I had an interest in health policy and a realization that, as an academic physician, one of the things you're always looking to do is to have your clinical interests and your scholarly interests overlap and reinforce one another.

Be persistent. Understand the ways in which your hard work is going to be necessary to achieve the goals that you want.

I realized in order to be involved in health policy, you really had to understand more than the individual patient that we as physicians, are taught to think about.

I grew up with a lot of dinner table conversations about health care and ways in which the system was inadequate for the needs of many of the patients they took care of.

I grew up with a real appreciation about just how wonderful and intimate the relationship is between a doctor and a patient was and the sense that this was a noble profession.

Once I started working with older people, I realized how much I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of taking care of patients who have multiple, complex medical problems.

I realize there are few sectors that can do what philanthropy does, which is look at big problems, take a long term view, try to develop strategies for addressing the root causes and then go about solving them.