Laura Kerber ’06 is a woman with a mission. The bumper sticker on the car in her driveway reads “Moon Diver.” She answers the door wearing a NASA Moon Diver polo shirt. A stack of NASA coasters rests on a table.

Even her marriage has a Moon Diver connection. Her husband of two years is a robotics engineer working on the Moon Diver mission rover. On one of their first dates, they assembled a large Saturn V rocket model using Legos. It’s on prominent display in their living room.

Kerber happily blurs the line between work and play. “It’s kind of like a hobby/job,” she says of her work as a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in La Cañada Flintridge, near Los Angeles. Her passion is planetary geology, especially explosive volcanism and extraterrestrial caves. She focuses her attention on Mercury, Mars and, for the past seven years, Earth’s Moon. “I’ve been known to go on vacation and then work on my job,” she admits, cheerfully. “But don’t tell anyone.”

At home, Laura Kerber ’06 keeps a Saturn V model rocket made of Legos.

The proposed Moon Diver mission that she leads as principal investigator began at a picnic table at JPL with a group of five researchers excited about the discovery of caves on the Moon. The Japanese lunar probe SELENE first spotted them in 2009, and the American Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter followed up with high-resolution images. No one has ever explored caves in another world. The scientists began to dream.

One of them, JPL engineer Issa Nesnas, had worked with geologists to develop a rover that could explore hard-to-navigate landscapes. It is basically two wheels with a thick axle in between and looks straight out of Star Wars. When Kerber heard about the vehicle, dubbed the Axel Extreme Terrain Rover, she had an idea. “If I had your robot, I wouldn’t necessarily explore the cave,” she told him. Geologists, unlike engineers, prefer sheer cliffs to flat ground. “I would explore the beautiful cross section of bedrock that’s exposed in the wall of the pit going into the cave.” To Nesnas, it sounded like an intriguing idea, and the two teamed up to write proposals.

Thus the Moon Diver mission concept was born, through research and imagination. The cave it would explore is in the Sea of Tranquility, the same region of the Moon where Apollo 11 landed in 1969. It is in the Moon’s mare, an area we see as dark swirls on the lunar surface, named with the Italian word for “sea.” The mare (pronounced “mah-ray”), primarily made up of volcanic rock called basalt, was formed by lava flows billions of years ago when the Moon was young.

The near-vertical walls of the cave expose intact strata of the Moon’s secondary crust, which can tell geologists “what was going on ‘inside’ the Moon while the primary crust was forming on the surface,” Kerber says. “Looking at volcanic deposits from deep inside planets using petrology is one of the main ways that we understand the inside structure of planets,” she explains. “The Moon is special because its primary and secondary crusts are both still preserved at the surface, unlike anywhere else in the solar system.” The Moon is bombarded by meteorites, but since it lacks an atmosphere, its surface has not been weathered by wind or water, nor altered, as Earth has been, by the constant motion of tectonic plates. (She likes to tell what she calls a “NASA joke”: “Someone tried to open a restaurant on the moon, but it failed because it just didn’t have any atmosphere.”)

The opening to the lunar pit the Moon Diver mission would explore is roughly 100 meters wide, a little more than the length of a football field, and scientists believe the pit is also around 100 meters deep. Courtesy of NASA/GSFC/ASU.

Tethered to its lander by a cable that supplies power and communications and could extend 300 meters, the Axel vehicle would rappel down the cave wall gathering data as it descended to the floor. Instruments deployed from the rover’s wheel wells would analyze key aspects of the geological record: an X-ray spectrometer for elemental chemistry, a reflectance spectrometer for mineralogy and a camera system to measure the layers of rock.

By 2018, Kerber and Nesnas had persuaded JPL to fund development of the Moon Diver proposal for NASA’s Discovery competition. The space agency funds projects at various cost levels, from flagship class—such as the recent Mars rover Perseverance and the upcoming Europa Clipper voyage—to lower-cost, competitively chosen missions such as Discovery with specific scientific goals for solar system exploration. Kerber and Nesnas directed a team that at one time included as many as 40 people, but the Moon Diver proposal didn’t make the final four in the 2019 funding round.

They ultimately lost out to two missions to explore Venus, “which we thought was fair,” Kerber says, without any apparent hint of jealousy. “Venus is an underappreciated planet. We’ve got to show it some love.”

Not being selected in the most recent funding cycle motivated Kerber and her team to re-evaluate the mission proposal from start to finish. One major area of concern was data analysis. Were they aiming to collect the right data? And would the analytical methods provide sufficiently accurate results to resolve the scientific questions they set out to answer?

