After a morning of Zoom meetings, a phone call to Senator Elissa Slotkin’s office and training medical students, Cara Poland, MD, MEd, still has plenty of energy to juggle her many roles. Poland is an associate professor with MSU College of Human Medicine and a physician at Trinity Health driven to advance addiction treatment through her clinical practice, teaching and advocacy.

“I like to tell my daughter I’m the Taylor Swift of addiction medicine but I’m in my chauffeur era,” she joked, referring to the coexistence of her nationally recognized work in addiction medicine advocacy and the never-ending transport needs of her two tween children.

In a way, this dual commitment to family and to advocacy work is representative of Poland’s entire life. Her passion for eliminating the stigma that surrounds addiction was ignited by the death of her brother, Max, more than a decade ago. As she shared on stage at TEDxMSU in 2024: “The opposite of stigma is empathy.”