Carrie Foti

I've always been interested in international affairs and international security issues. When I went to college, I studied with colleagues from around the world, particularly friends from Africa. After graduating with my first graduate degree in international studies, I went overseas to West Africa, to Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and I really fell in love with the continent and the issues that people faced there, and the different cultures and perspectives I could gain living and working there. I immediately discovered that public health was a significant need, and I pursued further education and then a career in international public health. I worked with Catholic Medical Mission Board in New York during the early 2000s when treatment became available for people living with HIV, and I started writing grants on mother-to-child transmission and care and treatment. CMMB ended up being a real leader in the mother-to-child transmission space based on the grants we wrote and our partnerships with Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation and Boehringer Ingelheim. I went back to school at Columbia University and got my Master's in Public Health, then ended up going to Kenya and living there with my husband. I was a project manager for the countrywide treatment expansion in Kenya, working with faith-based facilities and then public facilities, working closely with the Ministry of Health to roll out those services. At the end of my career on the research side, I worked with IAVI, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, where my job was to work with all of our global partners on the research they were doing. We were trying to develop a vaccine using an antibody approach, engaging the immune system differently through innovative approaches to T cell and B-cell immunology, and we were doing it based on research happening on the ground in East Africa and Southern Africa. When the Doge applied their woodchipper to USAID, my program was shuttered. City College was really interested in someone that had my fundraising and project management background because they are doing programs targeting minority populations, specifically Dominicans. The work I'm doing now is for a Dominican museum, the first Dominican museum in the United States. My work is basically to hear from the staff what kind of research they're doing, what kind of discoveries they're making, and then highlight the stories that I think will be most powerful to bring to other partners and allies for Dominican culture in the city. It's a steep learning curve because the languages I've been speaking in Africa are French, English, and Swahili, and now I'm immersed in a Spanish bilingual environment, learning so much about the history of the Caribbean and the Dominican Republic. I'm seeing a lot of people with similar experiences to mine doing work domestically that's really important right now in terms of bringing visibility to communities that might be marginalized, including women, LGBTQ communities, and Black and brown communities. That's always been the part of society that I've enjoyed serving in different ways, and I hope to continue doing that in the work I'm doing with City College. I just love City College because it's the first free college in the United States, and it's a very vibrant, young, youthful, hopeful community to be around. I'm really inspired by our students.