Meet
Dr. Jai Marathe
Meet Dr. Jai Marathe, Infectious Disease Physician at Boston Medical Center
Dr. Marathe is an Infectious Disease Physician at Boston Medical Center, where she also serves as the Director of the Long COVID ReCOVer Clinic. As a co-investigator of the Massachusetts Community Engagement Alliance (MA-CEAL) at BMC, she has been a close partner of Vital CxNs’ Long COVID Initiative. We sat down with Dr. Marathe to discuss her path to becoming an infectious disease clinician and her community-centered approach to her work.
Dr. Marathe, who was born into a family of medical professionals in India, describes her path to becoming a doctor as “rather unintentional.” She highlights her medical training as a unique part of her journey. Dr. Marathe attended medical school at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, located in a rural part of India. Founded by a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, the school serves a population that lacks access to basic healthcare and consequently experiences high rates of infectious diseases like leprosy, malaria, and tuberculosis. The school’s educational model requires every incoming class to “adopt” a nearby village, wherein each student serves as the primary care physician responsible for the health of their assigned families throughout the course of their medical training.
“A lot of people have to prioritize […] do you prioritize buying medications or buying food?”
Recounting her experience in medical school in India, Dr. Marathe says it made her reflect on what practicing medicine is like in reality, including “what community means, and what community health means.” Her tasks ranged from splinting the fractured leg of one of the families’ goats to seeking funding for well covers aimed at reducing high rates of diarrheal illnesses caused by contaminated water. She attributes her time working in a rural setting as the catalyst for her interest in microbiology and infectious diseases.
Dr. Marathe moved to the U.S. to get a masters in microbiology and immunology and later went on to do her medical residency training. She ended up at Boston Medical Center (BMC) for her infectious diseases fellowship, where she focused primarily on HIV until the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. At that point BMC’s infectious disease team pivoted to researching COVID-19, treating COVID patients, and developing guidelines and policies based on growing knowledge in the field. BMC eventually opened its specialized Long COVID ReCOVer clinic in 2021 with Dr. Marathe as the Founding Director.
Dr. Marathe says it has brought her “great joy to be able to help people [with this] new disease.” Given how much is still unknown about the condition, she says, “I tell my patients living with Long Covid that I learn as much from [them] as I probably could contribute to their medical health. So it’s a joint effort. It's a journey that we are on together, because we [clinicians] don't have the answers.” In fact, Dr. Marathe says that treating Long COVID is “a lot of trial and error and working one-on-one to figure out what works for each individual patient.”
Due to technological advancements since the onset of the HIV epidemic in the 1980s, Dr. Marathe points out how much faster guidelines, treatments, and vaccines were developed for COVID-19 than for HIV. However, she says the downside of speed is that, especially early in the pandemic, rapidly shifting COVID guidelines and policies—driven by the scientific community's real-time learning—ultimately eroded public trust. This dynamic created an environment of misinformation and disinformation, the consequences of which we continue to see play out today as conflicting federal guidance causes confusion and hesitancy around the most recent COVID-19 boosters.
“If I don't address the real life concerns that my patients have, I'm not going to be successful.”
Dr. Marathe’s work with BMC’s MA-CEAL aims to cut through public confusion by training trusted community members to provide evidence-based information on COVID-19, COVID vaccines, and Long COVID to their neighbors, an initiative with which Vital CxNs has been honored to partner. MA-CEAL’s trusted messenger model also seeks to address inequities in who accesses COVID- and Long Covid-related services, an initiative with which Vital CxNs has been honored to partner.
Dr. Marathe noted how BMC’s Long COVID clinic patients were initially significantly less diverse than the broader patient population at BMC. In particular, people of color, immigrants, and those who do not speak English are alarmingly underrepresented at the clinic compared to other groups, despite being among those hardest hit by the pandemic itself.
As the pandemic has waned, MA-CEAL has broadened its scope beyond COVID to include other health conditions like diabetes, but still centers minority communities with the goal of addressing the barriers they face to being healthy. “A lot of people have to prioritize between various essential things. [For example], do you prioritize buying medications or buying food? I may come from a place where I'm trying to prioritize healthcare,” Dr. Marathe says, “but if I don't address the real life concerns that my patients have, I'm not going to be successful.” The MA-CEAL program aims to build a culture of trust, inclusivity, and advocacy. “The medical community is here to listen to you and provide the support that you need but sometimes it's a matter of community members recognizing how to advocate for things that they need as well.” Dr. Marathe offers encouragement saying, “[Community members] shouldn't stop trying to make people listen to them.”
Written by Briana Acosta (October 2025)