AUGUSTA, Maine — The woman picked to take the reins from Dr. Nirav Shah after he left the Maine CDC has no plans to try to emulate him.
Instead, she's carving her own path: the same way she did as a Cambodian refugee who arrived in the United States as a baby.
Dr. Puthiery Va started as the Maine CDC director on August 28, 2023. Just over a month into her job, she is speaking with healthcare leaders all over the state in order to get a greater picture of the health challenges Maine faces.
Maine Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew appointed Dr. Va following a national search. Va returns to Maine having received her medical degree from the University of New England in 2012. She had never been to Maine before.
"When I saw this position open up, I wanted to come back to Maine. I always knew I had to come back somehow and serve, because I felt like the community gave me something. I need to give them back," Va said.
Before graduating she spent a year in China as a Fogarty Scholar, working in cancer epidemiology at the Shanghai Cancer Institute. Then, she worked as the Chief Medical Resident at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y., and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso.
After, Va served as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer at the U.S. CDC, leading a team that examined the impact of dietary sodium intake on health, and its connection to chronic diseases. She also was part of the response teams that tackled the Zika Virus International, and a mumps outbreak in Arkansas.
Following that, she became the Director of the Division of Public Health in Chinle, Arizona, serving the population of the Indian Health Service (IHS), Navajo Area Chinle Service Unit.
She oversaw both public health activities and clinical services, including population health, public health nursing, adolescent school health, diabetes, native medicine, health promotion and disease prevention, and clinical and community nutrition programs. She developed and implemented mobile health clinic services and data science analytics for population health management, which improved healthcare access for communities.
Va was also there during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Navajo Nation is the definition of rural. According to the Indian Health Service, it is the largest Indian reservation in the United States, comprising about 16 million acres, or about 25,000 square miles, approximately the size of the state of West Virginia. The people disperse widely across the reservation, in part due to the limited amount of grazing land, and the limited availability of water.
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She said these challenges have given her a good perspective on health equity.
"How do you isolate safely when you have three generations in a home? How do you take these infection control precautions when you don't have running water or electricity? How do you get good access to even schools, to work and learn when access to the Internet is difficult," Va said. "These are the questions I want to make sure that we're addressing. And a lot of times I look at it as a way of, 'Okay, if these are the challenges how do we bring those services to the people?' Sometimes, yes, it is geographical access issues."
It is a concept Va calls, "where the pavement meets the dirt road."
"Once you ask that question, 'why?' then, 'why not?' Why can't we bring those things? Why isn't there a health care facility right there?" Va said. "How do we make it just easier for people to find help all the time? And I feel like that's probably one of the challenges right now: how do we make that system much easier to navigate?"
Before all of this success, Va was a refugee from Cambodia, born in a refugee camp in Thailand.
"When people ask me, 'Where was I born? Where did it come from?' I guess I'm a refugee. Like, literally a refugee. I was born in a refugee camp," Va said.
Her mother, father, and older sister left Cambodia as the country fell into chaos and turmoil after the communist party -- the Khmer Rouge -- fell.
”They had to decide, okay, what do we do now? What future do we have here in its current state right now? And we have a daughter and a baby on the way, which was me," Va said.
From there her family became asylum seekers – arriving in Elton, Louisiana. They moved to the inner city of Rochester, New York when she was five years old. She said growing up in an urban area helped her understand the disparities in health and healthcare.
"You start to see, why is it so challenging? Why is it so difficult to live in a community, to be healthy?“
She said learning how to live in the U.S. was its own challenge.
"And when you're in college, what do you do? What if you need help? What does an advisor do? It was all these basic things that, you know, I did not grow up knowing," Va said.
She now takes all of this life experience into her role as the state's leading public health professional.
The Mills administration believes she will be a great fit.
"Dr. Va’s depth and breadth of experience position her well to assume the helm of the Maine CDC and strengthen our public health infrastructure," Governor Janet Mills said in a statement.
“Dr. Va has been a front-line leader — as well as a clinician and epidemiologist — during a global health emergency following a distinguished role as a disease investigator at the U.S. CDC,” Commissioner Lambrew, said. “These experiences, alongside managing public health from the Bronx to the Navajo Nation after beginning her medical career here in Maine, gives Dr. Va a deep keel for navigating Maine’s public health challenges.”