Geology Professor Nicole Moore

One way to find out was to test the methodology on similar basalt flows on Earth. To do that, Kerber reached out to Eric Grosfils, a professor in the geology department at Pomona who was her advisor during her college years. Grosfils, however, is primarily a physics-based volcanologist; Moon Diver needed a geology partner who was chemistry-focused. Grosfils referred Kerber to Nicole Moore, visiting assistant professor of geology. “It was just incredibly serendipitous, because I have studied basalts my entire research career,” says Moore. “First, basalt on a stratovolcano in the Cascades—Mount Baker—for my master’s. And then I studied the Columbia River Flood Basalt for my Ph.D.

“These [Earth] flood basalts are a really good analog for what the Moon basalts might look like,” Moore says. And then she punctures a myth that NASA, in an April Fools’ post, said dates back nearly half a millennium. The Moon, she says, is not made of cheese. “The man on the Moon is basalt.”

In July 2022, JPL’s Laura Kerber ’06, bottom right, took a team of researchers to Washington to test the Axel rover model on basalts that might be similar to those found on the Moon. Nate Wire ’23 at top row, middle, with Pomona Geology Professor Nicole Moore on the top row, third from right.

In mid-July 2022, Kerber, Moore and a team that included Nate Wire ’23, a Moon Diver summer intern, spent a week testing a model of the Axel rover along with various instruments on massive basalt flows in the state of Washington. A major goal was to determine how accurately the instruments proposed for use on the rover in the lunar environment could determine the precise composition of the rocks it encountered.

Researchers examine flood basalts on site in the state of Washington. Photo by Nate Wire ’23

If the team knew the actual chemistry of the rocks found through highly accurate analytical methods on Earth, says Moore, it could then compare that with results from a handheld device similar to what would be used on the Moon. “We need that precision,” Moore explains. “That was basically the concern of the group that didn’t fund the proposal [right] off the bat. ‘Is this really going to work?’ We’re still actively evaluating the data we got from the field this summer.”

Kerber understands there are no guarantees in the space business. She and her team are working hard to refine the Moon Diver mission proposal for future opportunities. It’s “kind of on this weird journey,” she says. “It might not end up looking like the endeavor that we proposed in 2019. It could morph into something different. It could be something that astronauts could help with in the Artemis program,” she says, referring to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the Moon. “Or,” she says, “we could repackage it into something a lot smaller. We could fly or hop into the cave.”

Space exploration “is a business of hopes and dreams,” Kerber says. “You have to really love the process, because nothing is guaranteed to happen. You can work a lot on a project and it might never fly.”

So Kerber relishes the journey. “I’ve been having the time of my life working on this project,” she remarks. “Somebody pays me to think about the Moon in a crazy amount of detail. It is such a delight to me. I love working with the team. It’s so fun to work with some of the world’s smartest engineers and roboticists and other scientists that are equally obsessed as I am.”

Given the chance, Kerber would fly to the Moon in a heartbeat. She has applied to become an astronaut twice. One of her colleagues is currently in the astronaut corps. “She’s in space right now,” Kerber says. “She’s poised at the right moment where she could be the first person to return to the Moon. It’s so exciting.”

Laura Kerber ’06, who earned a doctorate in geological sciences at Brown, inspects a specimen in her collection at home.

Kerber is not so sure she’d jump at the chance to go on a Mars mission. “It takes a lot longer to get to Mars, and it’s very, very hard on your body,” she explains. And, with a new baby, she says, “I love the life that I have on Earth.” But the Moon? That would be an easier decision. “Four days away. Go there, have a good time, come back,” she says. If only she had the chance.

Kerber knows her mission may be a long time in the making. “My goal is a long, 50-year goal,” she says. “If I put this out into the universe long enough that somebody will explore a lunar pit, even if it’s not me, then I’ll be delighted to see what the results are. I think that’s an achievable goal.”

The JPL motto is “Dare mighty things.” It fits well, Kerber says, with a quote she loves. “I don’t know where it’s from, but it says, ‘A ship in harbor is safe. But that’s not what ships are built for.’”

“Are you doing something bold and brave?” she is asked. “I try,” she replies. “I fail a lot. I don’t stop trying. Don’t worry so much about all the things that you have to have in place before you start succeeding. Just try and do something hard, and then all those things will take care of themselves.”

In those unreal first moments, Zach Landman ’08 wasn’t thinking about college days or his old friends, or the ways in which their worlds were about to intersect. He had no idea of the conspiracy of generosity that would soon envelop his family and help take it to a place of hope that at that instant was unimaginable.

All that Landman was thinking about, just then, were the words he and his wife, Geri, were hearing from their infant daughter Lucy’s neurologist last April.

Rare genetic disorder.

Untreatable seizures.

Never walk. Never talk.

“At the time, Lucy was literally sitting on our laps, this cute, babbling, smiley baby who looks perfectly normal,” Landman says. “The neurologist said, ‘There are maybe 50 kids in the world with this disorder, and it will advance, and the truth is that there is no cure, and from what I can see there is no one anywhere who is working on a treatment.’”

