“My international research has been supported by the Fogarty International Center for many years,” says Schiff. “I’ve always thought that if the timing were right and the position was open, maybe I could contribute back. I feel drawn to service, and I am very excited if I can help the United States and the world through this position.”
For the past 20 years, Schiff, a pediatric neurosurgeon, has worked with partners in Uganda to first identify and then characterize a strain of bacteria that causes serious illness and often death in children. Through that research, Schiff and his colleagues have uncovered environmental drivers of infection risk and established infection-tracking infrastructure. They’ve also demonstrated how global and domestic health are inextricably intertwined.
“We discovered what the infection was and started publishing about it, and as soon as we did that, multiple cases were identified throughout the United States,” says Schiff. “We're now producing reports that serve as health alerts to United States physicians. In the last month we've found another three cases, all from physicians at hospitals in the U.S. contacting us for advice.”
The discovery in Uganda is just one example, he says, of how understanding a threat to health in one part of the world leads to understanding in other parts of the world, including the United States.
Schiff will step down from his position at YSM to lead the Fogarty International Center, which he says is bittersweet. “Yale has given me the kind of freedom to pursue what I felt was most important in understanding how to observe and control serious disease in settings with very limited resources,” says Schiff. “I have never been at an institution that seems to have so appreciated what I was doing. Yale has that unique combination of excellent faculty and students, a culture of collaboration, and a culture of institutional support. It allows faculty to do things that are not what everyone else does.”
As Fogarty International Center director, Schiff says he will look to the future and consider how the center can best position itself for the next decade. “That’s, I think, my initial biggest challenge,” he says. “To not simply keep doing what we’ve done for decades, but to identify what we could do better and more flexibly in a new world with new international relationships.”
He's also not done with research.
“I will be an investigator at the NIH,” says Schiff. “They’ll enable me to continue aspects of my work that I feel are critical to keep pushing forward, that will benefit human health.”