An Immigrant’s Heritage Sets the Stage for a Life of Service

Christian Gloria was a certified personal trainer working one-on-one with affluent clients in Austin, Texas, when his heartstrings tugged. “I found myself on the second floor of this beautiful, expensive gym, looking literally across the train tracks wishing I could do more,” says the associate professor and deputy chair for the Department of Sociomedical Sciences. “I wanted to work with communities like my family who don’t have access to those kinds of programs and services.”

Gloria was 11 when his family emigrated from the Philippines to California, and then Texas. After earning his PhD from The University of Texas at Austin, he headed west. “I decided to do a leap of faith and move as close to Asia as possible,” says Gloria, who spent nearly a decade on the faculty at Hawaii Pacific University, where he oversaw the launch of the state’s first CEPH-accredited Bachelor of Science in Public Health (BSPH) and its first fully-online 12-month accelerated Master of Public Health (MPH) degree programs. He also started visiting his homeland, intent on giving back through public health research, training, and workforce development.

“People say that public health is a discovery degree—it never goes as planned and the job calls you,” says Gloria, who came to Columbia in 2021 and serves as both director and principal investigator for the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration’s Columbia Mailman-based Region 2 Public Health Training Center. “Some people prefer to stay in one lane. I love to run to emergencies.”

Filipino nurses are a significant workforce around the world. How has their experience during the pandemic affected your work?

Gloria: In the U.S., Filipinos make up 4 percent of the nursing workforce. But one-third of the nurses who died during COVID were Filipino. In 2023, colleagues and I started Healing Heritage, a project with other Filipino-American researchers that has evolved to include partners from Norfolk State University, Loyola University of Chicago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Harvard, and Princeton, with funding from Columbia’s Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. We’re interviewing [Filipino nurses] about their experiences during the pandemic—which was also a time of anti-Asian hate events—about how they coped with the stresses, and how religion or faith played any role in their experiences. New York City has a large Filipino community; my dream is to establish a center for Filipino community health that I’m hoping will be based at Columbia.

What are the topics you’re tackling through the Public Health Training Center?

Gloria: We assess the needs of the public health workforce, as well as develop and deliver trainings to meet these needs for our region, which includes New York, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Priority trainings lately have been in the topics of climate health, gun safety, de-escalation and conflict resolution, data science, technology and health, telehealth, trauma informed care, cultural humility and multicultural competence, health policy and advocacy, and mental health promotion and burnout prevention.

You have robust professional ties in the Philippines. How did those come about?

Gloria: In Hawaii, there’s a large Filipino-American community. Most youth there know nothing about our home country, don’t speak our native language. They inspired me to go back home and starting in 2015, to visit every school of public health I could find, with a mission to establish exchange programs for students and faculty.

How did the Philippine government’s 2017 Mental Health Act set the stage to expand your work there?

Gloria: Historically, there’s been a terrible stigma against even talking about mental health in the Philippines. My PhD was on mental health, stress, coping, and resilience. The 2017 Mental Health Act recognizes mental health as a medical issue and opens up funding for research and intervention programs. The government and universities invited me to become a Balik Scientist (or “Returning” Scientist), which is a program designed to reverse the country’s brain drain, and I became the country’s first mental health expert funded by this government program.

What was your role?

Gloria: My mission as a mental health visiting scientist was to help faculty and students from the department of psychology at Angeles University Foundation (Pampanga, Philippines) who are clinically trained, but not public health trained. They wanted to do population-level surveillance. I helped them bring their clinical training into communities and into the public health field, and I provided trainings on preparing research articles for publications to international scientific journals. The goal of the Balik Scientist Program is to bring scientists back home and incentivize them to stay and serve the country permanently. They certainly tried to do that with me, but it is not yet the right time for me.

What brought you to Columbia Mailman?

Gloria: During the interviews, I fell in love with everyone. People were so accomplished, yet humble. I was so in awe of the support system that Columbia has in place for faculty to be successful and world-renowned. One thing I love about Mailman and its students is how diverse everyone is, coming from all walks of life, all parts of the world, all kinds of experience and training—many are already leaders in their field. It’s a beautiful melting pot of brilliant people.