Infant Lucy Landman undergoes a brain scan, one of numerous tests performed at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in March 2022.

It was, in those moments, incomprehensible. What followed was a week of soul-searching and tears, as Zach, 36, and Geri, 38, tried to understand by what bizarre turn they had “lost the genetic lottery,” as Landman put it, as dual carriers of a gene mutation so unknown it was only discovered in the last decade. “We’re talking one in billions,” Landman says. “We could have won Powerball several times over before we’d both be carriers for this disorder.”

The diagnosis seemed catastrophic. But Lucy Landman, a blue-eyed doll who was then just shy of her first birthday, got remarkably lucky in at least one specific sense: She is the daughter of Zach and Geri.

Both are doctors, Zach specializing in pain medicine, Geri a pediatrician. It was Geri’s keen sense of baby well-being that tripped the alarms that something was not right with their daughter, with Lucy sometimes unable to remain sitting up, sometimes not making eye contact, sometimes refusing solid food.

Zach Landman ’08, a physician who specializes in pain medicine, spends hours in his home office on research and correspondence related to Lucy’s condition. Photo by Kree Photography

It was Zach’s and Geri’s determination to press experts for answers that led to Lucy’s stay at Stanford’s Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital last March and to full workups, an expedited MRI, a spinal tap, an electroencephalogram, a nerve conduction study. When none of those revealed anything unusual, the pediatric neurologist on service, who also happened to be a geneticist—and Geri’s resident when Geri was at UC San Francisco—moved to the next level and ordered genetic testing.

It led to the chilling diagnosis. But it also led to what came next. A community of help was on its way.

The PGAP3 gene disorder in humans is not particularly well understood, in part because it is so rarely diagnosed. Since no cure exists, it isn’t commonly tested for. What is known is that when the gene fails to function properly, the body does not have enough functional glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchored proteins, which are pivotal for both speech and motor development in young children.

“I hadn’t heard of this disorder before,” says Kathrin Meyer, Ph.D., a research scientist and principal investigator at the Center for Gene Therapy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who is working with the Landmans on what could be a cure for Lucy and others like her. “There are very, very few case reports.”

Using lab methods like those seen above, scientists in San Francisco have grown yeasts modified with the PGAP3 disorder in order to test repurposed medicines.

With Zach and Geri both carriers, neither of Lucy’s PGAP3 genes functions properly. Lucy’s parents noticed some of the effects of that as early as four months into Lucy’s life, when the child, their third daughter, showed a tendency to be “floppier” than other children—to sit up straight less often and for shorter periods. But Lucy initially was considered simply to be a later-developing infant with regard to her motor skills. It wasn’t until a family trip to Panama, when she caught a cold that appeared to affect her deeply, that things began to quickly escalate.

“When Lucy started to get really sick in the early spring, refusing food and really lethargic, I started sounding the alarm,” Geri says. “At one point, we were told that they’d scheduled an MRI for her in July. I was like, ‘No, no, no. I don’t think you understand the urgency here.’”

Both Geri and her husband understood, though. With genetic disorders that affect speech and movement, time is always the enemy, because the effects progress so steadily and can become difficult or impossible to reverse. The Landmans’ goals were suddenly both dramatic and incredibly streamlined: They needed near-immediate intervention to slow Lucy’s deterioration of skills, and they needed, essentially, a longer-term miracle—a moonshot, as they put it—in the form of an actual cure.

They attacked on all fronts, rounding up expert help from their long lists of personal and professional medical connections: at Harvard, Stanford, Vanderbilt, the Mayo Clinic. Zach, who coincidentally wrote his thesis at Pomona on the application of tailored pharmaceuticals to genetic disorders, began cold-calling experts around the world. Geri, a graduate of Williams College and the UCSF School of Medicine (where she and Zach met), read textbooks on the science behind gene disorders and their treatments.

Kathrin Meyer, in Ohio, was the first to suggest that gene therapy, a process through which healthy PGAP3 genes would be introduced to Lucy’s body to do the work of the faulty ones, might actually work. The Landmans had contacted Meyer because of the deep expertise she and Nationwide Children’s Hospital have in the field, and Meyer explained some of the basics. Lucy’s case was a possibility, in part because a similar therapy Meyer helped develop had worked on a single-gene neurodegenerative disease called spinal muscular atrophy, so a part of a template already existed.

Meyer needed to get Lucy’s cells under a microscope, and although Stanford officials offered to perform a punch biopsy “basically for free,” Zach says, there was significant legalese standing between that act and actually getting the results to Meyer’s team. It would take time to resolve—months, perhaps. The clock was ticking.

“So I took a red-eye flight that night from San Francisco to Atlanta to Columbus, with Lucy on my lap, while Geri stayed at home with the two kids (Audrey, now 8, and Edna, 6),” Zach says. “We Ubered to Nationwide Children’s, met Kat, they found a neurologist to do the biopsy at lunchtime, back to the airport, and then flew home. It was 23 hours of straight travel, but they got the tissue.”

