Kammerle Schneider.
Kammerle Schneider wanted to work at PATH while as an undergrad at the University of Washington. That happened in 2011 when she became the Seattle-based global health organization’s policy officer. She’s since held a variety of roles, including in PATH’s noted malaria eradication programs (PATH developed the world’s first Malaria vaccine, which is now being rolled out to more than 750,000 children in Africa).
For the past three years she’s served as the nonprofit’s chief global health programs officer, overseeing a dizzying array of programs focused on improving the health of people in more than 70 countries across the globe, including the United States.
PATH’s intense focus on women’s health includes developing services and products such as technologies to prevent deadly complications in labor and delivery; a variety of easy-to-use affordable birth control methods; and the rollout of primary care networks aimed at women and children.
What did PATH learn from Covid? I think some of the tremendous lessons are the power of science and technology, how quickly we can drive science and innovation and get a vaccine delivered around the world. As well, we saw a lot of mistrust in public health, and I think sometimes we can be a bit of a naïve community in feeling like what we do is inherently self-explanatory, or that foreign aid is inherently seen as something good or driving impact. We underestimate just how much we need to be communicating how safe vaccines are.
How frustrating is that? Definitely frustrating. Science is more politicized than it ever has been. But it’s not an added burden, an inconvenience or an extra step. It’s part of the translation we as public health experts need to be doing.
How difficult are the Trump administration’s funding cuts and the current atmosphere in the country? 2025 has been enormously challenging in our sector for everybody, which is obviously an understatement, and it caught all of us by surprise. How do we build more sustainable infrastructure and systems in partnerships with countries? But there's nothing that replaces the U.S. government's investment in global health. There's just no donor that has the impact. It was a real lesson for us. Foreign aid is one of the biggest, most fantastic success stories. As Americans, we've saved multiple generations of (kids younger than 5) that would have never made it to adulthood.
Is the thinking inside of PATH that this is just a blip? Whether it is or not, what does the next five years look like, and how are we thinking about mitigating the impact as well as building more sustainable systems? Regardless of what happens with this administration or the next, how do we put ourselves in a place where we're not as vulnerable and fragile as a global health ecosystem going forward?
As head of global health, what are your priorities right now? We’re in a unique moment where we need to find how to deliver interventions with greater efficiency. Let me give you an example of women’s health. Women show up to a facility when they're pregnant, and we have very siloed programs. Could we, at that touch point, give them a bed net, check them for HIV, for tuberculosis, syphilis? Could we give them a maternal immunization vaccine? Can we start bundling care in different ways at different touch points that already exist?
Is there an area of women’s health that you are particularly focused on? Women's health and adolescent girl health has been something that has been completely under researched and has had not had the focus that it deserves. We don't have a lot of data from certain pregnant populations or females or adolescents. We don't look at what the barriers to care are in data collection. Life course interventions focused on women are very different.
Where will PATH be in five or 10 years? How do we deliver health in different ways, looking at AI, digital health, new vaccines, diagnostics and medical devices in the pipeline? How are we meeting countries where they’re at? For me personally, women’s health is an area in which we have the ability to make tremendous progress in the next five to 10 years, everything from basic contraceptive care to anemia: A third of the women across the world are anemic. Basic health care is the foundational piece of it, and if we don’t have that fundamental building block of good, quality health care, the rest is lost.
