Reed Tuckson discusses career, public health threats at SPH Black History Month event – The Brown Daily Herald

Reed Tuckson joined Ashish Jha, dean of the School of Public Health, for a public conversation in honor of Black History Month on Monday afternoon, covering his career path and today’s pressing public health threats. Tuckson has led multiple public health organizations, serving in a range of healthcare administrative positions. He is co-convener of the Coalition For Trust In Health and Science, was co-founder of the Black Coalition Against COVID and was executive vice president and chief of medical affairs for UnitedHealth Group. Growing up, Tuckson’s mother was a visiting nurse in Washington, D.C., where he saw her “going into the poorest parts of the towns and (saving) people’s lives,” he told the audience. This eventually inspired him to go into public health.  During his time at the University of Pennsylvania, Tuckson worked at Veterans Affairs, where he diagnosed multiple patients with heart disease. “All of a sudden, all the excitement of what I had been trained to do just seemed a little suboptimal because these people were going to die from preventable illness,” he said. ADVERTISEMENT Tuckson was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at Penn, a program which allowed him to take classes at the Wharton School...