ALUMNI PROFILES
Angelo P Giardino, MD, PhD, MPH (Graduated in May 2006)
Pediatrician working in Houston on the campus of the Texas Medical Center as the Medical Director for the Texas Children’s Health Plan (TCHP)
Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Texas School of Public Health, Houston, Texas
My name is Angelo Giardino and I’m a Pediatrician working in Houston on the campus of the Texas Medical Center as the Medical Director for the Texas Children’s Health Plan (TCHP).
I have recently been appointed
as an Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Texas School of Public Health, Houston, Texas and I’m also a Clinical Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medi
cine, Physician Advisor to the Center for Childhood Injury Prevention at Texas Children’s Hospital, and recently appointed as the Associate Chief for Research in the section of Academic General Pediatrics. I had a blast getting my MPH from UMASS via distance education and will share below how helpful having that training has been to me in my career development.
By way of background, I earned my medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed my 3-year pediatric residency at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. After residency I was named a clinical scholar in the 2-year Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Clinical Scholar's Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and then did an additional year as a research fellow in the Division of General Pediatrics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. During fellowship training, I pursued studies in health services research, professional education and received specialized training in the evaluation of suspected child abuse and neglect. I also went back to graduate school and a doctorate from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where I focused on outcomes assessment in professional education. Work-wise, I have wonderful opportunties and very talented mentors who have helped along the way. In 1998 I was appointed Associate Chair for Operations in the Department of Pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and then in 2002, I went across town to be the Associate Chair for Pediatrics and Associate Physician in Chief at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, Pa. And then, in 2005, I was recruited to come to Houston have been there to the present.
I decided to get an MPH because I very much wanted to learn how to think about populations and how to improve their health. For years, I had developed skills at helping individual patients and their families deal with very difficult circumstances. To this, I wanted to add the ability to conceptualize what a whole group of patients needed and how best to serve an entire community. I was always interested in “systems” and I think this accounts for why administrative roles have always been prominent in my career path but what I knew I need to know more about was how to do a needs assessment, how to quantify the risks to a whole group of people and then how to assess if an intervention made a different or not using statistics and sound research design. Obviously, an MPH would had those types of courses within it’s curriculum so after doing much exploring I enrolled in the UMASS program and completed it in about 4 years. Like most mid-career professionals getting another degree, it took a lot of work juggled with ongoing work responsibilities but I must admit, I never regretted the decision and now, several years past graduation, I can say that the skills and perspectives from the MPH have made a big difference for me. How so? I feel much more confident in how I approach a given community health problem and feel I can share these skills on the many teams I get to serve on that are trying to have an impact on this or that problem or need. Specifically, I feel like I have a mental framework from which to prepare, ask questions and make suggestions about how to study and then respond to a perceived problem. Sometimes, when I’m asked to give an opinion, I can remember a specific “threaded discussion” in which we hammered out a similar idea or concept and that reminds me of just how much I got to learn from the faculty and my fellow students in the UMASS MPH. I could go on and on but I enthusiastically recommend the MPH to colleagues who want to supplement their education with an additional set of technical skills in the public health arena. Right now, I’m on a tear about investing in prevention and once again the MPH has been helpful as we’ve tried to 1) collected population wide statistics about family violence in our city and county, 2) design an intervention that seeks to prevent abusive head trauma among our families, especially targeting first time parents, and 3) set up monitoring tools that will tell us if our efforts have been successful or not. I can say that without the MPH training, I would not have much to offer this effort so with it, I feel like I’m adding value to the whole endeavor.
