Maya Adam ’04 had an unlikely entrance into the world of health care — Adam was a professional ballet dancer for nearly 10 years before applying to Stanford at age 27.

Now a clinical associate professor in pediatrics, Adam wants to “humanize” the field of health. 

Adam is the director of the Global Health Media Innovation Lab and associate director of the Center for Digital Health at the Stanford School of Medicine. She also hosts the Health Compass podcast, where she interviews experts at the university about topics from mental health to autoimmune diseases. 

Seeing her fellow ballerinas’ injuries when she was a professional dancer motivated Adam to study human biology.

“I remember thinking that it would be so cool to know how to help them,” she said. She later completed her honors thesis on injuries in dancers and decided to pursue medicine.

A lover of “a great storyboard, sound design and visual motion design,” Adam combined her medical career with former artistic experiences by exploring health education through media. 

As the director of the Global Health Media Innovation Lab, Adam designs engaging ways of communicating health information on social media or entertainment platforms to reach communities where health information is less accessible.

The other side of her work is research-based, where she tests health communication interventions to see if they have the intended effect in large populations. 

Adam believes the simplest and most effective way to communicate health information is through building bridges and storytelling. “If we want to change someone’s mind, we have to touch their heart first,” Adam said.

Adam’s Health Compass podcast focuses on this idea. In the podcast’s episodes, Adam learns the stories of experts featured in the Stanford Medicine Magazine and the “guiding compasses” in their lives, whether professional or personal.

The podcast invites audiences from all backgrounds, from parents seeking to support their teens’ mental health or tech enthusiasts curious about emerging health tools, according to producer of the Health Compass podcast and science writer for the Stanford School of Medicine Hanae Armitage. “The core tenets of Health Compass come down to the same qualities: science-based, authentic storytelling,” Armitage said.

Armitage attributed the episodes’ life to come from the people featured. Through conversations on their personal careers and the history of global health changes with the guest speakers, Adam weaves complex research into compelling, relatable stories, Armitage said

For example, Adam’s episode with Leanne Williams, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, discussed what motivated Williams’s work: her personal experience with losing someone to suicide. In this episode, Williams shared when she first openly shared her personal story behind her research during a Stanford plenary. 

“It felt in some ways liberating. The most rewarding thing from it was the number of colleagues who came up to me afterwards and expressed their appreciation and then shared their own story,” Williams said in the episode.

Adam was moved by her conversation with Williams. “It’s powerful when people understand that their physicians have these personal experiences. They’ve lived it and that’s why they care.”

In another episode with David Rehkopf, an associate professor of epidemiology and population health in the Stanford School of Medicine, Adam learned about Rehkopf’s research on longevity in Costa Rica. Rehkopf, who typically converses with other scientists, enjoyed the opportunity to speak on questions of interest to a wider audience, he wrote to The Daily.

Another guest, assistant professor of medicine and biomedical data science Jonathan Chen who talked about AI on the podcast, spoke to Adam’s ability to ask challenging and thought-provoking questions while having a warm and personable demeanor for her audience.

“She brings a perspective of curiosity and outreach, making her a great ambassador to traverse science, education, medicine and humanity,” Chen wrote to The Daily.

In the same episode, Michael Pfeffer, the Chief Information Officer of Stanford Health Care and Associate Dean at the School of Medicine, spoke to Adam’s “genuine curiosity” that prompted his reflection on his “decades-long personal story at the crossroads of medicine and information technology.”

In addition to the Health Compass podcast, Adam’s work with the Global Health Media Innovation lab is centered around what she coins “health entertainment.” 

“If we want to reach people who aren’t already motivated or able to understand traditional health information, we have to make it delightful,” Adam said. Through mediums of short story-based animated videos “free of cultural identifiers,” they can “resonate in any part of the world,” Adam said.

Artist Matt Torode animates many of the Global Health Media Innovation lab’s videos with Adam’s directions. “Sometimes Maya has a firm idea of what she wants and other times we bounce ideas around until we settle on one that works,” Torode wrote to The Daily.

With simple but sophisticated styles, pallets and characters, the team hopes “to appeal to adults and not be too cartoony,” according to Torode.

One recent video used the story of a fish to illustrate the stigma toward people with addiction. “We thought, ‘What if we tell the story and we allow people to see how an unsuspecting little fish could just get addicted to something without him being at fault, and how he could then recover from that by seeking help?’” Adam said.

The fish was also chosen because of the correlation of the sayings “drinks like a fish” and “getting hooked” with excessive addictive behavior, according to Adam.

Despite its seemingly simple approach, the impact of health entertainment has been surprisingly complex to measure in social media, according to Adam. For example, in assessing videos on vaccines, Adam said she faced challenges in recruiting large participant pools across a variety of countries to accurately assess the impact of a video.

Nonetheless, Adam hopes her work can be shared with both the Stanford Medicine community and the broader public.

“I know screenwriting sounds like it would be boring, but it is phenomenally exciting,” Adam said. “Because the first thing you learn is how to tell a great story. And then you learn how to format it so that somebody out there might make it one day.”