ONSITE PROGRAM - American Academy of Nursing

16
Maria Teresa Cerqueira, PhD, MS
Sylvain Aldighieri, MD
MARIA TERESA CERqUEIRA, PHD, MS
An artist is skilled at seeing things not as they are, but as they could be. Combine the artist’s eye
with international experience and you have someone with limitless imagination of what “could be”
for health and wellness across the globe. You have, in fact, Dr. Maria Teresa Cerqueira, the Chief
of the U.S.-Mexico Border Office of the Pan American Health Organization, division of the World
Health Organization in El Paso, Tx. She is also the Project Director for their Healthy Kids, Healthy
Communities initiative. In this role, Maria Teresa envisions the potential in community leaders and
a better quality of life for residents of neglected neighborhoods.
Maria Teresa was born an artist, and she can trace how creativity runs in her family. One
great uncle was an illiterate fisherman in Portugal who made up poems. His children wrote and
published them. Maria Teresa enjoys painting, especially fruits and vegetables or things garden
inspired. She has two sons, one also artistic, and another is a physician. She is also a proud firsttime
grandmother to her ‘nieto,’ Guillermo.
In high school, she decided to volunteer as a candy striper in a local hospital. While there, she
was asked to design educational pamphlets and became interested in nutrition. She followed
a traditional public health track but didn’t like clinical work. She went to Mexico to study the
relationships between diet, exercise and health under a National Institutes for Health (NIH)
grant. Her focus population was the Tarahumara and also Raramuri. She stayed for several years
working on different projects and then applied for a doctorate program at Cornell University to
expand her skills. She took courses in public policy, government, organizational behavior and
international labor, whatever interested her. For her dissertation, she worked with local community
health workers and evaluated the federal Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program
(EFNEP) and worked with the Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC). The WIC program
didn’t have community health workers but FNEP did and realized WIC wasn’t connected to EFNEP.
In her training she tried to connect them. Maria Teresa took community field workers to meet the
people in WIC, encouraging a more holistic approach to their health services.
Little by little she saw evidence for having policy at the national and local level to mobilize
resources and people.
One thing is very clear for Dr. Maria Teresa Cerqueira. You need to build a partnership and
trust at the community level and also with policy makers. It’s not an either/or. Policy makers
respond to people.
SYLvAIN ALDIGHIERI, MD
Sylvain Aldighieri is a French National, he earned an MD from the University of Marseille,
he is qualified in Tropical Medicine from the University of Paris and has followed postgraduate
studies in Epidemiology and Tropical Microbiology from the Institut Pasteur Paris. During the last
20 years he has been posted in various locations in Africa and the Americas as a Medical Officer
for the French Government and for PAHO / WHO. Dr. Aldighieri is currently the coordinator
of the International Health Regulations, Alert and Response and Epidemic Diseases Unit with
PAHO/WHO.