Lucy Marcil, M.D., M.P.H.

Lucy Marcil, MD, MPH, co-founder and Executive Director of StreetCred, is an associate professor of General Pediatrics at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and a pediatrician at THEARC, a Children’s National Health community health center in SE DC. She has extensive experience improving child health through structural changes, including improving economic equity, addressing climate change, and health policy/politics. Dr. Marcil is nationally known for her work improving health equity through economic justice. Her motivation for this work is rooted in her childhood experience with financial instability and her experience with patients who have expressed that having access to just a little bit of cash – to pay a bill, repair a car, find childcare – could be transformative to their financial well-being and mental and physical health. She has spent a decade pioneering Medical-Financial Partnerships and leading national efforts to study the impacts of and scale this work. She co-founded StreetCred, which integrates evidence-based, underutilized economic resources into routine prenatal and infant health care; it has returned >$10 million in economic resources such as tax credits, food supports (SNAP, WIC), and paid family and medical leave, to over 3000 families in Boston. She also founded the the Health by Wealth Collective (HxWC), a national open-source, technical support community scaling medical financial partnerships; it supports 35 health centers and systems in 11 states and D.C. HxWC partners have collectively returned $35 million in tax refunds to >20,000 families.
In 2023-2024, Dr. Marcil worked on federal family economic and maternal-child health policies in the Office of the Democratic Whip, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-MA) as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Medicine. Internationally, she has undertaken pediatric health-systems strengthening in Namibia, Kenya, and Bangladesh. Prior to medical school, she served as a PEPFAR HIV/AIDS volunteer in the Peace Corps in Namibia. She is a TED Fellow (talk with > 1.4 million views), Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow, and the recipient of the American Academy of Pediatrics Anne E. Dyson Child Advocacy Award. She earned her MD from the University of Pennsylvania and MPH at Johns Hopkins before completing pediatrics residency in the Boston Combined Residency Program (Harvard University and Boston University).