What Meyer needed to know, among other things, was whether Lucy’s PGAP3 gene was relatively long or short. This mattered because the method of transmission to the brain is a virus, and it can accommodate only so large a gene.

“Think of it like a vehicle. This (therapy) is like putting a second car in the garage,” Meyer said from Scotland, where she was attending a medical conference. “If the other car is broken, you can use this one instead.”

The result was affirmative—the transmission method could work. “You won’t believe this,” Geri told Zach after speaking with Meyer, “but this is possible. And she’s happy to get started on it right away.”

In short order, the Landmans realized a couple of truths. First, though gene therapy is inherently uncertain, it was at least a potential cure for Lucy, although it would take 18 months or more to get to a fast-track FDA clinical trial. Second, a couple of other treatments, including the repurposing of existing drugs and a ketogenic diet, might put the development of Lucy’s disorder on a slower track, buying time for that therapy to be created.

And third, this all would cost money. More than they had. Millions.

Zach and Geri immediately started calling pharmaceutical giants, asking if one of them might consider funding the research and trials. The answer came back almost as directly: PGAP3 was so rare that there was no way to make an investment in the gene therapy pay for itself over time.

Geri Landman, a pediatrician, carefully manages her youngest daughter’s diet and supplements. Photo by Kree Photography

After a frustrating week of negative feedback, it was a fellow Pomona grad who helped the Landmans see the road ahead. One of Zach’s cold calls had gone to Emil Kakkis ’82, a physician-scientist who is the founder and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Ultragenyx, which helps produce gene therapies for disorders more common than PGAP3. Kakkis, who knows Meyer professionally, spent an hour with Zach and Geri, laying out the likely scenarios and encouraging them to stay rooted in the present.

“Rather than worry about solving every last variable, which is daunting, the best advice is to keep your head down and get to the next step,” Kakkis says. “If you get a gene therapy created, you will find out what it does and then work from there. It’s an iterative process.”

Says Geri, “Emil just took our hands and slowed us down. He said, ‘You just need to look at tomorrow, and then the next day. Gene therapy is a good therapy. You are working with good people.’ It was a healthy dose of reality.”

Still, the financials of the process were overwhelming; the cost just to get to the point of an FDA trial might top $2 million. It became obvious to the Landmans, who already had sold their Bay Area home and scraped up all their savings, that absent a Big Pharma investment, they’d need to set up a nonprofit in order to solicit funds to help Lucy.

In the midst of their emotional and logistical chaos, Zach and Geri wanted to achieve something greater, too.

“We didn’t want to do it for just PGAP3,” Zach says. “Our mission statement was that we want no parent to get a diagnosis for their child and go to bed thinking there’s nothing they can do, which is what happened to us. It shouldn’t be just two doctors with Silicon Valley connections with the ability to get this done.”

The result: Moonshots for Unicorns, a foundation with a website that not only explains Lucy’s story but notes that single-gene disorders number roughly 10,000 and affect 1% of the population. The cost of developing treatments and strategies for any one of them can run to $5 million. Donations to the site not only help defray costs in Lucy’s case but also fund the Landmans’ creation of a pop-up laboratory in San Francisco that is capable of rapidly testing up to 6,000 existing, FDA-approved drugs to see if any of them can be repurposed—that is, used “off label”—to delay or ward off the effects of PGAP3 or other rare genetic disorders.

Zach and Geri Landman with Lucy, the youngest of their three daughters. Photo by Kree Photography

Simply put, the rarest diseases don’t often get treated or cured because such small numbers of children or adults suffer from them. “But at the same time, you only have one child,” Kakkis says. An organization like Moonshots may one day give that child a chance.

“They’re doing this in such a structured way that it will become a model for others to follow,” says Robert Pepple ’08, who has known Zach since their first day of Pomona-Pitzer football practice together in 2004, the beginning of a longstanding close friendship. “They don’t realize that yet, and I haven’t mentioned it because I don’t want to distract from what they’re doing. But I’m sure of it.

“It’s terrible that this happened to anyone, but there are no two more competent people on Earth to handle the situation,” Pepple says. “They are the most brilliant, motivated human beings in this world. If anybody can figure it out, it’s them.”

It was Pepple to whom Zach turned when it came to organization: How does one even begin setting up a nonprofit? An attorney in the Los Angeles office of the global firm Nixon Peabody who’d been a partner “for all of about five minutes,” Pepple says he told Zach to give him a day, then immediately asked his partners to get on board with setting up Moonshots as a 501(c)(3). “They prioritized it,” Pepple says, and within a day the framework was together.

Pepple didn’t stop there. He quickly reached out to a web designer, who agreed to put together the Moonshots landing site and build out its detailed, expressive pages, all pro bono. The Landmans consistently add updates, scientific information and breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking, photos and videos.

