Robert Peck

I am a Senior Research Scientist at the Mwanza Intervention Trials Unit (MITU). As a physician-scientist, my work is focused on the prevention and treatment of chronic diseases in low-income countries including hypertension and cardiovascular disease (CVD). After completing my combined medicine-pediatrics residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital, I was recruited as a Global Health Fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) to work full-time in Mwanza, Tanzania at the newly established Weill Bugando School of Medicine at Bugando Hospital. I was one of only 5 physicians in the Departments of Medicine and Pediatrics. My early years of working full-time on the wards of Bugando taught me about the rapidly rising epidemic of hypertension-related disease in East Africa. Inspired by this experience, I decided to pursue a career focused on understanding the causes and consequences of hypertension in Africa across the lifespan so as to develop and test novel, low-cost clinical and health systems interventions to prevent and treat hypertension-related disease.

I have been living and working in Tanzania since 2007. In addition to my work as a physician and medical educator with Weill Bugando School of Medicine, I also developed partnerships with both the Mwanza Interventions Trial Unit (MITU) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). These partnerships provide a unique environment to study chronic diseases in the context of Africa while also combating healthcare disparities in partnership with the Tanzanian Ministry of Health. My current research projects include: a clinical trial of a social worker intervention to improve post-hospitalization outcomes for adults with chronic diseases, a longitudinal study of hypertension and sleep disorders in Tanzanian adults with and without HIV, and a longitudinal study of cardiovascular risk factors in Tanzanian adolescents. An additional major area of focus is training and mentoring students interested in global health careers including undergraduate students from Cornell University, graduate students from Weill Cornell Graduate School and Weill Bugando in Tanzania, and medical students from Weill Cornell in New York and Qatar.