When Harvard Medical School and Mass General Hospital Dr. Ingrid Bassett, MD, MPH, began her public service leave at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), she set out to try something new. A long-time physician and infectious disease researcher, Dr. Bassett is a participant in Harvard Impact Labs’ Public Service Leave program—a new initiative that enables Harvard faculty to take a leave to work in a government or nonprofit organization. She went to DPH not to write papers or launch a study, but to work directly on a pressing, real-world challenge: pediatric vaccination in Massachusetts.
Dr. Bassett’s career has focused on evaluating strategies for improving engagement in HIV and TB care and prevention in South Africa, and she describes herself as a traditional researcher: “I do the study, I create the evidence, and then it's up to someone else to take that evidence and do something with it.”
The Public Service Leave at DPH is allowing Dr. Bassett to work directly with practitioners and communities. The experience is proving transformative, both for Dr. Bassett and for the communities she is serving.
Bringing academic skills to community health Massachusetts has strong overall childhood vaccination rates, but Dr. Bassett quickly learned that statewide numbers can obscure meaningful local disparities.
“While Massachusetts has been really successful with pediatric vaccination overall,” she noted, “we definitely have pockets with low kindergarten vaccination rates.”
Her work is focused on Western Massachusetts—particularly Berkshire, Franklin, and Hampden counties—where lower vaccination rates intersect with proximity to New York state, where measles cases have been rising sharply. Communities need at least 95% of residents vaccinated to prevent outbreaks of measles and other diseases, and vaccination rates among kindergarteners in these counties are falling behind. Rather than assuming a single cause, Dr. Bassett is asking what local, structural, and community-specific factors might be driving the lower vaccination rates. “What might lead to a low vaccination rate in one place may be different in another,” she said.
Drawing on her global health research experience, she is applying a prevention-oriented framework that emphasizes meeting people where they are. In South Africa, her work has focused on bundling HIV prevention with other routine services. In Massachusetts, she is bringing that same thinking to pediatric vaccination.
“Prevention is especially amenable to community-based delivery,” she explained.
Leveraging trusted community institutions
This approach led Dr. Bassett to focus on WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children that provides food benefits for low-income mothers of young children. WIC has local offices all over Massachusetts: trusted, non-clinical settings where families already receive support. By creating a map of local WIC offices and schools with low vaccination rates, she discovered substantial overlap between them.
“It turns out there’s a huge amount of overlap,” Dr. Bassett said. “The WIC offices are really right there.”
Importantly, WIC staff already engage families on immunization issues and see their clients multiple times a year. Dr. Bassett has been listening to the people engaged with families to learn what might encourage vaccine uptake in each of their communities, conducting qualitative outreach to WIC staff, public health nurses, school nurses, and pediatric stakeholders.
“I’m not doing research in a typical academic sense,” she emphasized. “I’m taking the skills that I’ve cultivated in my research life and really trying to think about them in a very pragmatic way.”
She is also exploring a collaboration with the Massachusetts Public Health Nurse Association, a key stakeholder group with members representing every community across the state, assessing whether public health nurses could help deliver vaccination education or services in WIC settings. She convened a multi-sector stakeholder meeting bringing together pediatricians, school nurses, staff from the state’s Medicaid program, and immunization partners to identify coordination gaps and opportunities where DPH support could make a difference.
“As a physician, I knew very abstractly that the disease cases I report were analyzed by the state, but to understand how they actually use the information to protect public health on a daily basis has been really eye opening.”
As Dr. Bassett describes it, much of this work involves navigating—and intentionally leveraging—the many strengths of a large, complex organization. “The Department of Public Health is big, and part of my work has been identifying synergies across different parts of the department,” she said. She pointed to the Bureau of Family Health and Nutrition as a natural collaborator for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences, noting its deep focus on pediatric health and strong relationships with families and community organizations. Together, these bureaus co-planned the stakeholder convening, adding a new dimension to the positive momentum DPH has already built around vaccination. “There’s tremendous potential when we collaborate in new ways,” Dr. Bassett said. “Working together allows us to think creatively about how we bring public health resources into even more community spaces.”
Leading at the regional level: The Northeast Public Health Collaborative
In addition to her vaccine-focused work, Dr. Bassett is playing an active leadership role in the Northeast Public Health Collaborative’s immunization working group. This multi-state effort brings together public health leaders from across the region to coordinate responses to rapidly evolving federal vaccine guidance and policy changes.
