President Melissa Gilliam

‘We’re Trying to Make a Difference in People’s Lives’

New BU President Melissa Gilliam, a physician with training in epidemiology, discusses the University’s role in helping improve health and wellbeing for residents of Boston—and beyond.

Long before Dr. Melissa Gilliam was named the 11^th president of Boston University, a role that she officially began on July 1, she trained as a physician with a keen interest in public health research.

During her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Gilliam saw firsthand how social determinants of health can have immediate and consequential life-changing effects. In her clinical practice, Gilliam became interested in why some teenage mothers became pregnant again within a year of giving birth, despite all the societal cues against it. To help answer those questions, Gilliam earned a master’s degree in public health from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her research career primarily focused on adolescent health, reproductive justice, and health disparities. She later became head of the program in gynecology for children, adolescents, and young women at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and led more than 100 studies primarily aimed at understanding the social determinants of health that affect young people.

Since being named BU’s president (and the first woman and person of color in that role), Gilliam has spent the past five months becoming reacquainted with Boston, where she spent an austere few years as a medical student at Harvard University. Now, having returned to a familiar city in a new and significantly expanded role, she has met frequently with an array of civic leaders and academic heads of BU’s 17 schools and colleges, often taking Zoom calls while walking on a slim treadmill beside her desk.

In addition to her office in the John and Kathryn Silber Administrative Center on the Charles River Campus, she will eventually have an office on the BU Medical Campus as an intentional bridge-building move to help increase the cross-fertilization between campuses.

“It’s often by hearing from faculty, and by understanding the barriers for our faculty, staff, and students, that you can make improvements,” Gilliam said. “I’m a problem solver by nature, and you learn so much by hearing from the end user about what’s working well and what’s not.”

Collaborative participatory research has been a significant part of your prior academic work. How does that experience help you work within organizations, especially large complex ones like you’ve encountered at Ohio State and the University of Chicago?

What I’ve learned from working that way is that there is a lot of talent and ideas in different places. When you can build collaborative teams, you bring more ideas to a situation and it leads to much more creative problem solving. I’ve tended to create groups that welcome deliberation and discussion, and introduce an idea that might be early and then through more conversation make it deeper and richer. I often will have teams that consist of different types of people. I’m building a team now and it has very senior people, but also a newly graduated student who will also work on this team. And again, I think you just get very, very different types of insights.

What sort of strategies would you consider proposing to foster interdisciplinary collaboration at BU, especially those that could possibly help tackle complex public health issues?

I often look at the underlying operations. Are there policies or processes that in any way inhibit interdisciplinary collaboration? Because sometimes you have people who would like to collaborate, but the incentives for collaboration aren’t aligned. So you have to make sure that your processes, programs, and systems actually lean towards alignment.

The second way is to ask where is this working well and what have they done? Because again, you’re trying to understand the internal logic of an organization, whether it supports or inhibits what you’re trying to do. To answer your question specifically about public health, I think part of where the magic will be is thinking about external collaboration—alignment with the state, alignment with the city, thinking about access to data or populations that we are uniquely positioned [to serve]. And then are there methods that are specific to Boston University that we can apply? Often it’s really understanding what we bring distinctively to a problem and then to say, where are the partners—either typical or atypical—that can help us move these questions forward?

That seems to go quite a bit beyond just eliminating silos. It seems like it’s actively reaching out to invite other groups or other people who may have different viewpoints.

I think sometimes if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You really limit your strategies. If you say this is a problem, and then you start to get open to different methodologies, different people you find, and not think about institutional barriers—go beyond the walls of the institution, go beyond the walls of your department, go beyond the walls of academia, you can start to find different ways of addressing issues.

Public health is emerging from its moment in the spotlight that demonstrated some of the strengths and failings of the field. What lessons should we take from the last few years as we move forward into a post-pandemic world?

Public health had its own stress test, and that’s challenging. There are a couple of things to think about. One, is that there is absolutely an opportunity to make sure the strategies that we’re applying in public health are impactful. Part of that will be sharpening our monitoring, surveillance, modeling, and data science—all of those things. These are fields that are getting better and better, but I think we now understand how important they are. The second is around communications—part of this is not just the responsibility of public health—but when it comes to communications, there’s a signal and a noise issue, especially around what is true in high-quality science versus what people might believe that is not based on evidence.

There’s another almost paradoxical piece, which is that we have to understand that knowledge does not necessarily result in changing of behavior. [For example] even if you know what to eat, it doesn’t mean that you always eat the right thing. You have to take human nature into account in your strategy, whether it is global sustainability, or working through pandemics, or maternal and child health. There is a certain amount of human nature and human fallibility, so there will be aspects in which you have to design the system with the flexibility to deal with the way that we actually function.

What role do you envision for BU in partnering with local communities to improve health outcomes? Are there any existing partnerships you plan to build upon or new ones you wish to establish?

There are two things that are top of mind for me. One is the existing partnerships with the City of Boston, Boston public schools, departments of public health, and the state. They are very clear stakeholders [and relationships] that we have and that we want to enhance. But within that, I think the opportunity exists for our institution to get a little more clarity about those relationships. I think we have an opportunity to clarify the channels and the ways in which we work, in which we partner. There’s more to come there, but it’s really an opportunity to build on top of this already amazing set of relationships that we have.

Is that part of the fact-finding mission that you began before officially starting?

That’s exactly right. Many institutions have built structures around their process for external engagement. It’s a way of increasing your impact. It’s a way of helping people who have interest in these areas, but may not necessarily have the connections. We have to be careful sometimes because we think any engagement is good engagement, but what we know is that you can overwhelm a partner because too many people are asking to partner.

What have the last few weeks been like in terms of coming into this new role while also relearning the city?

I have been part of BU now for about five months. Much of it has been spent outside of Boston, and other parts have been spent moving houses and unpacking boxes. But I would say, first of all, the city looks so different. And the last time I was here, I had a bicycle so I was either on bike, foot, or T. I think the difference is when you’re thinking about how an institution can partner with a city and state in mutually beneficial ways, it’s a very different lens than when you’re a student trying to figure out how to make sure that you get food at some point that day.

Your prior research has examined computer games and storytelling as novel ways of achieving desired public health outcomes. Are there any innovative approaches you think BU, or SPH specifically, can consider to address any of the social determinants of health that define some of those outcomes?

One of the biggest opportunities is to start to think about bridging our campuses [in areas] like the Center for Computing and Data Science, or the really exciting things that are happening in engineering and the life sciences. My own story was that I left a place with a school of public health, and I went to a place with no school of public health [the University of Chicago]. And the last person who was doing research in my area left and went to Canada. I really had nobody to collaborate with and so I realized I had to rely on atypical partners if I was going to be able to do research.

It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, and that insight has really led me to believe that it’s a great way to innovate. You can understand different ways of problem solving. You can actually find something that’s directly applicable to something what you’re doing. It’s a piece of advice I tend to give early career scholars: get outside of your discipline and just listen. Just listen and learn. In an institution that is as comprehensive as BU, where some of our schools are very collaborative and are thinking in really interesting ways, there’s a tremendous opportunity to advance public health.