Two medical school alumni take top careers to the Motor City’s health department

Two medical school alumni take top careers to the Motor City's health department

DETROIT - It is said of the East Carolina University Pirates' football fanbase that it travels well. The same could be said of our best trained health and medical professionals. For Brody School of Medicine alumni Dr. Claudia Richardson '89 and Kelvin Freeman '10, Ph.D., their meeting in a hallway of the Detroit public health department a few months ago was a surprise but not a shock. The network is national.

Still, Richardson and Freeman had some particularly close touchpoints.

"I'm from Windsor," Freeman said. "And no one knows where that is -."

"But I'm from Ahoskie," about 20 miles up U.S. 13, Richardson said.

Now, Richardson is the medical director of a health department serving the largest city in the nation's 14th largest metro, and Freeman is its emergency preparedness director.

A coincidence, sure, but improbable? Alumni of ECU's Brody School of Medicine, with its programs in public health, have a way of showing up everywhere - in rural clinics and major academic hospitals, in state agencies and federal command centers, and in big cities far from Greenville and the small towns many alumni grew up in.

"We have a shorthand," Richardson said. "There are things you don't have to explain when someone knows where you come from."

"When I go home, I don't have to tell her why my cell phone wasn't getting a signal when she called," Freeman said.

'ECU Prepared Me for Rigorous Training, for Rural Medicine'

Richardson came to the medical school in the mid-1980s. It was a time, she remembers, when eastern North Carolina health outcomes were among the worst in the nation. She remembers faculty who pushed students to think about ethics, equity and the realities of practicing medicine in underserved communities. She didn't know it then, but ECU was setting a tone for her career that she carries to this day.

She first moved to Detroit in 1989 for an OB-GYN residency at what was then Detroit's Hutzel Women's Hospital. The Brody School of Medicine's mission - and its focus on care for rural and underserved populations - drew her back to Ahoskie, where she opened a private OB-GYN practice in 1993. Her career has since spanned clinical care in Hampton, Virginia, leadership at Planned Parenthood and work in a federally qualified community hospital.

In 2003, she earned a master's in public health and has served on boards of public health, but she had never been a medical director for a public health department, and serving in that role for the city of Detroit was a hard fork in the road.

"I surprised myself taking this job," she said. "But the foundation was always there. ECU prepared me for rigorous training, for rural medicine, for urban medicine, for ethical decision-making."

"The community here in so many spaces is trying to help itself," she said. "We in rural areas try to solve problems, too - that connection has always mattered to me."

From A to B's Barbecue to PhD

Freeman's first memories in Greenville were accompanying his father on Saturday's to Joyner Library, where he pounded out the work necessary for his master's. Father and son treated themselves afterward to B's Barbecue.

Freeman earned his master's of public health in 2010 and began his career in North Carolina's Community Care program and later the state Department of Public Health, which introduced him to the specialties of bioterrorism and emergency management.

"ECU prepared me well," he said. "I walked into my first job at the state health department as a temp delivering mail, but because of what I learned at ECU, I could talk epidemiology with the people upstairs. That was my opening and my opportunity."

Mentors and peers - many of them fellow ECU alumni such as Erica Payton - encouraged him to pursue a terminal degree. It was Payton who tipped him off to a doctoral program opening at the University of Toledo.

Before Detroit, he led safety planning at Bowling Green State University. He still lives in Toledo.

"In Ohio, I get asked, 'Do you root for the team up north?' and I'm like, 'I'm Team Jesus all the time!' That's not what they mean in Ohio."

Freeman's portfolio now spans cross-border monitoring and bioterrorism, mass prophylaxis planning and emerging public health surveillance technologies. But access to health care and health equity are top issues in Detroit, and like Richardson, Freeman came for it.

"Even though I'm coming from a rural area, I see the same issues in an urban area," Freeman said. "It speaks to my calling."

An Impact Told in the Future Tense

Richardson and Freeman oversee critical pieces of Detroit's public health infrastructure - from maternal health to bioterrorism readiness, from community outreach to mass-event safety planning. During the NFL draft in the city, Freeman's team coordinated with federal and local agencies to monitor 20 square blocks using advanced technology. Richardson, meanwhile, has helped guide the department through post-pandemic recovery and new public health challenges such as measles cases.

To outsiders, the pairing of two ECU alumni in senior leadership roles 800 miles from Greenville might seem like chance. University leaders and alumni would like to differ.

ECU graduates - especially those from the Brody School of Medicine - are trained to lead through service and to be the equal of anyone. They run health departments, lead hospital service lines and direct emergency responses, shaping policy along the way.

"ECU is bigger than Greenville," Richardson said. "We are all over the country. That needs to be told."

Freeman agrees. "I still wear my ECU gear here in Detroit," he said. "ECU is who I am and it's where I am."

Their story, of two Pirates meeting again by chance and far from home, serves as a reminder that an ECU education is competitive everywhere, its alumni network is national, and its impact is told in the future tense.

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