Change Agents

BY JESSICA CANLAS

Berberich admits that her [UIC] education revealed a unique world of possibility for PharmDs, both clinical and nonclinical. Mother knows best.

Christina Berberich, PHARMD ’12, MPH ’12, has made it her job to care for mothers.

Though her title—head of regulatory and policy affairs—may not sound particularly nurturing or parent-focused, the heart of her role undoubtedly is.

Berberich is part of the leadership team for Bobbie™ , the only female-founded and mom-led organic infant formula company in the United States. As a seasoned healthcare professional with a background in dietetics, pharmacy, and public health, she had witnessed a sorely widening gap in the infant formula industry that was not serving mothers as well as it could.

“To me, [this is] about so much more than a job,” she says. “It’s about really giving parents different options. The formulas out there . . . are great products. But at the same time, these are the same products that have been on the market for generations. Having a brand that connects with parents in a real sort of way—that’s what was really missing in this space.”

Optimal nutrition for humans, both big and small, is not new in Berberich’s professional wheelhouse. A Mankato, Minnesota, native, Berberich earned her BSc in dietetics from St. Catherine’s University in St. Paul. The program offered her a convergence of interests—cooking, nutrition, and science. Berberich admits she wasn’t sure what career might emerge from her pursuit, but when she began working with mothers and children at a WIC clinic in Chicago, her path came into view.

“I realized that I love working with patients,” she recalls. “I wanted to expand what I was doing in healthcare. That’s why I started looking down other avenues.”

Berberich’s search led her to the UIC College of Pharmacy. With “an open mind to nontraditional careers,” Berberich admits that her education revealed a unique world of possibility for PharmDs, both clinical and nonclinical. While there, for example, she did clerkships at both the Food and Drug Administration and the health and wellness advertising firm AbelsonTaylor.

“One of the things I really enjoyed about my time at UIC was being exposed to a lot of different parts of pharmacy. I think that’s such a valuable thing for students—just even knowing something exists.”

After two years in pharmacy school, Berberich decided she needed to continue her exploration. Fueled by the drive for a big-picture investigation into the industry’s understanding and solving larger-reaching health problems, she concurrently pursued her MPH, also at UIC.

“There’s an interesting thing that happens in pharmacy school,” she explains. “It’s almost like you develop a superpower to be able to do all of this stuff. You get in this headspace where you’re driving to be the best that you can, and I felt that I needed to do something more, something bigger.”

Berberich recalls enjoying the juxtaposition of science and data during the day and debating ethical publichealth policy in the evening.

“It made so many things in pharmacy school matter. Understanding how we can impact health at a higher level is really empowering.”

Eventually, she arrived at a eureka moment with a preceptor who’d authored a book on drug and food interaction that helped further focus her career and pushed her to delve deeper into the impact that drugs and nutrition can have on patients.

Christina Berberich, PHARMD ’12, MPH ’12

Near graduation, Berberich connected with the VP of regulatory affairs for Abbott Nutrition, also a UIC Pharmacy alumnus. With her background, she smoothly transitioned into a role as a senior regulatory affairs specialist at Abbott, working with infant formula, medical foods, and dietary supplements.

In 2015, Berberich relocated to San Francisco and moved into a medical science liaison post in Abbott’s R&D group. She realized that she enjoyed working in compliance and “helping the business be better,” so, two years later, she took the opportunity to join Olly, a dietary supplement and nutrition startup, as a regulatory scientist.

“It was an amazing experience working for a startup,” she says. “I was able to build the regulatory program for Olly. It felt almost like being back in school again; I was learning so much.”

Three years later, Berberich was approached by Bobbie, yet another startup. She had been interested in returning to infant formula for some time, but that world is a small one, composed of, before Bobbie, only four other companies in the United States. Another piece to consider was the FDA recall Bobbie was hit with after its initial 2019 launch (see fortune.com /2021/01/04/disrupt-infant-formula-Bobbie-fda -recall/). So it was a risk. But Berberich discovered that Bobbie was different from other infant formula companies. “When I met with [the cofounders], we just started talking about the issues of breastfeeding and formula feeding and what it takes to be a mom, especially when you’re trying to work, advance your career, and make a difference in the world. It’s a lot to deal with.”

Berberich, now herself a mom, connected deeply with the company’s vision of not only putting out a quality product but also eradicating the stigma against formula-feeding moms. She had the unique experience at WIC of witnessing the struggles mothers face when determining how best to feed their infants. On the other side of the coin, she was thoroughly acquainted with the complexities of infant formula manufacturing and bringing that product to market.

According to Berberich, since Bobbie’s relaunch in January, the business has expanded quickly, and the company has received positive feedback.

“I imagined that this would be a lot of work but superrewarding.”

“I was totally right.”

Watch Christina Berberich tell her family’s own story of feeding their newborn son at hiBobbie.com.