When another college football teammate of Zach’s, Bobby Montalvo PZ ’10, saw a Facebook post about Lucy’s story on Zach’s page, his first thought was, “They need video.” Montalvo, who owns a production company in the L.A. area, was about to travel to the Bay Area for an assignment. He messaged the Landmans, arranged a sit-down with Lucy, Geri and three cameras, and produced a video that began resonating with visitors to both the website, and now, several social media accounts that update friends and family and seek donations to the cause.

“I had never asked anyone for money or been in a startup mode. Geri and I never even had an Instagram account, you know?” Zach says. “Rob was key. Bobby was key. It’s hard to even explain how much they’ve done.”

Almost a year into their journey, it’s clear that both Zach and Geri still sometimes awaken in a state of shock over the turn their family’s life has taken. When someone mentions to Geri how impressive it is that she doesn’t appear overwhelmed by all they’ve had to do, she quickly cuts him off. “I am completely overwhelmed by this,” Lucy’s mother replies. “I like talking about the science of it sometimes, because it uses the academic side of my brain, not the side that wonders, ‘Who would Lucy have been if she were not missing this one gene?’”

They celebrate the progress when it comes. The Jackson Laboratory, an industry leader in building mouse models for testing specific types of rare disease treatments, offered to do all the model testing and FDA submission on Lucy’s case for free. The keto diet, one often used to treat epilepsy, showed enough promise for the family to consider it for Lucy.

Their fundraising efforts had amassed $495,522 by late fall, in the midst of a “$1.3M by 2023” drive bolstered by nearly 30,000 Instagram followers. Meyer’s gene therapy work continues. And one week after the pop-up lab identified four drugs that might be repurposed to help slow the effects of PGAP3 disorder, Lucy last October took her first steps, something her parents were told would likely never happen.

At each of those points, the Landmans were surrounded by, as Montalvo put it, good people. Geri’s best friend from Williams, Megan McCann, a Wharton MBA, put other business aside to consult and become president of Moonshots. Montalvo sits on the board. Pepple has essentially become a constant—a lifeline of knowledge and action whenever it’s needed.

Kakkis, the most veteran of the alumni in the group, sounds unsurprised. “(Pomona) is a small school with lots of good people who care about others,” he says. “It’s more the selection of who is there and the culture of who we are than any networking scheme or clubby-type thing.”

Lucy’s prospects, of course, are uncertain—the nature of a moonshot, Zach says. But her life has already transformed the rest of the Landmans, as well as those who are serving them in the fight. Says Zach, “It spans generations.” It continues still.

Jessica Boatright ’98 will always remember when she first met Laila Bernstein ’04. The year was 2009. Both women had a passion to end homelessness in Massachusetts. That led them to jobs combating the problem, working at opposite ends of the fourth floor of the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development.

“This super-smart intern showed up out of nowhere,” recalls Boatright, known as Jessie Berman in her Pomona days. Boatright was the liaison between the state’s public housing office and the newly created Interagency Council on Housing and Homelessness. Bernstein was a new presence on the council. Something about her rocked the more senior Boatright back on her heels. “She seemed young, but I was slightly intimidated by her intelligence,” she recalls.

When the two women look back at it, their first encounter sparks laughter. “I was just, like, a pipsqueak intern,” says Bernstein. “And you were a special assistant!” At the time, Boatright worked in the division responsible for the Commonwealth’s portfolio of some 50,000 state-owned public housing units and 26,000 rental vouchers.

Today, their lives are entwined. “We share two complementary parallel paths, going through huge life events and challenging work situations together,” says Boatright. Now close friends, the two former public policy analysis majors have supported each other through childbirth, child-rearing and parents’ health crises.

There’s one more thing. They now work in the same place—in the Boston Mayor’s Office of Housing (one row and six cubicles apart, to be precise). They lead sister divisions that function in tandem to forward Mayor Michelle Wu’s commitment to ensure all Bostonians have access to safe, affordable housing.

Bernstein is deputy director of the Supportive Housing Division, which is responsible for the city’s housing strategies to end homelessness. The team manages more than $50 million in annual funding, collects and analyzes data on people experiencing homelessness in Boston, creates and leads strategic plans, and drives system design and policy change.

Boatright is deputy director in the Neighborhood Housing Development department. Her team of underwriters, project managers, architects and construction experts hammers out plans with developers and community stakeholders to create more than 1,000 units of new or preserved housing units each year.

Together with their teams, they have helped Boston make substantial progress in combating homelessness, a seemingly intractable problem in many cities across the country and particularly on the West Coast. In the past two years, Boston’s unhoused population has decreased by 28%, according to the city’s 2022 point-in-time count, a federally required measure. By contrast, homelessness has surged in such cities as Sacramento, California, and Portland, Oregon. And in Los Angeles, a city with a budget that now designates $1 billion a year to address the problem, there has been a stubborn 2% increase in homelessness since 2020.

