There is Selling Sunsets, the reality TV series focused on elite Los Angeles real estate, and then there is “selling Atlanta,” what Eddie Lai (SPH‘19) says sums up the essence of his role at the Metro Atlanta Chamber, a private, non-profit chamber of commerce serving the 29-county Atlanta metropolitan statistical area. As senior manager of life sciences and digital health, Lai’s job is to support and grow these industries across the region, which recently surpassed Washington D.C. and Philadelphia to become the sixth most populous in the country. To make his pitch, Lai leans on his public health training from the School of Public Health.

Early in his undergraduate education in the health sciences at Drexel University, it occurred to Lai that if he intended to pursue a clinical profession, he should understand the business side of healthcare, “because [the two] are so intertwined in our country,” he says. After adding a minor in health services administration, however, Lai found that the field better suited his interests and personality than the direct patient care he observed while volunteering and interning for his application to physician assistant school. During his senior year, Lai took several courses on public health that solidified his shifting career path and upon graduating, he decided to spend a year serving in AmeriCorps while applying to Master of Public Health programs.

“I always saw health as a really tangible way to help people, and I saw public health as a larger way to be able to impact higher population levels and still use the skills and interests that I had,” says Lai, who was accepted to SPH in 2017. “I chose BU specifically, even though I got into a number of other great programs across the country, because number one, it’s in Boston. Boston is such a major, impactful healthcare, public health, [and] biotechnology hub and it was a way for me to expand my horizons outside of the New Jersey/Philadelphia [area] where I mostly grew up.”

With an MPH and certificates in healthcare management and pharmaceutical development, delivery, and access from SPH in hand, Lai moved to Atlanta to complete a prestigious, two-year administrative fellowship at Emory Healthcare, Georgia’s largest healthcare system comprising 11 hospitals and more than 250 outpatient clinics. In a true trial by fire, Lai’s time at Emory coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. He emerged a seasoned healthcare leader after spearheading a system- and university-wide staffing and volunteer plan for Emory’s outpatient Vaccine Clinic—which administered more than 70,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in the first three weeks of operation—and leading a team of more than 30 employees to coordinate with more than 1,000 different vendors and donors to procure PPE (personal protective equipment) for frontline staff.

It was also while at Emory that Lai co-founded the Association of Asian Healthcare Leaders to nurture the careers of other Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) professionals in the healthcare industry. He harnessed what he learned from these experiences when he moved into his current position at the Metro Atlanta Chamber in early 2022. Coming up on nearly three years at the Chamber, Lai spoke with SPH about his work at the nexus of business and public health.

You have a unique role for someone with an MPH, but before you elaborate on what your responsibilities entail as senior manager of life sciences and digital health at the Metro Atlanta Chamber, could you describe what it is that the Chamber does?

The Chamber acts to support and grow business. We do that in a number of different ways. In fact, Atlanta is a leading corporate market, home to 17 Fortune 500 company headquarters. We also have a sports council that helps attract sports events like the upcoming World Cup or the Super Bowl or the college football playoff national championship.

I am on our economic development team, and we […] try to attract companies to develop a presence in our Metro Atlanta area. That could mean corporate relocation. For example, Delta Airlines used to be in Louisiana and came to Atlanta, UPS used to be in Connecticut and came to Atlanta. I am on our ecosystem expansion team, [and] we focus on major industries that Atlanta has continued to be strong in and wants to grow into, so for myself, that’s life sciences and digital health. That covers all areas of pharma, biomanufacturing, med tech, biotech, and on the digital health side, it’s your traditional health IT, medical devices, and anything in that realm, but also under that falls categories like age tech, which is technology business around aging—that’s a $2 trillion up-and-coming market.

Could you describe a typical day or a typical week in your role?

We have team meetings with our colleagues in economic development, where we go over all the projects that are in motion. That is one of the cool things I get to do—we need to keep a lot of these projects that we work on pretty secret, so I get to make code names for different projects. We’ll say, okay, ‘Company Moonshot’ is a life sciences company whose headquarters is in Wisconsin, but they are thinking about making Atlanta expansion. Here’s what they’re looking for: they’re looking at what land they can build it on or what resources they can get in regards to talent coming out of schools like Georgia Tech or Emory. Their people want to know what places to live. If they’re relocating from Wisconsin, they want to know how accessible the sports arenas are for entertainment and other things like that.

