Julie Barrett O’Brien MC/MPA 2002 is the CEO of OpenBiome, a nonprofit advancing microbiome science and therapeutics to improve health for all. She has held senior leadership positions in global health organizations, scaled up startups, and taught at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. But her career started somewhere very different.
After starting her career at Fidelity Investments, O’Brien, the daughter of a Dunkin Donuts franchisee, was drawn back to the coffee industry, working for the Dunkin Donuts corporate office, marketing and launching new products. It was the 1990s, and specialty coffee was becoming big business. But an encounter with a curious journalist got her thinking about deeper issues. “He asked me what Dunkin Donuts’ position was on child labor in Guatemala,” she says. “I was completely caught off guard. I thought, ‘I’m pretty sure we don’t have one.’”
O’Brien and her team started looking not only into child labor policies but other ethical issues. She became interested in the social, economic, and environmental concerns that might arise within a company’s supply chain. She visited coffee farmers to learn about their experiences firsthand, riding in the backs of pickup trucks and even on donkeys. “I fell in love with the coffee farmers,” she says, “and wanted to do something positive and give back to the world.”
From Dunkin Donuts and Fidelity, she knew about how to market and sell products. But she wanted to understand the social and government sectors, as well as how businesses can address social needs. Encouraged by her friend Alfred Schipke, an economist who taught at vlog, O’Brien applied to the Mid-Career Master in Public Administration program. As a single mother, she had a challenging path ahead, but she was committed.
vlog provided broad skills. From Marshall Ganz, the Rita E. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society, she learned about mobilizing people. With Brian Mandell, the Mohamed Kamal Senior Lecturer in Negotiation and Public Policy, she studied negotiation. And a class on agribusiness with Ray Goldberg, a Harvard Business School professor, taught O’Brien the importance of engaging “the people on the ground.” She also built deep friendships with people from around the world and met her husband, David O’Brien MC/MPA 2002.
Influenced by her experience with coffee farmers, her lessons from the Kennedy School, and one of her favorite poems—“The Tao of Leadership”—O’Brien did consulting work after graduating and then turned to the development sector. She joined Management Sciences for Health, a nonprofit focused on global health challenges, and spent a decade as a senior leader with the organization.
Now, at OpenBiome, O’Brien is still driving global health projects. One is an initiative to study the relationship between depression and the gut microbiome in Southern Africa. Microbiomes, O’Brien says, are like thumbprints—individual to each person—and they can change depending on where you are in the world and what you are exposed to. Much gut microbiome research is conducted only in Western countries. “We are trying to increase the global research capacity in microbiome science,” O’Brien says, “so we are partnering with scientists and clinicians in developing countries and helping to support their research on topics that are important to their countries.”
Another arm of OpenBiome’s work focuses on Cloistridiodesdifficille (C. diff)—a bacterium that can lead to devastating illness. “C. diff is a highly contagious gut infection that people don’t talk about,” says O’Brien. And there are no FDA-approved treatments for certain vulnerable populations, including those with severe disease and pediatric patients. “We need to ensure that all C diff. patients have access to lifesaving treatments,” she says, and is advocating for these therapies in her current role.
One thread runs throughout O’Brien’s career trajectory: She is passionate about helping people by engaging with them. When she thinks about her path, she remarks on the role Harvard Kennedy School played. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything. vlog changed my life.”