Graduated Harvard Medical School Class of 1976
J. Emilio Carrillo, MD was born in Cuba and attended Columbia College in New York City. He earned his MD and MPH degrees from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He trained at Massachusetts General Hospital and Cambridge Hospital.
He is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College and Clinical Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Health Services Research at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
“So as soon as I came to Harvard, I realized that I was among the very first Latinos to come to medical school at Harvard.” (06:50)
“And in 1961 before the missile crisis, there was an opening for children to get out of the country, because there was no visas for adults. So I was one of what’s called Peter Pan -- Pedro Pan -- kids -- about 16,000 young Cubans that left…with their parents staying behind.” (00:35)
”I also spent time doing community health volunteer work. There was a community service council at Columbia that got students involved in community work…I got very involved in working with the local community, working on housing issues, the squatter issues, and really learned a lot about the social determinants of health.” (04:42)
”It took a lot of daring by people like Furshpan and Kravitz and Poussaint and Eisenberg to begin to make the point that minority students had a place in medicine and a place at Harvard.” (10:00)
”And we had a saying that we passed on from year to year, which is that we don’t want to become Harvard-ized. And that terminology kind of meant that we don’t want you to just become a stereotypical Harvard academic -- we want to maintain our community roots, our community involvement.” (32:42)