“I don’t think coming into this in September I could have anticipated how dynamic the federal scene was going to be,” she says. “We’re in a moment where there’s this incredible tension between what the federal government is saying and what some states think is the right answer for their population. It’s completely unprecedented, and now there’s a lot of uncertainty with families and with practitioners.”
As federal processes around vaccine recommendations shift, Dr. Bassett helps the group align on shared evidence-based positions and communicate clearly with clinicians and the public. She contributes directly by drafting regional statements and helping shape Massachusetts’ formal comments on issues such as HPV vaccine schedules, COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, and hepatitis B recommendations.
Through regular cross-state calls with public health leaders from northeastern states and major cities, the collaborative serves as a forum for sharing implementation strategies, lessons learned, and policy approaches grounded in transparent, evidence-based processes.
“You get on a call—with people in Maine and Vermont and New York City,” she explained. “People are all sharing ideas and troubleshooting. What’s amazing to me is how incredibly thoughtful people have been, and how much they share their knowledge, understanding, and a ‘behind the scenes’ look at what their state is working on to help other states. It’s a real commitment to transparency in terms of how public health decisions are made.”
Navigating public health from the inside
Being embedded in a large public health agency has been instructive for Dr. Bassett.
“I didn’t realize there were over 3,000 employees at the Department of Public Health,” she said. “As a physician, I knew very abstractly that the disease cases I report were analyzed by the state, but to understand how they actually use the information to protect public health on a daily basis has been really eye opening.”
She is participating in weekly epidemiology huddles, public health “surveillance” discussions, and emergency response conversations about issues ranging from rabies exposures to emerging outbreaks. Seeing how the state responds in real time has given her a new appreciation for the scale and complexity of public health work.
“It’s very cool to be on the other side of how they make these decisions,” she said. “The infrastructure is really incredible.”
Dr. Bassett is learning how Massachusetts’ public health system works across bureaus and with 351 local boards of health—a structure that creates both opportunities and challenges for coordination.
“There are tools or levers that could be brought to bear on a problem that I think working inside the hospital or inside academia, you’re not even really aware of,” she observed.
Mutual value: Growth for the individual, benefit for the public
As her public service leave continues, Dr. Bassett is reflecting on how individual growth and public impact are deeply connected. Working on pediatric vaccination has introduced her to new people and pushed her to apply her expertise in new contexts.
“I’m finding myself in rooms with people that I never would have met before,” she says. “At mid-career, that is very energizing.” While the work can be uncomfortable at times, she sees that stretch as essential. “That discomfort is part of the excitement. It’s very healthy.”
She sees clearly how academic skills translate into government settings. And the practitioners she is working with welcomed her ability to synthesize evidence, ask foundational questions, and think systematically about solutions.
“The research skills I bring as an academic are really directly applicable to the Department of Public Health,” she said. “There’s a big appetite for this kind of thinking at every level of the organization.”
Looking ahead: Creating pathways for students
Looking ahead, Dr. Bassett is thinking about how to create pathways for Harvard students and postdoctoral fellows to work within public health agencies, where rich data, established infrastructure, and real-world challenges offer powerful opportunities for learning and contributing.
“One of my bigger goals is to help connect trainees to the Department of Public Health,” she said. “The students I work with are usually deciding between a career in industry or academia—they're not even thinking about government, but they should be. Academic skills are highly translatable, and DPH offers incredible data and infrastructure and opportunity—it's an environment where a postdoc would really thrive. I’m excited about creating a pathway that’s mutually beneficial for all.”
Dr. Bassett's experience illustrates the promise of Harvard Impact Labs’ Public Service Leaves and other programs that enable academics to bring their expertise to urgent public problems while learning directly from people who work every day to protect and improve lives.
“I’ve gotten so much out of it,” she says. “it’s been incredibly valuable—it’s the opportunity to refresh what your research questions and collaborators are. It’s such a privilege.” For the people of Massachusetts, that value shows up in stronger community partnerships, clearer understanding of vaccination gaps, and more thoughtful approaches to disease prevention.
“It’s never too late to try something new,” she reflected. And sometimes, trying something new can make a meaningful difference—both for public health and for the people working to strengthen it.
The Public Service Leave program is now accepting applications. For more information, visit the website.
—
Banner photograph by Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images; inline photo courtesy of Dr. Ingrid Bassett