College of Science and Health alumnus Mana Kasongo-Robinson reflected on her transformative experience as a DePaul student at this year’s annual William J. Degutis Women in Science and Health lecture, which celebrates and promotes the accomplishments of women in health and STEM-adjacent disciplines.

On May 18th students, faculty, staff, and community members assembled to hear Kasongo-Robinson’s remarkable journey, from majoring in biology and American studies at DePaul to receiving an advanced journalism degree from Columbia University and eventually practicing medicine at the frontlines of emergency rural healthcare.

Kasongo-Robinson recounted insights from her childhood in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the challenges she faced as a college student in the United States, nearly withdrawing during her junior year. The care, grace, and encouragement she encountered at DePaul enabled her to push forward.

“Sometimes you have to get up and ask, ‘why am I doing this?’ Well, that would be one of my whys is that I was given a chance…I was given several chances. Those professors, those teachers, all of those people did something they didn’t have to do. They could have let me go, but they didn’t,” she stated.

She also discussed how her abiding passion for healthcare precipitated a shift from a successful journalism career in New York, where she co-founded Black Star News, a weekly investigative newspaper, to medical school. “I was finding myself always navigating my way back into medicine…everything that I did always brought me back into science,” Kasongo-Robinson shared with the group.

This realization prompted her entry into Rush Medical School and a residency in emergency medicine at one of the nation’s top training hospitals, New York University/Bellevue, in 2006. Decades later, Kasongo-Robinson finds herself a leader in her field, having been named top emergency medicine specialist in 2021, top woman in medicine in 2022, and a fellow on the American Academy of Emergency Physicians.

Her calling to support lesser-served minority residents in rural communities led her to Phoebe Worth Hospital in Sylvester, Georgia, where she currently serves as attending physician and emergency room director. Advocacy for healthcare resources is a key objective of her work, particularly amid growing population pressure and sweeping public policy and funding challenges. Her distinctive career trajectory enables her to amplify discussion around these issues, along with health equity and racial justice, as a nationally published writer. She has written for ABC News, Newsweek, Real Health Magazine, and more, including editorials about the devastating impact of COVID in under-resourced rural counties - through her own painful firsthand account.  She also shared details of her substantial medical mission work in Kenya and Haiti, just days after the severe 2010 earthquake.

Throughout her talk she repeatedly emphasized how the lessons she learned at DePaul inform her own personal legacy.

“Fundamental qualities like working hard, like caring for others, all of those things are things that I honed in here, at DePaul. That came from this place, and I want everybody to kind of remember that,” she explained.

You can watch the full lecture on the College of Science and Health YouTube page.