have other needs beyond HIV. So it's about thinking about how do we combine the services that a person needs in a person-centered way, not a disease-centered way, and deliver them from a center that they want to go to and that supports all of their needs?
And so we lead a lot of large-scale trials to evaluate how those different types of interventions work in communities. I think you also asked about future aspirations. So for me, it's really about leaving something better than when I came to it. So I'd say that's true for the department that I now lead, as well as the research that I do. I just hope that someday something that I do leads to a big change and impact, and changes people's lives. And so for me, everything that I do, whether it's about the research that I do, or it's, again, my administrative work, it's about people first. That's kind of the place that I want to have impact.
And then for public health, that's a bigger question. I think that I look for us to have the courage to ask the big questions, the hard questions, and find the innovative ways that we need to, to answer them. To collaborate across other disciplines and other fields, kind of reach outside our comfort zone, and then hopefully speed up the pace of what we do. I think one of the challenges is the world is moving really quickly, technology is changing, but the pace at which we're able to do things is challenged. So again, just trying to find ways to overcome some of those barriers in our own field, and being able to think big.
Mirabella Johnson:
That is truly amazing and inspiring. And I think you've already made a huge impact. I am really, really in awe. That's amazing. Yeah. Wow, I'm kind of blown away [inaudible 00:16:06] you. Which I expected, but I just-
Shruti Mehta:
[inaudible 00:16:09], yeah.
Mirabella Johnson:
Really happy to hear that. And I also follow a very similar mantra where that's kind of why I decided on public health was, I care about people. I want to make the world or the place that I'm in somehow a little bit better than when I got there. That was how my parents raised me to be as a person. And I think that drew me to public health. And for anyone listening, I just took a course last summer in the public health program at Feinberg for LGBTQ+ Health. And even as an ally and someone very familiar with the intersectional challenges that that community deals with in public health, I really learned so much from that course.
And Dr. Lauren Beach, who is truly amazing, they're a wealth of knowledge as well. And a little plug there, but it was such a great course, and you got to work with a community partner. So it really helped solidify what I already knew, which is I love public health. But when you're working with people and like you said, with their challenges, understanding their challenges and meeting them where they're at, to get them to a place that's either better or good for them. A lot of times, that's not happening. So congratulations on all of your accomplishments and contributions to the field really. Going off of that, you had a great transition. So I'd like to ask you to think about everything you know now and what you've done, and kind of bring it back to the undergraduates who may be listening, be thinking about their future directions.
So at NU, like we talked about, Global Health Studies offered as an adjunct major or minor in Weinberg now, which is wonderful. We just celebrated, I think 20 years, the program. And that's what drew me to Northwestern. I knew after going to community college to save money during COVID, that I loved Northwestern, I'm from the area, and also I loved public health. I got to take an EPI course at my community college. So thinking about your own work on US public health issues, but also internationally, which is amazing. Do you think Global Health Studies would've been of interest to you in undergrad if it was available? And can you also speak a little bit to the value that you think Global Health broadly has brought into your efforts and your insights as a professional in the field?
Shruti Mehta:
Yeah, I would say 5000%. If it was offered, it absolutely would've been of interest. And I think it's really special for me that the major's there and that you're going through the MPH program. When I was leaving Northwestern for Hopkins, they were just starting to think about the MPH program. At that point, it was going to be a four-year program, and that was part of the reason I didn't stay because I needed to finish quickly. It was in its early stages. So just the idea that that program is so vibrant, and now there's an undergraduate program is so special to me. So I would've definitely been interested in that. I think it's exactly the kind of thing that I would've been looking for.
Again, like I said, it didn't exist when I was there, but I think that we see that so many of the people that come into the field now, people that come into the MPH program or come into the PhD program, are coming from that public health undergraduate background or Global Health Studies major. And I think it's great because they've got this additional preparation for the field that they're eventually going to be in. So I think it's fantastic. In terms of global exposure, I would say that I, even before I started working, it's something that's been a part of my life since I was a child. My parents were immigrants. They lived between two worlds. I was a first-generation kid. We went back to India, their entire family was there. We went back to India every two to three years for my entire childhood.
And so for me, that was critical to my upbringing because I was exposed to two cultures my entire life. And it gives you this perspective, not just the challenges of this society that you live in, but the challenges around the world that other people face. And that really shaped me, broadened my worldview. And I think it's important for everyone because we are a global society. I think COVID taught us that, right? We already knew that, but COVID amplified it, we are interconnected. What happens around the world affects us here at home, so we have to care. And I think global problems and challenges are our challenges, right?
Obviously that exposure to India as a child has been instrumental even to shaping my career. I chose India to work in very deliberately. But having these experiences working both locally in Baltimore and then globally in India, I've been asking similar questions in different places for many years. And what's kind of fascinating is there's huge differences, obviously between the two setting. But I'm always struck by how many things are similar for the populations that I work with and the questions that I answer, and some of the lessons that can be translated from one setting to another.
I think we often say local to global, and try to take lessons from the US and apply them elsewhere. But I'd say it's as much global to local as well, right? So my work in Baltimore informs my work in India, but equally, my work in India informs my work in Baltimore. And so I think just, again, having that broad perspective is critical for all of us.
Mirabella Johnson:
Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. That is so helpful and insightful. Thank you, Shruti. To quickly close this out today since you have spent so much time with us, and I really appreciate it. I have one more quick question for you. What do you wish you could tell yourself when you were either in my shoes or in a current undergraduate shoes? What do you wish you could tell yourself?
Shruti Mehta:
Take advantage of opportunities. Be creative. Be curious. Don't worry so much about what the end is going to be, right? Take advantage of the... I think we oftentimes, we get so focused on what am I going to be? And we obviously ask those questions. What do you want to be in five years? What do you want to be in 10 years? But I think sometimes we kind of feel the weight of that, and that may paralyze us a little bit. And so I think thinking about things a little bit more organically, and again, if something comes at you, don't be afraid to take advantage of that opportunity, even if it wasn't a part of your plan, because something amazing could come of that.
Mirabella Johnson:
Yeah, that's also incredibly helpful to consider. And I would echo that as a recent alumna, and I hope for undergrads, for recent alums and other graduate students too, that they're able to think about that because I really do think that applies to our education, but also to life and what you pursue. So with that being said, thank you so much for this great advice and for taking the time to join us today.
Shruti Mehta:
Thank you for having me and for sharing your perspective. And I really look forward to also seeing how your career develops.
Mirabella Johnson:
Thank you. I definitely will be following what you do. What you do is amazing. Thank you everyone for listening to this special episode of the Weinberg in the World podcast. We hope you have a great day. And as always, Go 'Cats.
Shruti Mehta:
Go 'Cats.