Longtime public health professional Nina Schwalbe, MPH, PhD, (pictured here at right) is running to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D) as the representative for Manhattan’s 12th Congressional District. (Photo: Maxim Shapovalov)
Maxim Shapovalov
It’s simple. In a supposed democracy, if you want the government to do more to help the health and welfare of the people, you can just run for Congress and get elected, right? Well, that’s essentially what longtime public health practitioner and leader Nina Schwalbe, MPH, PhD, has said she wants to do in her bid to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D) as representative for Manhattan’s 12th Congressional District. But as a science-based candidate who is quite different from traditional members of Congress, Schwalbe has encountered a host of hurdles and obstacles that may prevent scientists in general from reaching Congress.
Schwalbe was first prompted by the Trump administration’s public health cuts and lack of congressional action
“What first motivated me to run for Congress is when [U.S. President Donald] Trump pulled the US out of the World Health Organization and fired more than 200,000 of our peers from the CDC, NIH, FDA and USAID, all of whom do essential functions needed to keep people safe and healthy,” Schwalbe told me. I continued to cover myself Forbes Such continued cuts in both funding and personnel, as well as the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO, funding threats to universities, and questions about the policies of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Schwalbe herself has decades of experience in public health leadership, from director of policy at the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development to deputy executive secretary and managing director for policy and performance at GAVI to work as principal adviser to UNICEF and acting chief of health. Faith McLellan described Schwalbe as a “global health expert and advocate” who “has spent her career working on multifaceted global health issues, ranging from HIV and TB prevention to negotiating a pandemic treaty.” recent article in leading scientific journal The Lancet, which isn’t exactly where you usually find articles about congressional candidates. So Schwalbe is well aware of what firing all these science and health professionals from US government agencies will ultimately do to the health of many Americans.
Trouble tracing the cause of an outbreak prompted Schwalbe to run for Congress
What further “infected” Schwalbe with the idea of running for Congress was a then-unexplained outbreak of infectious diseases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that occurred between February and March 2025. She noticed problems identifying the specific virus causing the outbreak, which should be somewhat alarming given that little thing called a pandemic a few years ago.
“So I tried to call our Congress, and they just wouldn’t listen, they didn’t care,” Schwalbe recalled. “Finally, I got it [U.S. Senator Kirsten] Gillibrand’s office because she is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has a special interest in the DPRK. Then they called the CDC, then they got involved with the WHO, but that took too many calls.” Schwalbe added, “With many experiences added up like this, I realized they had lost the plot. No one was following that.”
This became the straw that got her over the camel’s hump, so to speak. “I started thinking [running for Congress] in the spring of 2025 and the summer, and then I thought I would just run as a challenger to Nadler to raise public health, to raise these issues around mistakes,” Schwalbe said of me. “Then Nadler decided to resign and then the whole thing changed. I talked to a lot of people who said I should run because we needed that voice.”
Do you know the song “Wake Me Up When September Ends?” Well, it was September 2025 when Schwalbe seriously decided to run for Congress. Then he entered a Democratic field currently led by four men who have much more traditional backgrounds as political candidates. Two of them are current members of the New York Assembly: Micah Lasher and Alex Bores. One of them is a former Republican who garnered a lot of press when he turned against Trump despite his wife’s position in the first Trump administration: George Conway. And the last of the four, Jack Schlossberg, happens to be the grandson of President John F. Kennedy.
People have told Schwalbe they need more scientists in Congress
It doesn’t take a scientific study to realize that scientists in general make up only a very small percentage of the 119th US Congress. For example, of the 535 voting members of Congress, only nine are engineers, one is a physicist, one is a chemist, one is a geologist, and 30 are physicians. Every day Congress makes science-related decisions with so little direct scientific experience and knowledge. Isn’t that like getting a bunch of non-athletes to play for the USA FIFA World Cup team?
Schwalbe emphasized how scientists “are really good at solving complex problems. And that’s an approach that’s useful in many fields. Our research method is really useful, and I don’t think people really appreciate that.” He expressed concerns that politicians will not necessarily know what laws should be passed for health and public health, “how those laws should be implemented and how you monitor and make sure they are implemented with the intended effect.”
And the cuts to science and health made by the Trump administration have certainly affected many different sectors in many different ways. “Almost everyone I talk to is concerned that the science has been cut,” Schwalbe said. He talked about people losing jobs, not being able to find work, workshops and studies being cut, and “stories all day about ‘grandma was in a clinical trial for a cure and the trial stopped midstream.’ He told me, “People will stop and say, ‘Oh, you’re the scientist. We need a scientist. We need a scientist in Congress.”
Schwalbe found out how much money and connections talk when he ran for Congress
Nancy Goroff, PhD, former chair of the chemistry department at Stony Brook University ran for New York’s 1st Congressional seat in 2020, but lost to incumbent Lee Zeldin (Photo by Chris Ware/Newsday RM via Getty Images)
Newsday via Getty Images
Scientists may have abundant problem-solving skills, insight, and knowledge. But one thing they may not have in abundance is moolah, which is a technical term for money. “When I asked people how much money I would need to raise, many said about $3 million,” Schwalbe recalls. “I was like, well, that’s not going to happen.” He said everyday people “don’t realize how big of a money-driven business politics and running for office is, and it’s really ugly.”
The other big “c” besides “cash” and “crummy” is “connections.” Schwalbe lamented, “It’s really about who you know, as all endorsements come from people. You’ve had to have long-term relationships with people. There’s no kind of level playing field here.”
Nancy Goroff, PhD, former chair of the chemistry department at Stony Brook University, who also ran for New York’s 1st Congressional seat in 2020 but lost to the incumbent, Lee Zeldin, echoed Schwalbe’s observations: “To get elected, one needs to raise a million favors from the Candidate with the most friends and the most dollars. scientists don’t have that kind of network.”
Scientists like Schwalbe face additional hurdles to get into Congress
Angela Merkel (R), who served as Germany’s chancellor from 2005 to 2021, holds a PhD in quantum chemistry and worked for more than a decade as a research scientist in East Germany before moving into politics. (Photo by CHRISTIAN HARTMANN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
POOL/AFP via Getty Images
In addition to money, Schwalbe mentioned another “m” that can be a big obstacle for scientists – the machine. “The democratic machine is very much about protecting current interests,” he said. “There’s a lot of money and deals. And public health is so invisible. People really don’t understand what it is or how it works.”
Gorov pointed out something else about what scientists have to deal with – that is stereotypes. “Scientists running for office also have to deal with the stereotypes voters and donors have about what a scientist is,” Goroff said. “There are positive and negative associations with being a scientist, and since there are so few of them in politics, every science candidate has to carry all these stereotypes, whether they fit or not.” Such stereotypes can be like some fruit pies (not all, of course) in that they can be rather nuts, but weigh on scientists’ candidacies for leadership positions. But in reality, you can find many world leaders past and present with deep science backgrounds, such as the current presidents of Mexico (Claudia Sheinbaum) and China (Xi Jinping), the former Chancellor of Germany (Angela Merkel) and, of course, many of the Founding Fathers of the USA, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and the George Washingtons.
Yes, this last bunch of scientists was somewhat successful in founding and developing all of America. Why then do people not find scientists to be effective in guidance now?
