“Health knows no borders,” says Joe Cerrell ’91, because disease doesn’t recognize artificial lines.

As director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Advocacy division, Cerrell’s passport got pretty frayed last year as he logged more than a half-million miles of travel. He manages a multi-million dollar grant-making portfolio that funds efforts to advance the foundation’s mission to improve the health of the world’s most vulnerable.

Cerrell, 37, is neither a physician nor a public health expert. In fact, at USC he was an English major. But, he says, his liberal arts degree serves him well as he communicates the importance of global health to governments, the private sector and other stakeholders.

Cerrell sees signs of hope in increased funding for HIV/AIDS, a new search for a better pneumococcal vaccine, increased immunization rates in poor countries against such diseases as measles and diphtheria, and advances in wiping out malaria and TB.

“Global health has become a mainstream policy,” says Cerrell, “and when you see politics being put aside, you see progress.”

Early this year he was at the Gates’ side in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, and in June he’ll be at the G8 summit in Germany.

Cerrell grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a high-powered political public relations executive. When it was time to choose a university, he didn’t look beyond USC, his father’s alma mater (Joseph Cerrell ’57). But the young Cerrell didn’t follow in his father’s political science major and Democratic Club footsteps. Totally apolitical, he studied 20th-century American literature and played drums at Wednesday noontime concerts with a rock band.

An internship at the 1996 Democratic Convention led him to a position as “advance man,” doing logistics in Washington state for the Clinton-Gore campaign. It was the same year he met his future wife, Sara, who worked for First Lady Hillary Clinton.

They both volunteered to control the “press pen” at the annual White House Jazz Festival. She chided him for allowing some well-known jazz critics to escape the pen. “This woman came over and said, ‘Are you Joe Cerrell? Did you know they're sitting with the guests, eating the catered food!’ ” he says with a laugh. They married in 1998.

Cerrell worked as assistant press secretary for Vice President Al Gore and as a liaison to elected officials, industry and labor leaders, and the media (a bonus was getting to play on Tipper Gore's shiny red drum set).

When Cerrell became a vice president himself, of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials, he oversaw that agency's foundation clients, one of which was the Gates Foundation. He jumped at the chance to direct the global health division.

Having a family – four-year-old Sal, and one-year-old twin daughters, Chase and Josie – makes Cerrell more empathetic to his mission. “It gives you perspective on the senseless nature of some of the things that kids, just through a geographic accident, have to live through.”

– Christine Sinrud Shade