By Jill Pease
It was late afternoon on Jan. 12, 2010, and Michael Mathelier, a high school senior in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, had just returned home from school. As he lounged in his room and contemplated starting homework, the house began to violently shake. After 30 seconds that felt like an eternity, Mathelier stumbled out onto the street.
The community he loved was covered in rubble and dust. And everywhere he looked he saw suffering.
“People were screaming, people were bleeding, people were dying, and I was standing there and couldn’t really do much about it,” Mathelier said. “It was almost like a switch went on at that moment. I made a promise to myself that I would never feel this helpless again.”
The massive earthquake set Mathelier, who had planned to join the family bakery and restaurant business, on an entirely new path. Now a University of Florida student, Mathelier graduates this spring with a Doctor of Medicine from the UF College of Medicine and a Master of Public Health from the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions.
His many contributions to local and global communities throughout his five years at UF have earned him the prestigious U.S. Public Health Service Excellence in Public Health Award, a national recognition presented to a select number of medical students dedicated to public health. Mathelier is also the recipient of this year’s UF M.P.H. Public Health Practice Concentration Exemplary Student Award.
“For Michael, public health service is not a ‘nice to have,’ it is a ‘need to have,’” said Shelley Wells Collins, M.D., FAAP, the UF College of Medicine’s senior associate dean for educational affairs and a professor and associate chair of pediatrics. “Whether it was responding to the pandemic locally by testing patients or administering vaccines, or motoring medications to remote villages in Ghana, for Michael, the call to service is rooted in his very being. He cannot help but respond to the call.”
After high school, Mathelier completed undergraduate work in Florida, explored his interests in numerous creative fields, including photography, videography and dance choreography, and worked as a high school teacher and as a scribe in a hospital emergency room for three years. All these experiences helped lead him to medical school, which he began in 2020.
Mathelier really felt the pull to serve the community during his first volunteer experience with the College of Medicine’s Equal Access Clinic Network, a group of student-run clinics providing free health care services to patients who are uninsured throughout Alachua County. That summer evening in 2021, Mathelier assisted a community member with obtaining a prescription for blood pressure medication.
“I remember that encounter vividly because as we finished talking the person said, ‘Thank you’ and shook my hand,” Mathelier said. “That small act meant so much to me because I sometimes feel that with AI and technology we have moved away from the touch of medicine, being able to physically touch your patient. That first experience got it all going for me. I went from being terrified of volunteering at the Equal Access Clinic to volunteering every single week.”
Mathelier has since provided more than 500 hours of service to the clinic, and has led 12 health fairs throughout the region as health fair coordinator.
Recognizing that public health interventions can provide numerous downstream health impacts for patients, Mathelier, an aspiring emergency medicine physician, decided to pursue a combined M.D./M.P.H. degree.
“I wanted to spend more time learning about public health interventions and preventive medicine so I can add these different tools to my toolbox to be a holistic provider and offer the best possible care for my patients,” Mathelier said. “I want to be the E.R. doc who is connected to the community and the different community resources for patients as well as knowledgeable of creative ways to help my patients. The M.P.H. has definitely contributed to that.”
UF’s M.P.H. program has also offered Mathelier an opportunity to explore his interests in global health. He conducted his M.P.H. internship in Granizal, Colombia, an isolated community near Medellín where steep mountainous terrain and lack of paved roads makes health care access extremely challenging. Mathelier spent summer 2024 in Granizal and returned this spring to continue working on an assessment and evaluation protocol to understand the effectiveness of a telemedicine service for meeting the health care needs of Granizal community members.
Mathelier’s M.P.H. capstone project took him to Ghana to participate in MotoMeds, a pediatric call center and medication delivery service founded by UF faculty member Eric Nelson, M.D., Ph.D., that helps prevent medical issues from becoming emergencies during nighttime hours. Under the supervision of Torben Becker, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of emergency medicine, Mathelier conducted quality assessments of MotoMeds’ cases in Accra, the nation’s capital, and later spent two months helping to train EMTs during the program’s expansion to Tamale in northern Ghana. His capstone research is a systematic review of the causes of deaths among children 5 and under in sub-Saharan Africa.
“In a lot of ways, Michael has created his own academic path — identifying ways to marry public health and medicine,” said Julia Varnes, Ph.D., M.P.H., a clinical associate professor and director of the Master of Public Health program in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions. “He truly understands the important role that public health has in prevention and intervention.”
After graduation, Mathelier will bring rich life and educational experiences to a UF Health residency in emergency medicine, followed by a fellowship in critical care. He also still plans to be involved in global health initiatives and will continue his commitment to public health efforts.
“Being in the community has almost been something I need for my own mental health,” he said. “It is an honor for me to help make sure people have access to the health care they need.”