Small Acts of Caring

When Berberich isn’t helping things run smoothly at Bobbie or spending time with her family, she volunteers as commissioner and chair of the County of Santa Cruz Integrated Community Health Centers Commission. The commission oversees several Federally Qualified Health Centers, which aim to meet the needs of underserved areas. In Santa Cruz County, which boasts a sizeable homeless population, this proves to be a big job.

“We are advocates for the homeless in the sense of their healthcare,” Berberich says. “Unsheltered people who go to the clinic likely have a lot of other things going on, so we try to do anything we can to provide wraparound care—mental health, substance abuse, routine vaccinations. If you don’t treat somebody and actually try to make them healthy, they’ll end up in the ER.”

One of Berberich’s strategies with the commission is overcoming barriers that patients may encounter when visiting a clinic by meeting them directly in their own environments, such as tent communities. Although she acknowledges that caring for the homeless is a complex issue, Berberich believes that helping others is a simple task. She recalls an experience from working in a WIC clinic with a mother and her three young children.

“She’s talking to me, holding her baby, and her two-year-old son is all over her, poking at the baby. She tells me that this happens a lot and that she’s worried that he might need some help. I could see where she was coming from. I found a referral for her to have him evaluated.” Three months later, she again saw the mother, who expressed her gratitude and explained that her son did have an issue but had since begun therapy, and their family situation had improved.

“You don’t have to move mountains for people. Something so simple as providing a tiny piece of advice, a supportive message, can make a difference in somebody’s life. It can happen anywhere, and it can be a huge opportunity.”

my own

Dr. Kathy Pham

Five years ago, Kathy Pham, PharmD, RES ’04, took a leap of faith.

Kathy Pham, PharmD, RES ’04

At that time, she had been working as a clinical pharmacist in a specialty that she loved for more than a decade and decided to transition from practice to policy.

“Someone saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself,” she explains.

Pham, who hails from the Washington, D.C. area, had spent three years in what could be called the longest job interview of her life.

At UIC, I felt like a decision maker. I had the ability to spread my wings, to figure out what I knew and didn’t know on

An active volunteer, Pham had been involved in a number of professional organizations on both local and national levels, including the Washington Metropolitan Society of Health-System Pharmacists, the Pediatric Pharmacy Association, and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. In 2014, she was appointed to the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee as an expert in pediatric pharmacy.

“I was one of only a few pharmacy voices on the committee,” Pham recalls. “This was like a seat at the big kids’ table, a real policy-facing opportunity.”

For the next three years, she sat next to the director of public healthcare programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts, learning and interacting on the committee. At just about the time of her renewal, this individual approached Pham about an opportunity to join the expanding team at Pew’s Drug Safety Project—an endeavor focused on ensuring trustworthy manufacturing and distribution systems, particularly in the area of pharmaceutical compounding.

At first, she was hesitant about leaving clinical practice earlier than she’d expected.

“A lot of colleagues talked me into making this jump,” she says. “All of them were saying that I was made for this, but I hadn’t seen what everyone else around me saw—my ability to think big picture and communicate in a broader-facing way.”

One thing Pham had known about herself was that she’d always wanted to pursue a career in healthcare, which was a path her Vietnamese immigrant parents had encouraged. A preference for chemistry over biology led her to pharmacy school at Rutgers Univeristy, where she earned her PharmD with high honors and Pham chose UIC for her residency because it gave her the opportunity to try out both—and because “if you learn by doing, you go to UIC.”

“At UIC, I felt like a decision maker. I had the ability to spread my wings, to figure out what I knew and didn’t know on my own.”

Pham eventually chose pediatrics because she noticed that fewer of her fellow clinicians in training were comfortable in pediatric pharmacy.

“It felt like I was serving more of a need.”

After residency, Pham went on to hone her practice and was working at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., as a NICU clinical pharmacy specialist and director of pharmacy residency programs when the opportunity at Pew presented itself.

Barely one year after joining Pew as senior officer of the Drug Safety Project, Pham came across the opportunity to, as she says, “speak in [her] natural voice again.”

“ACCP gave me the opportunity to represent my peers.”

Today, she does just that as director of policy and professional affairs at the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, where she advocates for a healthcare system with what she calls a “quadruple aim”: improving population health, enhancing the patient experience, reducing costs, and improving the work life of healthcare providers.

Pham says her desire to make a broader impact, which prompted her to make the move to full-time advocacy work, developed organically on her professional journey.

“The advice I would give to pharmacy students and pharmacists is to be inspired by what they see in practice and be involved in professional pharmacy organizations that align with their interests. Take advantage of leadership opportunities. Be patient while building visibility and credibility as an expert that might help to inform broader interprofessional work. Advocacy starts with how we represent the profession every day at the practice level, with our patients and in our communities.

“I let my career evolve from the opportunities along the way, whether I sought them out or not. Some aligned with my goals and interests, and some pushed me out of my comfort zone, but I learned and grew from all of them.

“Every opportunity is a chance to set yourself apart from your peers.”