Alumni Project Week Interview with Alumnus Felipe Mejia-Medina

Why did you want to take part in this Project Week?

I've been working on digital health since 2011 and I've been mostly into governance and policymaking. I also worked on research, but more on the implementation side. For almost 11 years I worked as an external consultant for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) – WHO America's Office in Washington, D.C.. It was a great experience and I had a sense of many of the different areas of digital health. As the office oversees the Americas, it was on the side of global digital health, and that's why I got hooked and interested. And then I got into AI, which is exactly what I'm doing now: In 2023, I founded my own consultancy company and we've been working on AI governance and AI ethics and capacity building for different governments and institutions. This project week was just like meant for me to apply to – and fortunately, I was accepted.

Unfortunately, I had a familial emergency, so I wasn’t able to attend most of the first part in Cologne. But I wanted to be part, to share my experience a little bit of what I've been doing. Dealing with AI use to manage loneliness, especially for men, and especially right now, I'm a subject of my own research because I'm actually dealing with the same issues, so it made sense to me to come and tell the story. Initially, it was just the researching part, but then I decided to sort of like show that it actually does happen. Oftentimes in these meetings, it seems that researchers are not having a life as they are just sharing knowledge and structures and methodologies. But we are all human beings going through moments and we can be also the users of the research that we are carrying out.

What do you expect from this project week for your work?

In general, I tend to attend several workshops per year, and throughout the years, I've learned the importance of networking and of having external views on whatever it is that you do for research and for life. Now having someone outside kind of seeing what you do is very amazing because they will see things that you cannot see anymore. And when it comes to AI governance, ethics and mental health, as in my case, you really need interdisciplinary teams – this project week brings together just such an interdisciplinary team of amazing people who are achieving incredible things. That's why I try to network at events like this and build a project together that goes beyond the workshop.

You have a really interesting research topic – male loneliness. How did you find this topic?

That’s a very important topic nowadays. I think that we have reached a point in which even those that seemingly hold the power need to also be the recipients of care and attention. I've learned from my mother, who is one of my first role models in feminism, and my female friends, the importance of speaking up and sticking together. I'm an LGBT plus person and I know from my own experience how important it is to to create a community to support each other. But men, precisely because of the consequence of holding this power, although it's always the minority of men who really do hold the power, that they lost the sense of creating a community. But we need community. So if we expect to have a good society, we need to bring everyone, men and women, to the front. Women also have children who are boys, women also have fathers and brothers, and it's the same for men – so we all need to find a way to take care of each other. But we need to also find the differences so that the interventions are targeted based on the actual needs of the people in this case. As we have learned how important it is to develop interventions for girls and women, we need to come up with interventions that are targeted specifically for boys and men.

You are involved In the HAI network for global health. Why is this commitment important to you?

Yes, I've been running the network of global health for almost 10 years already. But I'm also managing other global health networks, for the KAAD, the Katholische Akademische Ausländer-Dienst, and we recently launched also one for Latin America, we did it in a beautiful project at PAHO, for international cooperation teams. Now we have the technology to kind of have this type of contact and exchange, but also because we do need this type of collaboration. It's hard to come up now with a solution that works out, that is sustainable, without having people working out on one single idea. The global south was forgotten, however, the ideas were coming for the global north, creating interventions without asking us, without using our knowledge. And we've come to the moment of really building these networks so that everybody can take that advantage. And that's basically why.

I really love working out on building networks and I've learned a lot from what seems to be different. We always say context matters, and it definitely matters – but the more that you work with people, the more that you realize how similar people are. The fundamentals are always the same – we seek for the same type of things. It expresses perhaps differently based upon culture, but at the end it's not that much different.