For Gene Pozas, SM ’26, public health is a journey shaped by family, mentorship, global experiences, and a commitment to education
A child of Cuban immigrants, Pozas grew up in the suburbs of Miami in a close-knit community where Spanish was spoken at home and among neighbors. This upbringing gave him a firsthand understanding of the challenges faced by families like his own in navigating health systems built primarily for English speakers.
“A lot of the public health infrastructure in the U.S. is built in English,” Pozas explained. “It doesn’t really follow what people were used to in their home countries. Noticing the struggle that people, like my family, had adapting to the system in the U.S. inspired me to work more with immigrant communities here.”
As a student at Harvard Chan School, Pozas’ focus on empowering disenfranchised communities—particularly Latino ones like the one he was raised in—has continued by way of education on environmental health exposure, risks, and solutions. “Education is probably the best thing that you can provide to communities that may not have the resources to combat certain aspects [of public health] that are affecting them,” he said.
As a fieldwork assistant in the Healthy Cities Lab, led by Gary Adamkiewicz, associate professor of environmental health and exposure disparities, Pozas observed that Spanish-speaking residents in Boston neighborhoods like Dorchester and Roxbury were not receiving public health messaging and resources the way English-speaking communities do. “How much we were able to interact with and speak with people in this community was motivating, but unfortunately, we didn’t have enough people who spoke Spanish to best educate them,” he said.
Pozas is also involved in a project at the Harvard Innovation Labs focused on building epigenetic testing kits that measure environmental health exposures. Eventually, “we’d like to see those go to disenfranchised communities and people who are most susceptible to environmental health risks and then provide them with education on lifestyle changes if needed,” he said.
His hope is that his Cuban-American background, fluency in Spanish, and personal ties to marginalized communities, give him more opportunities to address gaps in access to public health education and resources.
Education is probably the best thing that you can provide to communities that may not have the resources to combat certain aspects [of public health] that are affecting them.
Personal experiences turned to professional pathway
Growing up, Pozas would visit his grandparents in Cuba, where he’d shadow his grandfather, a physician, at work. “Seeing how he treated patients in Cuba and dealt with infectious diseases inspired me to want to learn more about it,” he said.
He may not have known it at the time, but these early experiences, characterized by an interest in how diseases spread, laid the groundwork for a future in public health.
This curiosity carried into his undergraduate studies at the University of Florida, where he joined an epidemiology lab focused on infectious disease, eventually leading him to explore cancer biology. This work “resonated personally” with Pozas as breast cancer had impacted his mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. At the time, he said “it felt like a calling.”
A mentee and mentor
While at the University of Florida, Pozas’ volunteer work included performing science experiments for elementary school students and encouraging them to pursue opportunities in STEM. Sharing that his own passion for STEM blossomed in elementary school, he wanted to expose youth to the field and ensure they went after opportunities like the ones he had. “I wanted them to know that there are many interesting STEM fields they’re able to pursue,” Pozas said.
Pozas participated in FACETS in the summer of 2023. Under the mentorship of Brittney Francis, who was a research fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the time, he looked at how environmental stressors can affect the risk of preeclampsia in Black and Hispanic people who are pregnant. While in the program, he realized he “could make more of an impact through public health. It could affect more people,” he said.
The return to Harvard Chan School
Pozas and fellow teammates representing Harvard at the Ulsan Rowing Festival in South Korea.
When Pozas found himself on the Harvard Chan campus again in 2024—this time to pursue a Master of Science degree—it marked the beginning of several overseas opportunities. Among them, what he called one of his most special accomplishments to date: a recent trip to South Korea with Harvard’s club crew team that happened to combine an athletic achievement with exposure to another society’s way of life, further enriching Pozas’ approach to public health.
This summer, Pozas also took on a project in Rosario, Argentina. The project was titled Rebuilding the Social Fabric of La Tablada: Empowering Youth for a Better Future and Pozas joined as one of 22 fellows chosen to represent the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.
While in Argentina, “I was able to work with community health centers and social workers and tie in more aspects of public health into the project than originally planned, which was exciting,” he shared. Pozas reflected on a conversation with his older brother where they both agreed that this experience abroad with the Bloomberg initiative wouldn’t have been feasible without the scholarships he received.
Pozas presenting project titled Rebuilding the Social Fabric of La Tablada: Empowering Youth for a Better Future.
In January, Pozas is headed to Greece as part of a follow-up to an epidemiology study led by Petros Koutrakis, professor of environmental sciences, who Pozas admires for his approach to research. “He emphasizes ‘the why’ behind what we study, rather than the production of papers,” Pozas explained. The team comprised of a dozen researchers will explore whether there’s an association between how “people [in Cyprus and Greece] rank their built environment and actual cardiac health outcomes.”
Each experience that has come along with Pozas’ time at Harvard Chan School—local and global—has broadened his understanding of how different countries operate and approach public health, but he admits he’s still figuring out what he wants to do after he earns his SM. “Not for lack of opportunities,” he says. But just the opposite. “There’s so much I want to do after.”
