Grayson Privette

Originally from Raleigh, NC, Grayson has had the opportunity to work for the past decade across various settings in the public health/disease control realm prior to medical school at UNC-Chapel Hill. Studying abroad in undergrad sparked his interest in global health, and his interests grew to include tropical health and infectious disease while working with CDC in Guatemala during graduate school through Emory University. In his professional career he has worked with NGOs to identify and control infectious disease in South Sudan and Sierra Leone, and then applied these public health concepts to clinical settings in Philadelphia. Reflecting on these experiences and his current work to evaluate and improve infection control practices through a partnership with UNC's Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Ecology Lab and Mbarara University of Science and Technology in Uganda, Grayson's life and future career path have been inextricably shaped by interactions with amazing people who better the lives of others through their compassion, creativity and perseverance in the face of overwhelming challenges. He has enjoyed making the transition to working in public health, healthcare and then medical school, where he hopes to combine his public health background with future training in emergency medicine, particularly through systems-based clinical improvement projects and pre-hospital care to reduce the global burden of infectious and communicable disease.

What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
For me, the Kean Fellowship and associated project support represent opportunity—the opportunity to impact the lives of others through research, the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from amazing mentors and research colleagues, and the opportunity to grow personally and professionally through the completion of a project I never imagined possible several years ago.

What do you anticipate learning?
Through the Kean Fellowship, I anticipate continuing to learn about effective collaboration across cultures, from a personal and professional perspective. I look forward to sharing my project and associated findings with community members, local government officials, healthcare personnel, and research colleagues alike, which will push me to grow and improve communication techniques through research dissemination across such different populations. Moreover, I anticipate learning more about healthcare delivery in Eastern Uganda and the pragmatic, cost-efficient opportunities that exist to improve healthcare delivery via infection prevention and control, with the end goal of reducing patient harm.

What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
Tropical medicine interests me so greatly because of its sheer complexity and the collaboration necessary to address human suffering. The burden of tropical disease represents the summation of seemingly unimaginably complex problems that include global inequity, climate change, political motivation, the built environment and the dynamic nature of interactions driven by the global economy. Sustainable solutions to these issues cannot be singular and must, by their very nature, employ multi-disciplinary approaches. I enjoy collaborating across cultures, disciplines, and expertise, and hope (with a healthy dose of pragmatism) that we can better tackle the multi-faceted challenges posed by tropical disease with greater success over the coming generation of health leaders.