Remarkable Woman: Melissa Gilliam

With the decline in teen pregnancy rates in recent years, you might think that Dr. Melissa Gilliam would be declaring victory.

You would be wrong.

"I suddenly looked at my clinic, and I said, 'I have all these kids who have not gotten pregnant, but they're struggling in school, they have some of the most complex home situations you could imagine, the rates of obesity are incredible, their access to good food and nutrition is bleak,'" says Gilliam, an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center who has dedicated much of her career to the city's most disadvantaged teens.

"They didn't get pregnant, and I know how hard that is, but what are we offering them? What opportunities do they have?"

For a lot of us, those would have been rhetorical questions. For Gilliam, they were a call to action. The Harvard- and Yale-educated daughter of a journalist and an abstract painter, named one of the top doctors in the city by Chicago magazine, decided it was time to look outside the walls of the medical center and enlist experts from a wide range of fields — economics, sociology, theater, game design — in her quest to improve the lives of at-risk women and children.

The result, the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3) at the University of Chicago, was launched this year, with plans to use the resources of the university and partner closely with community organizations.

The following is an edited transcript of a recent interview with Gilliam, who lives in Chicago with her husband, also a doctor, and their two children.

Q: What's going on at Ci3?

A: One program that we are working with is using game design as a way of teaching about sexual and reproductive health, and also as a way of letting youth be engaged in the process of self-education, critical inquiry and self-discovery. So we set up small camps and workshops with young people, and we design projects that we then use as interventions with other young people.

Q: Can you give me an example?

A: We have one game that we designed over a week, and it's a card game. The game is about sexually transmitted infections, but it's also about how do we communicate and deal with all of the things that are involved in sexually transmitted infection? How do we communicate around stigma and fear and shame and bravery? There's a role-play part where you have to take on these challenges: The thing that you're fighting against could be shame, and all the players have to think, OK, we have four traits: (say,) humor, resilience — whatever those traits are. And each person has to say, "How would I use humor to deal with shame?" They sort of work through that as a group.

Q: Did you always know you wanted to be a doctor?

A: It wasn't so much knowing what I wanted to be, but I just always felt things very deeply. I just remember being a kid and following national politics and being very worried about war and the number of people who were incarcerated. Any social justice issue, I seemed to be deeply moved by. I even remember my dad (the artist Sam Gilliam) saying to me at one point, "You know, Melissa, you need to have a little perspective on these things. These are not all your problems — you can't take everything to heart."

Q: How old were you at the time?

A: I think I was 8 or 9.

Q: You grew up in Washington, D.C. How did you end up in Chicago?

A: You can do something called couples matching (for your medical residency), where you tie your options to another person, and it limits your options. So my husband loved Northwestern, and it was my very first time saying, "I'm not going to do what I want; I'm going to do what you want." It was my very first time compromising.

Q: Do you miss the East Coast?

A: I get there a lot, but the Midwest is calmer in many ways. It does not have the intensity of the East Coast, the rush, rush, rush all the time, and yet you can still be part of all of these things.

Q: Your mom (Dorothy Butler Gilliam) is a journalist.

A: She wrote for The Washington Post, and then she ended up writing a column, so she'd write about us.

Q: So you were famous.

A: Yeah, in that goofy way. And when we were first born (Gilliam has two sisters), she took some time off and did some television, and then my dad is an artist, so you'd sign your name, and people would say, "Oh!" And D.C. is in the South, and it was in the '70s and '80s, so people would say, "Oh, she was wearing this, and her hair looked like this," so you were always worried that you weren't pulled together. I was like, I'm going to go live in New York where nobody knows me!

Q: What do you do in your spare time?

A: I have two kids, an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old. I spend a lot of time playing soccer. … I (also) take piano lessons.

Q: Are you a good pianist?

A: It's funny, because at first, by willpower alone, I leapfrogged over my kids, but my son has since just trounced me. He looks at me in the rearview mirror. He's good, you know? I'm like, how do you move your fingers so quickly? How do you do this?

Q: You're tackling a lot. What inspires you when you encounter challenges or setbacks?

A: My kids are without drama — they're so grounded and comfortable in their skin. And that's one really important source of strength. With all of my jobs, I spend a lot of time helping other people be resilient, and when I look at my kids, I have such hopefulness. They're just so unfazed by it all. Very little school drama, friend drama. So I get a lot of (strength) from there

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