Incubator Welcomes Ana Cristina Sedas

June 14, 2024

“How can I help?” This is the question at the core of Dr. Ana Cristina Sedas's story. Born in the U.S. and raised in Mexico, Sedas has always been invested in helping others. She became a doctor, global health researcher, and advocate in order to help the world’s most vulnerable.

Now, joining the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator (GHELI) team as a Global Health Program Manager, Sedas will be using her extensive knowledge and passion for global health to help the Incubator develop and disseminate GHELI’s open access materials through targeted outreach.

Sedas recalls that since she was young, she had always been fascinated with the idea of being a doctor, but she didn’t think it was a possibility for her because she had never seen a female physician. Her thinking changed when she visited a rural Mexican community as a missionary when she was a teenager. Since access to health care was limited in this community, Sedas often provided basic first aid, asking “how can I help?” Here, she realized for the first time how inequities lead to poorer health and how poverty has the potential to kill. After this experience, she became determined to be a doctor.

Sedas later attended medical school in Mexico, working with people facing similar health, economic, and social challenges as those faced by the rural community she visited as a teen. It was in medical school that she came upon her current passion, migration, by listening to people’s stories. “Migration is something I grew up learning,” Sedas said. She grew up seeing how migration was intertwined with poverty and health—how people in impoverished communities traveled between the U.S. and Mexico in order to find work that would pay for out-of-pocket health expenses.

Sedas first came to Boston to do a research-clinical rotation in mind-body medicine as part of an international observership during her medical school training. During that period, she connected with the Consulate of Mexico in Boston and was invited to work there helping Mexican migrants in the United States as part of her one-year social service required by the Mexican Ministry of Health. Through working with Mexican and Latin American migrants in Boston, Sedas felt keenly how health conditions were connected to the conditions for health—the social, political, and economic contexts people live in. At that time, it was 2016, and a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that rose along with the Trump administration made migrants afraid to seek care for fear of deportation. “I started to learn that it is impossible to provide good medical advice and good prevention if we don't understand the context of the people that we're serving,” Sedas said. That was when she started doing advocacy work to help Latin American migrants access health care.

Since finishing her medical training, Sedas has obtained a master’s degree in Global Health Delivery from Harvard Medical School and taken on a variety of positions related to migration and health. One of those positions included a role at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Health and Migration Programme developing curriculum for the WHO Global School on Refugee and Migrant Health and identifying global research priorities related to health and migration. She continues to be involved in research and advocacy work, in May publishing a new paper, “The response of health systems to the needs of migrants and refugees in the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparative case study between Mexico, Colombia and Peru,” in The Lancet Regional Health - Americas.

Sedas was drawn to GHELI’s environment of creativity and exploration centered on making global health education accessible to everyone. “I believe that through education, you are able to advance agendas, advance advocacy, advance programming, advance health equity,” she said. Sedas is excited to become a core support for the Incubator’s repository and educational programs. With her ability to draw global connections and her absolute enthusiasm for helping others, she is a natural fit for the GHELI team.

Welcome, Ana Cris!

Read Ana Cris’s paper: The response of health systems to the needs of migrants and refugees in the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparative case study between Mexico, Colombia and Peru