It’s a lot of putting yourself out there, I would say. Sometimes people see our job as selling Atlanta if you will. To do that, we need to know what’s going on in the region. One thing I do bimonthly is write a newsletter of all the great things going on in the region in terms of events and announcements, whether that’s startups or companies establishing here or academic institutions coming up with cool research. We’re connectors. [For me,] that stems from a lot of the work I did when I founded the Association of Asian Healthcare Leaders back when I was at Emory.

Could you share more about the Association of Asian Healthcare Leaders, the organization’s mission and activities, and how you are involved?

The Association of Asian Healthcare Leaders, or AAHL, stemmed from a little bit of my experience at BU, where one of the reasons I ended up getting an MPH and believing I could do it successfully, is that I came across someone who looked like me and had the same cultural heritage. He had an MPH, he was doing consulting, and was successful.

[Someone] reached out to me when I was at Emory, and said, I want to talk to you, but also, you’re Asian and there’s not many of us in in this field, specifically, healthcare management. We noted that in a lot of these virtual events or panels where we hear people speak about their experiences—maybe like one every three times—there’ll be a person of AAPI descent. Why don’t we do our own event with Asian people to help show that there’s multiple of us doing different things with different backgrounds, working in different parts of the country and in different roles. We held [an event] on administrative fellowships, which are competitive programs after graduate schools for training in hospitals. We had 300 registrants. We founded the Association of Asian Healthcare Leaders in May of 2020, which happens to be AAPI Heritage Month. Fast forward to now, we’ve grown it to over 2,200 members on our LinkedIn group across the world. We’ve had thousands of people attend our events, and it’s been a really great way for me to meet people all across the country.

I [also] started a podcast called Asian Faces, Healthcare Places. I meet all of these really cool people across the world. I was learning about their stories, having Zoom Meetings or meeting in person. And I said, we can make a podcast out of this, let’s tell the stories. [The podcast tells] these stories to inspire people, so that maybe the undergrad who was pre-PA and doesn’t quite know what to do next, can say there’s someone that looks like me that took this other path that I may be interested in.

Could you talk about how your own heritage has impacted your career path and the decisions you have made?

My parents immigrated from China, and I was born in Missouri. I think part of my experience in cultural heritage has been straddling that line, by being a child of immigrants but being an American and not always recognized. Part of that—and maybe it’s part of the Asian heritage—is that you have to respect your elders, and you don’t speak up. I grew up pretty shy. Through my career journey professionally and even personally, I’ve learned that both tactically and tactfully, it’s important to put yourself out there. [For example,] I came into BU and I ended up becoming the president for a semester of the Student Senate.

I would say that almost all of my jobs came from doing some intentional outreach. The adage is the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Certainly when you’re in your early career, people like to see eagerness, excitement, and energy, but also professionalism and competence. The more you work and the more success you can show, it kind of speaks for itself, but you also have to advocate for yourself. That’s something that I didn’t grow up necessarily knowing to do. I thought, put my head down and do the work, which is definitely a good thing to do, but you also want to—again, humbly—share this is what I’m working on, this is what I’m interested in. Because people do want to help, but they don’t know how to help if you’re not asking for help. That is something I had to reconcile.

Do you have any advice for current MPH students who have interests similar to your own?

This is what I wish I did better earlier: My second year, as I [became] interested in health tech, I was looking all over the country for different events I could volunteer for—in Chicago, Orlando. Then, I thought, wait a minute, I’m in Boston. Boston is like the HQ of all this stuff, so I started crashing Harvard events, MIT events, registering for those because that’s right in my backyard and I would meet these CEOs and other cool students. There are so many people you could just use LinkedIn to reach out to or just take a walk in Kendall Square, which is not too far away, and sit in a cafe and meet someone. Recognize that you’re in one of the greatest healthcare cities in our country and take advantage of that.