Boatright says Wu, the Boston mayor, is “laser focused” on the struggle of people without housing, and the city recently dedicated an additional $20 million in American Rescue Plan funds to create supportive housing.

Boatright and Bernstein help spearhead projects like the one at 3368 Washington Street, which is replacing a one-story office building with the largest ground-up construction of a permanent supportive housing project in the city’s history. (Unlike subsidized housing, supportive housing in Massachusetts is more specifically targeted to people exiting homelessness, with preference going to those with disabilities who have been experiencing homelessness the longest. It comes with intensive services to help support and stabilize them. No one is screened out due to criminal history, bad credit or other barriers people experiencing homelessness often face.)

Located near five-story buildings in the affluent Jamaica Plain neighborhood, the $100 million redevelopment project will create 202 low-income housing units with 140 of those earmarked for people who are exiting homelessness. The Pine Street Inn, the location’s previous occupant—a nonprofit that has provided food, shelter and other services to people in need since 1969—is a development partner and will be the service provider and have offices there alongside housing for both formerly homeless households and families with low and moderate incomes.

Officials celebrate a partnership to renovate a historic building on 140 Clarendon Street.

“Deals don’t always come together like this one, but this one combined a unique site with a strong development team,” says Boatright. “It’s a great location for people to live, period, including people exiting homelessness. It’s located on a transit thoroughfare with easy access to both public amenities and a commercial corridor serving a broad diversity of consumers.”

140 Clarendon Street to provide affordable and supportive housing alongside cultural institutions.

In addition to new construction, other projects to add affordable and supportive housing have included the preservation and rehabilitation of architecturally significant landmarks, among them 48 Boylston Street, an 1875 building near Boston Common that once housed the Boston Young Men’s Christian Union, and 140 Clarendon Street in well-to-do Back Bay. The current tenants at the Clarendon location—the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, the city’s oldest professional theatre company, and the YW Boston, formerly the YWCA—welcomed the project and will stay in their historic homes.

Many more are in the pipeline.

“We’re building a plane as we’re flying it on a number of supportive housing opportunities,” says Boatright. “The problem is huge, but I think there’s a ton of promise to deliver a huge number of these units in the next few years.”

Bernstein sighs when she considers what she, Boatright and Boston are up against. “Even when we’ve helped 100 people stabilize in housing, 100 more fall into homelessness in Boston,” she says. “That part’s really hard, to not be able to address all of the root causes at once.”

When asked why ending homelessness is her life’s work, Bernstein seems surprised. “Who doesn’t want to be working on ending homelessness?” she replies. “It’s a privilege to be in a role working on something that’s so clearly needed and responding to a complex set of systemic failures with a solution.”

Boatright’s zeal to make a difference comes from a slightly different place. The daughter of activist parents, she says she is motivated by values of justice and fairness. “It feels very visceral. Social justice work has to be at the center of what I do every day,” she insists.

Bernstein calls her friend “a boundary spanner” and a “mission-driven person.” Boatright admits she relishes the intricacy of the work. “The draw for me is the opportunity to realize a neighborhood’s needs, wants and dreams through the built environment. The challenge is to make this happen with the alphabet soup of public and private programs that fund and regulate the projects. It’s an insane brain workout. The complexity of the problem is another hook that keeps me in it. It’s not easy, not boring, and never routine.”

Bernstein loves seeing buildings being repurposed or built to house people experiencing homelessness. “You can feel tangibly the results of this complicated and at times frustrating, arduous process,” she says. “Permanent supportive housing transforms lives for people in our community. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling job.”

The pace of work is furious for both women. They spend workdays switching gears between nonstop meetings, sometimes on the hour, sometimes on the half-hour. “There is a deluge of demands on our schedules,” says Boatright.

They live for the personal time they carve out of their schedules every Friday at 10 a.m. That’s when Boatright says they do their “weekly debrief sessions,” a euphemism for stress-relieving fresh-air strolls. Free from office hubbub, the two division heads follow a loop trail that connects Pappas Way to Waterfront Path #1, “an awesome walk,” they say, which passes through a mix of carefully landscaped lawns and industrial buildings along a Boston seaport canal.

“It’s what keeps us able to come back on Monday,” says Bernstein.

These ritual walks, they say, create an almost sacred interlude. They were especially important during COVID. “We were able to keep up those walks as a really safe and important space for protecting and nurturing each other during an incredibly hard time to work in government,” says Boatright.

Their conversations embrace everything in their lives. They have been there through their parents’ health crises. “Laila’s mom was diagnosed with the same cancer my mom had before she passed away. We’re lucky three of our parents are alive and very engaged in our lives,” says Boatright.

