The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the powerful ways in which social forces structure the risk of illness, and of poor outcomes once ill. Join us for a discussion with Dr. Maggie Sullivan and Dr. Avik Chatterjee, two clinicians and health activists who have dedicated their careers to caring for the sick while seeking to redress the social forces that sicken them. Drs. Sullivan and Chatterjee have worked for years with the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program (BHCHP) and various medical and public health institutions in Boston to advance health equity. The speakers will share their professional paths, their recent work (including efforts undertaken by BHCHP to respond to COVID-19), and their reflections on what the pandemic has revealed about the way forward.

Please register for the conversation here. (Zoom link to follow)

For more on COVID-19, homelessness, and social policy, check out Dr. Chatterjee’s recent essay in the New England Journal of Medicine and this feature about BHCHP’s COVID-19 response.

Margaret Sullivan, FNP-BC, DrPH

Margaret (Maggie) Sullivan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. In 2019, she graduated with a Doctor of Public Health degree (DrPH program) from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is a board-certified family nurse practitioner with an interest in serving immigrant patients and their families. Her dissertation research focused on improving healthcare delivery to immigrant patients at community health centers in Massachusetts. Since 2009, Maggie has practiced at Boston Health Care for the Homeless (BHCHP), providing primary care to patients in shelter-based clinics. In March of 2019, she launched a new immigrant health clinic, Oasis Clinic, at BHCHP where immigrants experiencing homelessness are connected with interdisciplinary and multi-lingual services. Maggie also works as a clinical consultant with the Massachusetts League of Community Health Center’s farmworker health program in addition to collaborating with Partners In Health in Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala. Maggie conducts forensic asylum evaluations with Physicians for Human Rights and Harvard Medical School’s Asylum Network.

Avik Chatterjee, MD, MPH

Dr. Avik Chatterjee is a med-peds trained primary care and addiction medicine physician at several shelter-based clinics through Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program. His areas of clinical and research interest include innovative treatment models for opioid use disorder in marginalized populations, and interventions on social determinants of health, such as food insecurity. He has an additional interest in racism and health care, particularly its manifestations in medical education and training.