Dr. Rachel Marcus was raised in the Washington DC area, where she first started volunteering in health clinics in Adams Morgan. After getting her degree in Political Science from Stanford University, she attended Stanford Medical School, during which time she went to Latin America to learn about tropical diseases. She completed her residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Stanford Hospital and then returned to Brazil to learn more about Chagas disease.
After 10 years in private practice on K St downtown, she helped launch and became the Medical Director of the Latin American Society of Chagas in 2012. This 501c3 nonprofit has an all-volunteer staff, and provides free testing, treatment, and cardiac exams for the at-risk community for Chagas disease, a potentially deadly parasitic infection of the heart.
Over the past 13 years, she has developed an international reputation as an expert in this condition, speaking frequently to medical audiences and publishing in the medical literature about Chagas cardiomyopathy. Most recently, she joined the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute at NIH to develop a Chagas disease research program, but her first love remains the work of LASOCHA.
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