Vivek Murthy

Thanks, Pooja.

Well, thank you, Pooja.

And it's really nice to be here with you and with the entire community online that's joining.

My path to public health was accidental, as many other things have been in my life.

I was never one who made five and ten year plans because when I did try, they would quickly fall apart.

And when I was a freshman in college, I actually got a call from my father.

And he said, there's this philanthropist in Florida who wants to give money to a worthy cause, but he doesn't know what cause to give it to.

Do you have any ideas?

And what he meant was, do you want to do something?

Do you want to build a project?

And I had not thought of that at all.

I was

starting college.

But that got me thinking.

This was in the mid-90s when HIV was on the rise in India.

And so my sister and I together decided to build an effort to train young people, students, to go to India to empower really the students there.

through community education programs.

So we spent our first summer after a freshman year doing these education workshops.

And we spent the next eight years building out this effort.

Along the way, we built a community health worker program in a series of small villages in South India.