Sue Goldie is a physician and public health researcher whose leadership, rigorous analyses, and creative interventions are transforming women’s healthcare around the world.  Incorporating mathematical modeling, the science of medical decision-making, and risk analysis, she has successfully identified important new strategies to improve women’s health in underserved populations.  Together with her collaborators, Goldie has developed complex and comprehensive epidemiological models for diseases such as HIV, gonorrhea, chlamydia, herpes, and hepatitis C.  By weighing disease characteristics and quantitatively assessing possible health interventions for potential populations, Goldie has translated her models into actionable information to guide global health interventions and policies.  A focus of Goldie’s research is the human papilloma virus (HPV) and its link to cervical cancer, the most common cause of cancer death in women worldwide.  Combining clinical, scientific and mathematical methodology, Goldie has demonstrated that non-physicians can be trained to conduct direct visual inspections or HPV testing to detect early cervical cancer, a more practical and cost-effective approach than the expensive and technically challenging Pap smear screening method.  She has taken her findings to the field, creating practical, sustainable cervical cancer-screening programs in Haiti, India, Kenya, Peru, South Africa, and Thailand.  Indeed, by bridging the gap between clinical researchers and global policy-makers, Goldie has already enhanced the lives of tens of thousands of women and has the potential to do so on a broader scale still.

 

Sue Goldie received her M.D. (1988) from Albany Medical College, and completed her residency (1988-91) at Yale University-New Haven Medical Center.  She returned to classes while still seeing patients, and received her M.P.H. (1997) from Harvard University.  She was a fellow at Harvard’s Center for Risk Analysis (1997-99) and is currently an associate professor of health policy and decision science in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.