By Michele Dula Baum
Katie Lambert Walters wasn’t born yet when television legend Fred Rogers told America’s anxious children to “look for the helpers,” but the description fits.
Walters, 24, is executive assistant to Sally Wenzel, MD, chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, and studying part-time toward a Master of Public Health in the Department of Health Policy and Management. For more than a year now, she’s also been a volunteer at the registration desk of a free clinic, Sheep Inc. Health Care Center, in Monroeville, a faith-based nonprofit organization that offers primary care and pharmacy support to uninsured patients in the region.
“I’ve always had a heart for helping people, and even though I’m not the one treating people, writing them prescriptions or anything like that, I’m still part of something that’s helping them,” says Walters, who expects to graduate in 2028.
Helping others is something she learned early while growing up on a farm in rural Somerset County. Her mother, Beth Butler Lambert, MD, is a pediatrician whose practice took her to hospitals in Windber and Johnstown—traveling more than 30 minutes each way in all weathers. The farm, near the tiny coal town of Cairnbrook, has been in the family for generations. “It’s my favorite place,” she says.
Though it’s no longer a working farm, Walters says her parents maintain a large organic garden and blueberry patch. “My dad is retired, but he rents out the barn and some of the fields to another farmer down the road for his cattle so the farm still functions, just not fully,” she adds.
“Growing up, I loved going to the hospital nurseries. Mom would take me with her to do newborn checks. Once was on my birthday and I asked to come along. It was definitely special,” Walters says, adding that such experiences likely influenced her health-related career goals.
Visits to those larger towns also showed Walters a different world—one that gained exponential size once she moved to Pittsburgh.
“Growing up, we had one grocery store, and it closed when I was young,” she says, adding that beyond local services for physical therapy and dialysis, “everything had to happen in Windber or Johnstown.”
The scarcity of resources in her hometown is perhaps part of Walters’ motivation to volunteer at the Monroeville free clinic. She also finds the experience relevant to her MPH studies. “I wanted to see how a free health care clinic functions and how relying on volunteers can actually work and be sustainable,” says Walters. “It’s been a really cool experience.”
Beyond volunteering, studying and assisting department chairs, Walters likes to spend time with her husband, two tomcats and her hobbies. “I started crocheting a couple of years ago and I like to make things for people,” she says. “My husband I and like hiking, too.”
So far, Katie and Anthony, her husband of a little more than two years, have visited five national parks. “We’re trying to visit them all,” she says. There are 63 designated national parks in the United States and more than 400 monuments and historic sites.
If anyone can get it done, it would be Katie, notes Bryanna Snyder, personnel administrator with the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health and longtime friend.
“She’s always been super diligent, smart and insightful,” says Snyder. “She’s here to get things done.”
