Rx One Health alum: Alejandro Mena

Alejandro Mena is a veterinarian and pursuing a PhD in Public Health with a One Health focus at the Emerging Pathogens Institute from the Department of Environmental & Global Health, University of Florida.

What prompted you to pursue your career path?

I think that it started with the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. My family passed through a complicated situation at that moment - my mom was pregnant with my brother and it was very stressful for my family when one of my uncles got ill from H1N1. He didn’t pass away but we were very stressed about it. I grew up thinking “How can I manage everything to avoid this from happening again to other families and the general population?” I learned about zoonoses, and that diseases can be transmitted from animals to humans, and I was like “That sounds perfect for me - H1N1 was a zoonoses, COVID was a zoonoses. That’s the path that I want to follow in my career.”

What made you apply for Rx One Health?

When I was in my first year of veterinary medical school, one professor came with the One Health concept and I felt like everything that I wanted to do - like prevent new pandemics and new diseases that could really potentially harm other people and the population in general - everything was perfectly matching with what I was wanting. I need to work with animals to prevent diseases in humans but also involve the environment because that’s what we share. I was looking for everything in One Health and I applied to many other programs and i worked in many organizations on the One Health approach. I’d been tracking the Rx One Health course for 2 or 3 years. When I applied for a PhD program and finally got to the U.S. I felt like it would be eventually be easier to get here and I applied…and now I’m here.

What is your key takeaway from the course so far?

I think one of the main takeaways are that you definitely need to be open to know other people and what they’re doing to find a way to match them with your current work and purposes - and collaborate with them. Really be open to what other people are doing.

How can you apply what you learned here at home or in your work?

We can look for human diseases or animal diseases trying to involve other aspects of One Health to better understand how everything is behaving and how to make the biggest impact - not just focusing on one species or one area. We need to be able to communicate in the best way to the community and the general population to get everyone involved.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to an aspiring One Health learner?

Definitely be open-minded to learn from others. Have an innate curiosity to learn about everything they are able to, not only focusing on one area. We as researchers are often only thinking about our own world in the research that we’re doing, and we need to be open to understanding how other variables are intervening in our current research. Be willing to work with other people and working as a team. Always look for a way to communicate the work they’re doing to the general population - I think that is something that’s really important for being successful because you won’t have the same impact involving the One Health approach if you just have the results and publish if you don’t know how to communicate it to the general public.