For me personally, today is incredibly important. I am the chief medical officer at Verily. And Verily is the branch of Alphabet that focuses on health care and life science.
Yes. And I don't think a lot of people-- and I talk so fast-- a lot of people may not have caught that, but with you being the first chief medical officer for Crisis Text Line and now the chief transformation officer, you've held two executive roles within one organization. As an African-American woman holding two powerful roles, what does that mean to you?
One of the things that you would expect, and also one of my favorite things to do as an astronaut, was learn how to do medical care. So I was the crew medical officer on my space shuttle flight and also for my long-duration, 200-day mission. And before the long duration mission, NASA actually sent me to the Houston medical area, downtown Houston.
and change, and that goes into to right what you're doing now-- transformation. But going back to when you were the chief medical officer , I think what you brought to the organization was a different perspective, that clinical perspective from a mental health perspective.
I'm just having fun. And the only time you share it is if a medical officer comes to you to do an interview on contact tracing.
complex. And what it does is it says this is me, and if another cell expresses differences, it's not me, and your body tries to kill it. So we met with an orthopedic surgeon who's now our chief medical officer , award-winning orthopedic surgeon.
It could be a public health profession. Back in history, it was the medical officer of health. Nowadays, it might be the director of public health locally, or it might be, in this country, the Chief Medical Officer .
Some of you will have heard of Dame Sally Davies who is often in the media. Well, she's our Chief Medical Officer in this country. She's the public health supremo In the United States, it would be the Surgeon General.
And then finally, in the interval years-- the 1920s and the 1930s-- public health really expanded its remit. And the public health practitioners, the medical officer of health would be running not just preventive services and health education services, but also running hospitals and running health services more generally.
And then I worked at the Department of Health, continuing to focus on trauma and physical health conditions, and then did some consulting and wound up at Crisis Text Line back in 2017 as the chief medical officer . Awesome. So it sounds like trauma, personal trauma that you went through in your family, really kind of directed you invited you to your career
And even internal to the AIDS industry, this can be true. We were at an event, and our CEO introduced our chief medical officer to the then doctor at St. Vincent's. And he looked a little confused about, why would you have a doctor at a thrift store?
Back in history, it was the medical officer of health. Nowadays, it might be the director of public health locally, or it might be, in this country, the Chief Medical Officer . Some of you will have heard of Dame Sally Davies who is often in the media.
be focused on public health. It was intended to be, originally, a local government-focused service run by public health practitioners-- the medical officer of health. Well, that didn't happen.
And we were going to send it someplace really far away, like Texas. So we had a power systems flight controller, thermal systems, chief medical officer , operations planning, and so on and so forth.