Dr. Margot Gage on health, advocacy and research

If you ask Dr. Margot Gage what she studies, the answer depends on when you catch her.

One week, she's reviewing research for one of the nation's largest federally funded long COVID initiatives. Another, she's teaching Lamar University students how neighborhoods, governments, and public policy shape health outcomes. She's organized ceremonies honoring Vietnam veterans, and become one of the country's most visible advocates for people living with long COVID.

On paper, it reads like a career that zigzags across topics.

To Gage, it has always been the same story.

"I like to do research on topics that give a voice to people who don't have one," she says.

Whether she's studying health disparities, advocating for veterans, or pushing for better recognition of long COVID, Gage is less interested in what makes individuals sick and more intrigued by what the world around them does.

"I'm interested in how your country makes you sick," she says. "Your society can make you sick, but your society can also heal you."

It is a deceptively simple idea, but one that has shaped nearly every stop in her career.

Born in Austin, Texas, and raised largely in Colorado, Gage earned her bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Colorado Boulder before taking what she expected would be a temporary trip overseas. She enrolled in a study abroad program that took her through the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It was her first time leaving the United States.

At first, she wondered if she'd made a mistake.

The culture felt unfamiliar. There was no ice in the drinks, air conditioning wasn't common, and bicycles outnumbered cars. She remembers calling home often, overwhelmed by the adjustment.

Then something shifted.

Instead of seeing Europe as foreign, she began seeing America as only one way of organizing a society.

"I always tell my students to study abroad," she says. "I did it on a shoestring and a prayer, and it changed my life."

She stayed in the Netherlands, earning a master's degree in health psychology at Leiden University, where Albert Einstein once served as a visiting professor and generations of members of the Dutch royal family have studied. She later completed her doctorate in social epidemiology and public health at the University of Amsterdam and Amsterdam Medical Center, one of the world's leading public health research institutions.

Unlike many doctoral graduates, Gage remained as a postdoctoral researcher before earning a competitive grant that funded a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Along the way, she completed research appointments at UCLA and Harvard, working alongside internationally recognized scholars whose work helped shape the field of public health.

The years she spent in Europe transformed more than her résumé.

Living in countries with different healthcare systems, social policies, and approaches to family life reinforced a lesson that would become central to her research: where people live often matters just as much as the choices they make.

"I don't study cancer," she explains. "I'm interested in whether living next to this place caused the cancer."

That way of thinking followed her to Lamar University, where she joined the Department of Sociology as a tenure-track assistant professor and now serves as interim assistant director of the Center for History and Culture.

Her courses range from epidemiology and global health to healthcare bias, medical cannabis, sociology, and human rights. Regardless of the subject, students quickly discover they are being asked to think differently.

Many arrive expecting conversations about personal responsibility. Instead, Gage asks them to consider food deserts, housing, education, transportation, discrimination, and public policy.

She wants them to understand that a ZIP code can predict health outcomes just as powerfully as genetics.

Her research has resulted in more than 20 peer-reviewed publications, but she believes scholarship shouldn't stop at publication.

"I think researchers should put their work out in a public way," she says. "Usually, it's only researchers reading other researchers' work."

That philosophy became deeply personal during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After developing long COVID, Gage says many of her symptoms were dismissed by medical professionals. As she searched for answers, she found thousands of patients sharing nearly identical experiences.

Speaking publicly was not an easy decision.

"It was a very big decision," she says. "We talked about what it could mean for my job, my insurance, and my family."

Instead, her voice became one of the most recognizable in the country.

Her TEDx talk has been viewed more than one million times. She was invited to brief President Joe Biden's COVID-19 Task Force, recognized by Health magazine as one of seven African American women named Unsung Heroes of the pandemic, and featured by The New York Times, The Washington Post, People, ABC News, and MSNBC. Today, she serves on the National Institutes of Health's RECOVER Publications and Oversight Committee, helping oversee research that continues to shape physicians' understanding of long COVID.

Long before that work, Gage had already built a reputation as an advocate for another community she felt was often overlooked.

Raised in a military family, she grew up understanding both the opportunities military service created and the challenges many veterans faced after returning home.

That perspective inspired years of work honoring veterans across Southeast Texas, including organizing large recognition ceremonies for Vietnam veterans and recognizing other veterans and first responders.

To Gage, those efforts are not separate from her research.

They are another way of asking who society notices, who it forgets, and what happens when people fall through the cracks.

"I use my little platform for good," she says.

For Gage, research has never been about collecting publications or adding another line to a curriculum vitae.

It's about making invisible people visible.

Whether she's studying health disparities, advocating for veterans, helping shape the nation's understanding of long COVID, or teaching the next generation of researchers at Lamar University, the work begins in the same place: paying attention to the stories that too often go unheard.

The questions change. The people change. The mission never really does.