When Bernstein had her first child, Boatright, whose two children were older, helped with meals and “1,000 tips and words of encouragement,” says Bernstein. “Jessica modeled how you can believe in yourself as a professional and be a dedicated, caring parent. I don’t know if I would have made it through becoming a new parent and working at a job like this without her wisdom and her support.”

Bernstein reflects on the similarities between being a parent and a manager. “You have to work hard to understand someone else’s perspective. People see right through you—whether they’re 2 or 50.”

Bernstein pauses to consider what it takes to be a good manager. Her description also fits their friendship: “You have to be your genuine self while also providing the guidance and support for someone who needs to keep moving forward.”

When someone asks me, “So, what do you do for a living?” I have to make a decision. I am triple board-certified in pediatrics, pediatric emergency medicine and adolescent medicine. Do I add “abortion provider” to my list of jobs, or leave it out?

I base my answer on how it might affect me, my family and my patients. Will my family be harassed? Will they be safe? Am I abandoning my patients if I don’t talk about an essential health care procedure that many physicians refuse to perform themselves or to refer for?

I’ve come to believe that talking about my abortion work normalizes it as part of health care and puts a face on a group of medical professionals who are often demonized. Creating that human connection makes this work safer for all of us as providers and patients. But it saddens me that I still ask myself: What are the risks and benefits of talking about abortion? Unfortunately, this won’t change until we stop politicizing health care and start advocating for abortion alongside other social justice causes such as racial equity, fair wages, transgender rights, Indigenous people’s rights and even climate change advocacy, with the understanding that they are all interconnected.

It has been a lifelong journey for me to get to the point where, despite the fear, discomfort and unknown, I (usually) advocate for and talk about abortion.

My interest in reproductive health care started at Pomona with a job I found through the Career Development Office. Despite being a Japanese American teenager who had never discussed sex growing up, I was hired to teach comprehensive sexual education at area high schools. This made me somewhat of an Asian Dr. Ruth, and I became a distributor of condoms and advice regarding birth control, safe sex and consent, not only for high school students but for my fellow Sagehens too. It turns out comprehensive sex ed is something most adolescents desire regardless of ZIP code, family income or education.

The next year, I taught career development classes to pregnant and parenting high school students in Redlands, California, and accompanied pregnant teens to Lamaze classes. I shared in their shock as we watched a video on how babies are born. I also learned to provide pregnancy options counseling through a summer job. And when a friend called me to tell me about her unplanned pregnancy, I was able to support her, without judgment, in her decision-making process. She went on to raise two amazing daughters with the support of her family, friends, church and university.

My interest in social justice grew while I was at Pomona, but it was rooted in experiences I had growing up as one of the few Asian kids at my public school in Arizona. I watched as my non-English speaking parents worked hard to create a life for me and my brother. My father taught karate and built a community in a place where people of Japanese descent had been forcibly relocated during World War II only two decades earlier. Like my father, I experienced racist comments from teachers and students alike. But I also made lifelong friends who showed me inclusivity and friendship. Those experiences led me to help start a refugee youth council in high school to support Hmong classmates who had been evacuated and relocated at the end of the Vietnam War.

In 1992, my parents dropped me off at Pomona. I majored in Asian studies figuring that because I was pre-med, college would be the last opportunity to study liberal arts. Professors Sam Yamashita, Lynne Miyake and Kyoko Kurita, in addition to countless others, taught me how to think critically and build arguments with solid foundations based on reason, compassion and truth. Pomona nurtured students’ intellectual curiosity, developed problem-solving skills and gave us confidence that we could tackle difficult issues.

After college, my work and medical training took me across the country, from California and Arizona to New York, Boston and Atlanta. I’ve been exposed to the harsh reality of health care in the United States: The quality and extent of health care that people can access is almost entirely dependent on their ZIP code, income and identities.

I moved to San Francisco after graduating for an internship at the UC San Francisco AIDS Health Project, where I provided HIV testing services at needle exchanges, street fairs and health clinics. I also worked at San Francisco Women Against Rape, where I advocated for rape survivors in local emergency departments and answered hotline calls late into the night. The trainings I received for these jobs were led by activists within those marginalized communities who understood and fought against bias, stigma and discrimination. Those experiences solidified my conviction that abortion access is about justice and equity, and is an essential aspect of women’s health.

During medical school at the University of Arizona, I discovered that the reason abortion services were not available to pregnant people at the University Medical Center was because a state legislator put an abortion ban into the same 1974 law that funded an expansion of the football stadium. Football was the reason patients were forced to go elsewhere for essential health care. It was also the reason I was forced to go to independent abortion clinics in Seattle and Tucson for abortion training during my fourth-year elective rotations.

I also traveled to Ecuador, where abortion is largely illegal, to participate in an elective in women’s health. I had to tell a rape survivor that I couldn’t help her with abortion care for this pregnancy—but if she wanted, she could take a rhythm method bead necklace to ensure she wouldn’t get pregnant in the future. She was raped. (In 2021, Ecuador decriminalized abortion in cases of rape. It also is allowed when a patient’s life is in danger.)

