Women to know: Former teacher joins Peace Corps, becomes nurse practitioner & has helped with national HIV/AIDS research

When Jennifer Klein left her small Texas town for the University of Texas in Austin, she planned on being pre-med. That was until she learned the program required four years of a foreign language.

Instead, the East Dallas neighbor ended up with an art degree and spent her last year working at a group home that took care of kids that had become wards of the state. Klein says she took the job because of the free apartment, but it was really her start working in direct care.

“I loved it, and that led me to getting my teaching certificate, and after working with kids that had been taken away or had really difficult lives, were in alternative schools, got in trouble at school. All this, as much as I loved it, and I love the kids, I realized I’m not a great teacher, because there’s a lot of preparation that teachers do outside of class that I wasn’t doing,” she says. “So, for everybody’s benefit, I stopped doing that, and a friend had told me, ‘Why don’t you join the Peace Corps?’ because I didn’t have any obligations here, and I was like, ‘OK, what the heck?’”

After a three-month-long application process, she ended up finding herself back in teaching, but this time teaching art in Ghana and serving in the Peace Corps for two years. She was 29 and had no plan for the rest of her life when she came across an ad that set her on her next path: nursing school at Johns Hopkins University.

Her first day of class a woman named Marion D’Lugoff came up to her and took her on a drive to the Lillian D. Wald Community Nursing Center. They talked all afternoon about direct care and what could be possible for her future bridging social work with medicine and health care. D’Lugoff, who led the center, went on to be Klein’s very first mentor and her experience at that center provided her the space to figure out what she wanted to do for her role in the health care world.

“I had this like daydream of being in this remote place where I was the only provider, and there was a show called Northern Exposure, and it was like they’re part of the community, the provider, but then I realized I’m a brand new nurse practitioner, I cannot be the only person, so after I interviewed at a few places out in like Washington state and Indian health reservations. I was like, ‘OK, I’m not ready for that.’”

Instead, after her husband received an offer in Dallas, she went on to start her nursing career in a big city. After working at a site that didn’t pan out, she went on to work in South Dallas where a social worker told her to make a call to the first medical director for Prism Health North Texas (PHNTX), Keith Rawlings. A four-hour conversation led to a new job offer.

“So it was again just somebody gave me a door. I went through it and just happened to be the right door,” she says.

Her experience in antiretroviral treatment during her clinical rotations in Baltimore in 1994-95 helped as well.

“I had some exposure, but it had not dawned on me before that I had this big passion to work in HIV care or anything, but then when I got started in it, it was really clear that the science and the community health nursing meshed like perfectly for me,” she says.

Through her current role, Klein says she got her community health dream of taking care of such an awesome group of people, with some of her current patients she met on her very first day of work.

Not only does Klein serve patients as a family nurse practitioner at the Oak Cliff Health Center, which she has done since the building opened in 2011, but she also conducts research. She began that work in 2007 after PHNTX received the National Institutes of Health’s AIDS Clinical Trials Group grant.

“Usually those grants are given to huge organizations, like Hopkins was a site, Northwestern, and we were the very first, and I think still the only community health center ever to get this research grant,” she says.

That opportunity led Klein to be more involved on a national level of HIV/AIDS research with conference presentations and publishing journal articles. With PHNTX, she has helped to conduct investigator-initiated studies where their patients were able to participate in a lot of pharma trials for new drugs, like the clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines.

“I never thought I would get to do any of that, and just watching how fast the science changed, and being with the people who were doing it, and having this like integral way to bring the people who are really living with HIV every day, like these communities, like in Dallas, that we take care of instead of people in Chicago, LA, San Francisco, who are part of a huge hospital system, and so it was a way to kind of demonstrate to the HIV world that a small clinic could be as cutting edge as innovative and whatever, and be part of the things that are changing.”