Mia R. Keeys, MA
Mia R. Keeys, MA
Women Leaders in the Health Sciences Fellow
Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
As Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Fellow, Mia R. Keeys serves as the Health Policy Advisor to Congresswoman Robin Kelly (D-IL), Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Health Braintrust. Mia is originally from Philadelphia, PA, but also calls Jakarta, Indonesia and Johannesburg, South Africa “home.” Through her efforts promoting health equity nationwide and internationally, Mia works with her colleagues developing health, economic, and education policies and programs that illuminate and address critical issues of historically underserved populations. Mia bases her health equity philosophy on understanding “upstream” issues–access, affordability, and socially determining factors–which affect communities’ abilities to make healthy choices across their lives. Mia especially frames her research and work on youth of color and their ability to manifest their life vision, which she illustrates in her 2015 TEDx talk, “A Racial Imagination Quotient.”
Previously, Mia has been a Kaiser Family Foundation Barbara Jordan Health Policy Scholar; a Fellow for the City of Philadelphia in the Deputy Mayor’s Office for Health and Opportunity; an HIV/AIDS researcher in South Africa; and a U.S. Fulbright Fellow to Indonesia, where she lived and worked in various health administrative and research capacities for three years, while simultaneously learning the national language, Bahasa Indonesian. She has also held summer associate appointments with the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Office of Minority Health.
Mia holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and Psychology from Cheyney University, and a Master of Arts degree in Medical Sociology from Vanderbilt University, where she was also a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow through Meharry Medical College. Mia is also a creative non-fiction writer, with training from the University of Oxford.