As a resident in pediatrics at a New York City hospital, I came to realize even more how systemic racism disproportionately affects children. In the Bronx, the creation of the Cross Bronx Expressway led to increased exposure to pollution, displacement of communities and degradation of neighborhoods—all interconnected and leading to increased rates of asthma and asthma-related complications. In addition to my pediatrics training, I received further abortion training. There were patients whose birth control failed them, who could not afford another child and still provide for their family, or who wanted to complete their education.

Abortion laws by state: Most Restrictive: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia; Very Restrictive: Arizona, Georgia
Restrictive: Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin; Some restrictions/protections: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wyoming; Protective: Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Washington; Very Protective: California, Vermont; Most Protective: Oregon. Source: Guttmacher Institute (December 2022), states.guttmacher.org/policies

I went on to do two fellowships in Boston, where racial disparities I saw in the city were amplified for the adolescents I cared for. There was a 14-year-old whose pregnancy was diagnosed while she was being prepped for unrelated surgery. I helped her tell her mother. She gave birth several weeks later. There was also a young woman who had obtained medication abortion pills from a family member in another country. Research shows that medication abortion pills are generally safe and do not require physician involvement. But occasionally patients require a procedure to stop dangerous vaginal bleeding, as she did. In some states, ambiguous laws make uterine evacuation illegal unless the patient’s life is “at risk”—a term that puts physicians and hospitals in the difficult position of delaying care as lawyers are consulted and committees are convened to determine whether a patient is close enough to dying to receive a procedure that physicians are trained to perform.

Later, when I moved to Atlanta as a new mother, I developed close friendships with Black moms. As my daughter became friends with their children, it hit home how hard it must be to raise a Black child in America knowing the injustices they face. I also worked at a local abortion clinic. One patient, a religious woman who worried about the stigma of abortion, drove eight hours from Ohio. Another who previously had postpartum complications cried in relief as her abortion gave her confidence she would survive to raise the children she already had.

My work as an abortion provider—especially in the South, where health disparities along racial and income lines are more pronounced—has made it clear that for people with resources, abortion is usually accessible. But for those with limited means, abortion is difficult if not impossible to access. The people I know who fight for reproductive freedom at organizations supporting women of color—groups including SisterSong and Indigenous Women Rising—say it’s clear to them that abortion restrictions and bans worsen maternal mortality and health disparities. Academic research supports that.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, those disparities have become starker.

In Arizona, where I had returned to be closer to family and work as a pediatric emergency medicine physician and abortion provider, abortion services ceased temporarily as lawyers argued for greater clarification of state laws. Abortion access in Arizona, as in other abortion-restrictive states, has been in turmoil since. Patients’ lives have been at the mercy of legislators, lawyers and judges, the majority of whom are not physicians. Some clinics in Arizona kept their doors closed due to the uncertainty of abortion legality, reopening in October when the Arizona Court of Appeals put a hold on the reinstatement of an 1864 law that criminalized abortion when Arizona was still a territory, not a state. This back and forth and lack of legal clarity has been confusing and stressful for patients, sometimes with life-threatening consequences. Pregnant patients have been affected, of course. But so have patients who need access to medications like methotrexate, which is used for the treatment of both ectopic pregnancies and autoimmune illnesses: Some have been denied potentially life-saving medication due to concern that it would be used to induce an abortion.

The turmoil has made many providers reluctant to perform abortion services out of fear of criminal penalties. The recruitment of medical students and physician trainees across the country also has been affected, with some seeking to train and practice in states where medicine is science-driven, not politically driven.

As I continue to work with and listen to people who have been advocating for decades with Black, brown and Indigenous organizations, I’ve come to realize that fighting for abortion rights is not the same as fighting for reproductive justice.

Reproductive justice is the right to have children, to not have children, and to raise the children you have in safe, sustainable communities. This means abortion access and access to clean water. This means bodily autonomy and not facing drought-induced heat strokes and natural disasters. We cannot have one without the other.

It is devastating to know that at any moment, every single day, patients in this country are being turned away from the medical care they want and need, and turned away from the futures they imagine for themselves and their families. These restrictions are impacting the way that health care providers like me approach conversations about more than abortion care. They also affect the ways we approach miscarriage management, birth control, ectopic pregnancy treatment, infertility care, cancer care and so much more due to concerns about losing one’s license, livelihood—and with potential criminal penalties in some states—even one’s freedom.

While all of the air has been knocked out of me as I raise a young girl in a state where legislators and the courts have control over our bodies, I move forward with a bit of hope, a small glimmer knowing that we—the collective we—will not stop until we build a better future for each other, that no matter who we are, where we live, who we love or how much money we make, we can live a life of dignity, respect and self-determination.