Tanya Wansom fully intended to pursue a career in academic medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine upon completing her fellowship in the Division of Infectious Diseases. Instead, she now helps translate research into real-world care as an independent consultant, working on projects ranging from clinical trials to policy implementation from her home base more than 8,700 miles from Baltimore.

“I definitely followed a nontraditional path,” Wansom says. “During fellowship, I won a KL-2 and was planning to bridge to junior faculty, but an opportunity came up that I couldn’t turn down. I probably am one of the only people who has returned a grant to pursue something else.”

With long-standing connections to Thailand, including family history — Wansom’s parents are Thai immigrants — and a stint there as a Fulbright Scholar before starting medical school, she was heavily recruited out of fellowship for a position working in HIV vaccine research with the Henry Jackson Foundation for Military Medicine in Bangkok.

“I’ve always loved Thailand since my Fulbright days, and wanted to continue doing work here. Then this opportunity came up to assemble cohorts for future HIV vaccine research and do a lot of community work with organizations I had worked with before,” she says.

She and her husband decided to move their young family, including their 3-month-old son, halfway around the world.

The position that drew her to Thailand was eventually eliminated by funding cuts in December 2019. Despite the disruption, Wansom credits the experience with presenting opportunities she never would have considered otherwise.

“I was deciding whether to come back to the States or figure something else out. There was so much uncertainty because of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. I ended up staying in Thailand … In many ways, losing my first real job ended up opening other doors,” she says.

As an independent consultant not affiliated with any academic institution, Wansom is free to pursue projects she finds meaningful. Her work has covered the spectrum of infectious diseases, including malaria, HIV, viral hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, substance use and harm reduction, vaccines, clinical trials and more.

Wansom has served as a locums medical officer at the United Nations headquarters for Southeast Asia in Bangkok, worked as a medical evacuation physician for International SOS, managed clinical operations for a variety of trials, including for a new antibiotic for gonorrhea, and led a study in Thailand that helped remove exclusion criteria barring people who use drugs from accessing hepatitis C treatment.

She’s proud of the impact her work has had. The gonorrhea treatment (zoliflodacin) was approved by regulatory authorities in Thailand and in the United States; the hepatitis study resulted in significant policy change that has helped thousands of people.

“It felt really full circle, because my Ph.D. in clinical investigation focused on HIV, hepatitis co-infection and drug use in Baltimore and Bangkok. So, getting to come to Thailand and really drive that work — and see our research findings shape public health policy — was very impactful,” Wansom says.

Currently, Wansom is focused on two main projects: She’s the independent global medical monitor for an ongoing malaria trial, the first of its kind comparing antimalarials among pregnant women in their first trimester with malaria; she’s also chairing a multinational ACTG protocol for people with HIV and hepatitis B coinfection to study a new drug in development for hepatitis B. She also serves as a research physician at the Thai Red Cross Infectious Diseases Research Centre — the same institution where a Fulbright first introduced her to clinical trials as a premed student almost 25 years earlier.

While the flexibility of independent contract work suits Wansom and her family just fine (she homeschools her two children, in addition to her own work); it has its challenges. The work is unpredictable, positions are frequently offered by word of mouth rather than formal job postings, setting a competitive rate for consultant work is tricky and burnout is always waiting in the wings.

“Before, I would say yes to everything. Then I got completely burned out … It was originally hard to say no, but over time I learned to focus on projects I thought were cool and aligned with where I could make the biggest impact,” Wansom says.

When asked about how the Hopkins ID fellowship prepared her for such an unconventional career path, Wansom says mentorship and the tight-knit community the program fosters were essential.

“I really valued the collaborative approach. I don’t think anyone there thinks you can do it alone. Seeing that modeled in the academic setting was very helpful for the work I do now,” she says.

Wansom credits mentors Mark Sulkowski, Chloe Thio, Dave Thomas, and the ACGME Adult Infectious Diseases Fellowship Program more broadly, for helping her gain the skills necessary to identify good research questions, design effective studies, navigate the publication process and think through problems from different angles. She’s also grateful for the breadth of clinical experience in fellowship that has informed her current work.

She’s still connected to many of her fellowship cohort, and fondly remembers rounding with the legendary John Bartlett, Shmuel Shoham, Paul Auwaerter and Robin Avery, new to the faculty at the time.

“I was a new fellow and she [Avery] was new, too. We had like 5 million consults,” Wansom quips. “We were there really late, but she was just so kind and encouraging. We got through it together, and I really appreciated her.”