Althea is responsible for bringing sickle cell screening to Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. She’s working with the World Health Organization and other organizations to add more developing countries to that list.
P
ulling on the signature white coat every morning, ensconced in a Yale genetics lab, Althea Grant ’89 could have congratulated herself: her scientific career was right on track. Yet, she was not happy. More than fifteen years later, Althea wears a khaki Public Health Service uniform to her office at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta. Now, she is right where she wants to be. Soul searching, networking and research helped Althea devise and embark on an unusual, even unlikely career shift from a coveted role in lab science to service leadership in public health. Today she brings that same inventiveness and drive to the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities. She is acting director of the Division of Blood Disorders, and her particular focus is sickle cell disease. “The answers to the questions we deal with in public health are not straightforward,” Althea says. She hasn’t left hard science behind. On her busy Twitter feed (@DrGrantCDC), Althea describes herself: “disease detective, scientist, passionate about public health.” Her first project as head of epidemiology for the Centers’ Division of Blood Disorders: how to collect population data on sickle cell disease (SCD). Characterized by C-shaped red blood cells, sickle cell can lead to chronic pain, strokes and infections. Roughly 100,000 people, primarily African Americans and, to a lesser extent, Latinos and other racial and ethnic groups, are diagnosed with the condition. Beyond that number, however, little data existed on where those who are diagnosed live or how they get services. Althea’s vision—to establish a new national registry that would collect valuable data—was impossible without new funding. Months of meetings, travel and study helped her craft a program to gather vital information about sickle cell disease. In 2010, the CDC, along with the National Institutes of Health, launched a pilot program in seven states called RuSH— the Registry and Surveillance System for Hemoglobinopathies— to collect population-based data on people with SCD and thalassemia, another blood disorder.
“I took on that goal and worked it,” Althea says. “Getting funding for a completely new project forced me to be more resourceful than I might have been.” The daughter of two postal workers, Althea grew up in Newark, New Jersey. She didn’t excel in music or the visual arts. Not quite five feet tall, she wasn’t likely to be a star athlete, either. Math was a strong point, and though she wrote poetry too, Althea gravitated to the sciences. With two generations pushing her to excel—her grandparents lived nearby—Althea found Milton through A Better Chance, a program that connects outstanding students with opportunities beyond those that the challenged schools near home could provide. “Being at Milton put me on a particular trajectory,” says Althea. “I was really well-positioned to go anywhere I wanted to go.” After Milton, Rutgers welcomed her home. The first in her family to earn a college degree, Althea received her bachelor’s in biochemistry. She enjoyed science, and it also felt like a path to a solid career. That was important to her. In hindsight, she thinks she chose science because it felt less risky than writing or studying in the humanities. “Science seemed more unequivocal,” she says. “You got the answer or you didn’t. There was less room for subjectivity in people’s critiques. It felt like a safe place to go.” After earning her Ph.D. at Emory University, she pursued a postdoc in biochemistry and came back north to Yale. Her mentors at Yale were great, and her research into yeast, a model for human genetics, was going well. But something was wrong. “Though professionally, everything was going fine,” Althea says, “I thought I had lost my mind.” Althea had never questioned her commitment to science, and she had invested years of education in a lab career. Now she was faced with figuring out where she really wanted to be and how to get there. So she started a new research project—into a career change. She began by trying to remember a time when she felt passionate about her work. The feeling of engagement that she had during her public health classes came to mind. After Spring 2013 23