Get to Know Angela Suarez

As a young physician in Venezuela Bloomberg Fellow Angela Suarez grew frustrated. She saw patients returning to her clinic on a regular basis with the same medical problems, but no clear path forward. “This,” she reflected, “led me to question the best way to deliver interventions or implement solutions that created a true impact in communities" — and sparked her career in public health. 

Today, Suarez  serves as the Program Evaluation Manager for La Clinica del Pueblo in Washington, DC where one of her responsibilities is leading evaluation efforts for a project, which aims to reduce health disparities and improve health outcomes in diabetes care in the Latino immigrant community.

Driven by the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, one of the largest displacement crises in the world, Suarez arrived in the United States ready to use her skills to help vulnerable populations.

After coming to the US, Suarez evaluated the five-year initiative Bridging the Gap: Reducing Disparities in Diabetes Care, funded by the Merck Foundation, and the four-year long Health Resources and Services Administration's Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program: Collaborative Care Model to Advance Mental Health Equity and improve Health Outcomes among clients living with HIV in La Clinica del Pueblo. 

Suarez then decided to pursue her DrPH degree at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Bloomberg Fellowship program. As a Bloomberg Fellow, Suarez is learning how to create targeted interventions that are informed and adjusted based on the needs of each community they serve. She is already implementing her learnings in her day-to-day work.

Looking to the future, Suarez also thinks about her past. She notes that one of her proudest experiences was a three month rotation a decade ago in the Warao community, an indigenous people in the Orinoco delta of Venezuela. She says, "being part of this community allowed me to understand how the community should be an equal partner when it comes to the design, implementation and dissemination of interventions." 

With skills from Johns Hopkins and the Fellowship, she hopes to collaborate in the design of interventions, working alongside community members, to create innovative approaches to evaluating their success in creating a better future.