Philomena Asante, MD

Philomena Asante, MD, MPH, is an Associate Professor in Pediatrics-Adolescent Medicine at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Medical director for School Health in the Division of Adolescent Medicine. She is a board-certified pediatrician with twenty one years’ experience as a primary care clinician as well as a public health leader, school and college health expert with extensive administrative experience leading and managing health care systems in educational settings and leading health equity initiatives.  As medical director, Dr. Asante oversees the six school based health centers that Mount Sinai Hospital operates in New York City public middle and high schools to provide students access to high quality primary and reproductive health services. She also sees patients at the School based health centers and Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center. 

Dr. Asante received her bachelor’s degree in French language and literature with high honors from Harvard College, her medical degree from the University of Rochester School Of Medicine, as well as her Master of Public Health degree in international health and certificate in clinical effectiveness from the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.  She completed pediatric residency at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, NY, then went on to complete both a General Academic Pediatrics fellowship and a Harvard-wide pediatric health services research fellowship at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. She was the first general academic pediatric fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr. Asante is certified in pediatrics by the American Board of Pediatrics.

In the last 10 years, Dr. Asante’s career path has focused on the intersection of health and education. From 2014-2018, Dr. Asante served as the director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Health at the Boston Public Health Commission, where she oversaw a city-wide program that operated seven school-based health care centers in Boston public high schools in collaboration with Boston Medical Center.  From 2018-2020, Dr. Asante was the medical director at Northeastern University Health and Counseling Services.  From 2021 to 2023, Dr. Asante worked as staff physician at Boston University Student Health Services. In 2023, she was appointed as Chief of Student Medicine at Yale University at Yale Health after an extensive national search.

Dr. Asante is a founding member of PROWD (Promoting and Respecting Our Women Doctors), a national organization of gender- equity researchers who collaborate with each other on a volunteer basis to support the healthcare workforce. She was also the Vice-Chair of the Women Physicians Section Governing Council at the Massachusetts Medical Society (MMS), and a member of the MMS Committee on Diversity in Medicine. She has also served as the deputy chair of the Alumni Engagement Committee at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health.