Alumni Profile: New San Antonio graduate Nicholas McCann, MPH, headed to medical school

From his earliest moments, Nicholas McCann has been surrounded by hospitals, doctors, and healthcare. He was born during his mom’s third year of medical school and was just two years old when his family moved to San Antonio so that his mom, a now-retired Air Force colonel, could begin her first year of pediatrics residency.

And with that introduction to the world perhaps McCann was always destined to follow his mom’s footsteps into medicine and healthcare.

“My mom is the most empathetic, kind, attentive doctor,” McCann said. “I went to work with her sometimes and just seeing how she treated her coworkers, her patients, treated everyone kindly, no matter who it was, showed me this is who a doctor is supposed to be. So, I want to be just like my mom.”

Today he is well on his way toward that goal. While completing his bachelor’s in microbiology at the University of Tennessee, where he had an athletic scholarship for competitive diving, McCann discovered he was interested in public health. The COVID-19 pandemic struck during his freshman year of college and as it shook up the world, it caused McCann to think about the impact of public health in new ways and adjust his goals.

“Seeing how an infectious disease like COVID could turn the world upside down in a matter of months, and the importance of prevention measures and vaccines to prevent the spread of disease, just understanding that was interesting to me,” McCann said. “It was something that I had zero exposure to before and was really new information.”

By the time he graduated with his bachelor’s he had added a double minor in leadership and public health. Instead of heading straight to medical school after his bachelor’s, he came back home to San Antonio and enrolled at the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health to pursue an MPH in epidemiology.

Almost immediately after beginning his MPH, McCann began working as a graduate research assistant for Jack Tsai, PhD, dean and professor at the San Antonio location of the school. With an innovative idea to bring basic medical testing to vulnerable populations, Tsai and McCann teamed up to create a laundromat outreach program.

Laundromat patrons filled out questionnaires before the program launched to assess the demographics, and the results indicated that the majority of customers were from racial and ethnic minorities, with low incomes and limited access to healthcare or health insurance.

“Most people at a laundromat are sitting for long periods of time, waiting for their clothes, so we thought it could be a great opportunity to meet them where they are to offer these services,” McCann said.

Thanks to a medical assistant certification he had already earned, McCann had the skills to conduct basic medical tests such as blood pressure readings and A1C testing, a preliminary indicator of diabetes. Every week, several days a week, for a year and a half McCann would set up his miniature clinics at various laundromats throughout the city, offering free tests to anyone who was interested. 

“There were some days I would go and nobody was interested,” McCann said. “And then there were other days I would test like 15 people, by myself.”

All told he screened around 200 individuals, many of whom were uninsured or had never been to a primary care provider. In one case, a woman with dangerously high A1C levels was able to get diagnosed and treated for type 2 diabetes after speaking with McCann.

“She told me, ‘I never would have known if you hadn’t been here today.’ That moment really stuck with me,” he said. “It was through launching that project that I realized I really wanted to go to medical school because I really enjoyed the one-on-one interactions and the clinical aspect.”

In addition to his work as graduate research assistant, this past spring McCann traveled with a team to rural northern Vietnam, where he taught dental hygiene to elementary students and sex education to middle school students through a local NGO. That experience counted as his integrated learning experience (ILE), a capstone requirement for his MPH and global health certificate, and also renewed his desire to one day work with Doctors Without Borders.

“It was just mind boggling to me how some of the kids had never brushed their teeth because they didn’t have access to a toothbrush,” he said. “It was just a very eye-opening experience.”

With his MPH completed, McCann is heading straight into medical school this summer at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine in Lubbock. While he’s not yet sure which particular area of medicine he’d like to pursue, he’s had a strong interest in surgery ever since he spent one summer during his undergraduate years shadowing a surgeon.

“As a kid, I loved Legos, puzzles, arts and crafts, and I was just good with my hands,” McCann said. “And so, it just kind of clicked. I know I'm meant to be in an O.R.”

Whatever specialty he ends up in, McCann knows his MPH will be an asset and he is ready to put his public health knowledge to work with all the opportunities for learning at hospitals in the rural areas surrounding Lubbock.

“My background in public health is going to give me a different perspective, just understanding health at both the individual and the population level, and how public health and medicine intersect,” McCann said.

He said he’s leaving the school of public health with fond memories of hangouts with his fellow students, staff and faculty at the San Antonio campus, and he has some parting advice for future MPH students. 

“Getting an MPH taught me how to learn in a different way,” McCann said. “The subject was kind of outside of my comfort zone before, which is a good thing, and I think in the long run it helped me. You want to always be a lifelong learner - in public health, in medicine, in technological advancements.”