Bonderman Travel Fellowship

Michael Sanchez

Photo of Mike Sanchez

Public Health: Health Services

Graduate

2005 Fellows

Travel Locations: India, China, Australia, Ethiopia, Brazil

Sanchez wants to explore values and human aspirations that overcome daily struggles at a basic survival level. His itinerary is tentative, but he will set out with Australia, India, China, Ethiopia and Brazil as his likely destinations. Michael describes his focus as to “rejuvenate the art of living.”

Alumni Reflections

How did the Bonderman impact your life?

“The Bonderman Fellowship helped me realize that many of the public health/healthcare problems are due to the inability to translate what works in research and generalize solutions to real-world settings. Before the Bonderman, I was determined to get a PhD to become an expert – know more and more about less and less. And instead, I decided to focus my strengths in real-world applied, translational research to be more of a bridge between the research and practice worlds within large organizations. This is something I learned while traveling – bridging two cultures, two complete strangers, to bond over a common goal or value.”

What are you doing now?

“I’m a Program Manager at Google solving the problems of tomorrow in Health AI. I’ve had several career transitions, always learned something new and sometimes re-invented myself, even if sometimes that meant taking a demotion to get to where I wanted to go. I’ve been fortunate to serve as a Program Officer aka science diplomat at NIH to closing health equity gaps in cancer at Kaiser Permanent (a lifelong dream of mine). What keeps me focused, is thinking about where can I have the biggest impact and when there, helping teams answer 3 simple questions: what works, for whom, and under what conditions?” Photo of Mike Sanchez on Bonderman

Mike Sanchez during his Bonderman