When she was 7 years old, Florencia Polite, MD, decided to become a doctor. "I loved the idea of having a career where every day I get to feel like I am helping someone," she said. Her choice represented a departure from a family tradition—or so she thought.
Many of Polite's family members were educators. Indeed, her grandparents helped open schools for Black students in then-segregated parts of the United States. "So, education has been the lens with which I have come to medicine," said Polite, who is now Penn Medicine's chief of Academic Specialists in Obstetrics and Gynecology and vice chair of the department's clinical operations. That focus on teaching shows itself when she is training students at the Perelman School of Medicine or engaging one-on-one with her patients to help them learn about their care. Being a physician draws on her "natural gifts and talents" in this way.
In the last few years, however, Polite has leaned into a new role for her latent inner educator: vaccine advocacy, on a broad level. "It's been my evolution as a physician," she said, "continuing to educate in all these different settings." Most recently, she has trained physicians globally about a relatively new vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), which can cause serious illness in newborns and young infants, among other at-risk groups. While the vaccine does not protect most pregnant women directly, it does protect their babies. For Polite, sharing this powerful knowledge with both patients and their physicians presents a meaningful opportunity to have an impact, and to save lives across the globe as well as close to home.
