Pamela Collins: Wise & Courageous

Welcome to The Wise & Courageous Podcast, where we host conversations with women leaders about how they are seeking and engaging wisdom and courage in their leadership and work in this unique season.

“In any situation where you are uncertain about how to proceed: where you are new, where you have to have the courage to learn in public, to acknowledge publicly that yes, you are learning. And yes, learning is a process. And yes, you won’t know all the answers. And yes, you will make mistakes. That in itself is a kind of wisdom that one learns both from experience but also from listening to other leaders.” — Pamela Collins

Pamela Collins, Chair of the Department of Mental Health the John Hopkins School of Public Health joins Nancy Pedulla on The Wise & Courageous Podcast for a conversation about pursuing a path to do what you what matters most to you, even when the way is unclear.

Pamela shares her journey toward her passion of engaging mental health challenges as they impact those who are most vulnerable in the U.S. and in the world. Pamela describes her work of gathering and hosting an array of people from world leaders to direct service providers to work on solutions. We explore how wisdom and courage involve the vulnerable work developing the right community of people and leading in humility. We discuss how prayer shapes her reflection and her decision making as a leader. Listen for the way she describes investing in a new generation of advocates in the process of mentoring others.

For the purposes of this podcast, we are defining leadership as the stewardship of people, culture and purpose, guiding and serving others toward a shared vision or outcomes.

Welcome to the conversation!

— Nancy Pedulla

You can listen on iTunes or at The Women Scholars & Professionals Podcast. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

Listen on your favorite podcast platform, or click through to listen to our interview with Pamela on:

• iTunes

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Further resources for this interview:

• Pamela’s page at Johns Hopkins

• Pamela’s LinkedIn page

Pamela Collins, MD, MPH, is a Bloomberg Centennial Professor, chair of the Department of Mental Health and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Mental Health. She works at the intersections of global mental health, HIV care, and urban mental health for adolescents and adults. Her current projects integrate psychosocial interventions into routine HIV care for adolescents living with HIV and into community-based care with faith-based providers in sub-Saharan Africa, and she explores urban responses to youth mental health needs in the U.S. Through leadership at the National Institute of Mental Health, she launched research initiatives to expand access to evidence-based mental health interventions in low- and middle-income countries and among populations experiencing disparities in the US. Prior to her current position, while professor of Psychiatry and Global Health at the University of Washington, she oversaw the implementation of HIV and mental health integration activities in Ukraine, sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the Caribbean as executive director of I-TECH. Dr. Collins is a scientific advisor to PEPFAR, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program, has served on the National Advisory Mental Health Council, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. She is a co-director of the Johns Hopkins-Emory University Center for HIV and Mental Health Stigma Elimination Strategies (CHIMES). She has a joint appointment at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.