Shayanne Martin

My journey in public health began with a childhood dream of becoming a scientist. By college, I discovered public health and was drawn to how you could more efficiently manage people and resources to improve the health of the masses. During a senior year trip to Guatemala, I worked in an area called the Triangle of Death, known for high infant and maternal mortality, where I was inspired by community health workers - primarily women with low literacy and low economic opportunity who learned basic health education to to improve the health of their communities. After initially working 3 years in revenue cycle consulting helping hospitals be more fairly compensated by insurance companies, I still had this calling to go into global health. I pursued my master's of public health from Hopkins in 2014, and then spent the next 7 years in focused on health workforce development (training doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and social workers to deliver healthcare in low-resource settings) and HIV service delivery in sub-Saharan Africa. Four years ago, my daughter was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease from a spontaneous mutation in the sodium leak channel (NALCN). We were living in San Francisco at the time, and moved to Texas where my husband, who is a physician, is from, for better family support and a great research and care setup for her. After about a year of working in community health in Texas, where there is no global health, I was motivated at a public health conference to go back to school. Now I'm getting my PhD in a health promotion and I'm working to make rare disease a public health issue, since 10% of Americans are affected by a rare disease. I'm the Executive Director of Channeling Hope Foundation, which I co-founded in July 2023. We're an international organization with patients in 35 countries, and I primarily focus on growing our organization to support patient-driven research to develop treatments for individuals affected by NALCN-related diseases.