TMC PULSE

t m c » p u l s e | o c t o b e r 2 0 1 6 32 TMC SPOTLIGHT school. At Lenox Hill, I was vice chair of the Department of Medicine and chief of the General Internal Medicine division. I had the same titles at UMass, but I had responsibility for a much larger faculty and budget with a greater clinical, educational, and research port- folio. The achievement of which I am most proud is that I started a mentoring program for the entire health sciences campus that included the graduate school of biomedical sciences, nursing school, and medical school. For this Julia Andrieni, M.D., vice president of Population Health and Primary Care at Houston Methodist Hospital and president and CEO of Houston Methodist Physicians' Alliance for Quality, speaks with Pulse about her acting aspirations, the happy collision of science and medicine, and the future of health care. Q | Can you tell us a bit about your childhood and family? A | My father was a first generation immigrant from northern Italy. His family ended up settling in Houghton, Michigan, working in the coal mines. My father, who had an eighth grade education, contributed to supporting his family at an early age. He met my mother in the South, during World War II, and settled in Augusta, Georgia, where I was born and raised. I always did well in school and loved mathemat- ics. When it came time to go to college, though, my mother said, 'Oh, you don't really need to pursue that path because you'll marry your childhood sweetheart and have a nice life.' Q | But you wanted to go to college? A | Yes, I valued education as a vehicle for advancement. Interesting anecdote. One night at the dinner table, my older brother said, 'Why don't you apply to Vassar?' He had just seen a James Bond movie where Kim Basinger does a karate chop and James Bond asks her: 'Where did you learn to fight like that, NASA?' She replies: 'No Vassar.' So my brother thought if I went to Vassar I'd be the coolest woman of all time. I applied and ended up getting a scholarship that paid for half my education. When I went to Vassar, it opened my eyes to a whole new world of opportunity. Q | What did you study at Vassar? A | As a freshman I wanted to be an actress. Meryl Streep went to Vassar College; she was my commencement speaker. But my parents thought that was a terrible idea, so I became an economics major because math was always a strength for me. After Vassar, I wanted to explore my interest in sci- ence so I worked as a research assistant at Rockefeller University in a Nobel Laureate lab. With my economics degree, I had the opportunity to work for eight years with a startup team to bring Hoya, a Japanese glass corpora- tion, to the U.S. market as director of marketing. Hoya expected me to con- tinue on the business path and agreed to pay for my M.B.A. at Columbia University. I believed I could make a greater contribution in science, which People are complex, with specific health needs and motivations. One size does not fit all. led me to medical school at the age of 31 as a second career. Q | How did that career shift feel? A | I always felt that it was just meant to be. It was really important to be able to combine science with the business of medicine in implementing transfor- mative change at the individual and system level. Q | After studying and working in New York at Lenox Hill Hospital, an NYU School of Medicine affiliate, you ended up in Massachusetts at UMass Memorial Medical Center. What led you to UMass? A | An opportunity to have a larger and more influential role at a medical work, I was named the Joy McCann Professor for Women in Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Creating an environment for others to grow, advance, and succeed is important to me. Q | How much of your experience at UMass influenced your decision to come to Methodist in 2013? After all, Houston is a monstrous, complex city. A | I have always been interested in complex systems and how the pieces fit

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