Her Story
About Kendra
I currently work at the Department of State in the Office of Health Diplomacy as the Deputy Team Lead for the Bilateral Engagement Team. In this role, I support our embassies on all health programming, helping to ensure that everything we do across TB, malaria, HIV, maternal and child health, and global health security is connected and integrated. I serve as the point of contact within our Global Health Security and Diplomacy Bureau to help our embassies strategically design, implement, and monitor their programs. Because we have such a short number of staff, I'm dual-hatted right now and also lead our Asia team, specifically in East Asia and Pacific, though my role is actually expanding to cover all of Asia soon. My career in this field spans almost 25 years. After earning my doctorate in microbiology from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, where I studied tuberculosis, I applied for the AAAS Science and Technology Congressional Fellowship. I was debating between the traditional postdoc route and trying something different, and I ended up getting the Congressional AAAS Fellowship through the American Society for Microbiology. I came down to DC for a year to see if I liked doing something different, and after that year, I caught Potomac fever and decided to pursue this path of using my scientific skills to help with policies and programming. After my congressional fellowship, I worked at the Federation of American Scientists before landing a job at the Department of State, helping to manage their biosecurity engagement programs. I was there at a great time because we were hugely expanding the portfolio, so I helped spread that into more countries and make it a global program. During avian influenza, I really wanted overseas experience, and USAID opened up positions to work overseas, so I changed my career and went to USAID Indonesia to help lead their emergency avian influenza program. I ended up staying there for 5 years, and we were able to get more money to do programs for TB and science and technology, so the portfolio just continued to grow. When I came back, I stayed at USAID for 15 years until recently when the agency got demolished, and I transferred back to the State Department, coming full circle.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Kendra
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I always encourage people to try, and as much as possible, to work overseas, because if you're doing global health work, I think it is really important to try to pursue the opportunities where you can be on the ground, where we're implementing our work, and really see that in action, and learn how our embassies and our structures work overseas, and then come back as well and work in Washington, because it's important to understand how headquarters work. I always give the advice of finding a mentor early on, too, because it is incredibly helpful to have a mentor, and I think the way you succeed, particularly when you're working in government, is to really understand the department or the agency that you're working in and the processes. That's best to do by having a mentor and someone that can walk you through it, and also taking the time to maybe rotate in different offices and do different things so that you really get that full sense of understanding budget processes, clearance processes, how decisions are made to help programs made. I think it's really, if you're going to be in government a long time, that's a really valuable experience.
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