Spotlight

A self-proclaimed perpetual MIT nerd, Dr. Abrams claims that his mediocrity in chemical engineering and a collapse in oil prices led him to switch to a career in medicine. That was the first of many events to shape his career path. Eventually, he melded engineering with medicine and entered the field of international medicine.

Preferring to work with babies, Dr. Abrams chose well before graduating medical school to specialize in neonatology. During a fellowship interview at Baylor College of Medicine, he met scientists working on new bone density equipment that they wanted to adapt for babies to study calcium nutrition—a combination of engineering and medicine. So after his Baylor fellowship in neonatal-perinatal medicine, he completed two more fellowships, in nutrition and use of stable isotopes to assess mineral status, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Back at Baylor in 1991, Dr. Abrams began to study calcium needs in adolescents. That had nothing to do with neonatology, but NIH research grants were more readily available to study calcium intake and absorption in adolescents, and he was interested in the physiology by which bone is formed throughout childhood.

Then in 1993, 10 years after graduating medical school, he became involved in U.S. public health policy and began research using stable isotopes of iron and zinc. Soon, colleagues at Johns Hopkins and UC-Davis recruited Dr. Abrams to collaborate on nutrient fortification studies in Peru. Thus, he began his journey in international health.

“ I got the travel bug, joined up with space traveler Dr. David Hilmers, and for most of the last 4 years have crossed the globe doing research studies in nutrition,” said Dr. Abrams. “We’ve had many scientists from other countries train with us in Houston. We’re currently working in over a dozen countries and the list keeps expanding. I continue to do the calcium research in teens in the U.S., but I enjoy the international work quite a bit. Philosophically, we recognize that it is impossible for any one group of Americans or any one approach to completely change the nutritional status or infant care in a country. But by working closely with a few physicians and scientists in developing countries, we hope to develop a model for such interactions that can be applied more widely.”