When Kristin Laberis, New Hampshire market director of cardiovascular services, started college, her mind was set on medical school. However, due to a number of headwinds, that plan was scrapped, and she found herself without a definitive career path.
Having grown up in a very small town in South Dakota – population fewer than 100 residents – she was curious about the world. So, she decided to explore other countries and cultures, and to try to figure out what do with her life. It was during her travels to Europe and India that she gained an appreciation for people, culture, and languages (she speaks, or at least reads, 10 other languages – Greek, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Spanish, Italian, French, cuneiform (Babylonian), Arabic and a bit of Hindi -- and her 12-year-old son, the oldest of her two children, is already studying Chinese – no doubt he gets his love of language from his mom).
In addition to her love of language and culture, Kristin liked trying to figure out what made people tick (she still does), why they did what they did, and how their culture, societal norms, and environment shaped their thoughts and actions. She took this curiosity back to college, and while she wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to do with her life, she knew she wanted to keep studying people.
She dove back into her studies, taking classes in languages, religions, and politics. This was during the 9/11 aftermath, when our country was fully engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the question of religious martyrdom and what would motivate people to not only die for their cause but to kill others for their cause, haunted her. It seemed incongruous with the Islam that she had experienced while worshipping in mosques in India, London, and South Dakota.
This question of martyrdom eventually landed Kristin a full ride at Harvard where she earned a Master’s in Theological Studies. She took classes from a wide variety of experts, including journalist and national security analyst Peter Bergen, former deputy national security adviser on Iraq and Afghanistan Meghan O’Sullivan, and national security analyst Graham Allison. She was fortunate to take these classes alongside professionals from the Armed Forces and various intelligence agencies, which deepened her understanding. She worked for the Islam in the West Program, unraveling immigration and its generational challenges, spending her nights and weekends studying, and digging around in chat rooms and online forums, studying the interactions and gathering/interpreting the latest releases from Ayman al-Zawahiri.
After Harvard, Kristin had the opportunity to consider several options in the field of intelligence and counter-terrorism. She took on consulting projects that involved Saudi male teenagers and their chat room and online forum usage, and video games as a terrorist training platform. She was a ghost writer for a variety of major technology companies, focusing on security issues. However, she also had a unique fortuity to work with Peter Olson (former CEO of Random House Publishing) and Candice Carpenter Olson (founder and former CEO of iVillage). They were thinking about a startup to bridge the gap between school and career, and they invited her to partake in its formation. Working alongside and learning from two incredibly successful people, not to mention “her kind of people” – intelligent, curious, always trying to find solutions to problems -- was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. The startup world was vastly different from anything she had experienced before, and the innovation that went into their business plans, financial planning, and presentations hooked her.
So how did she go from counter-terrorism to cardiovascular services?
Her jump into healthcare came after she and her husband, Drew, moved back to South Dakota. There, one of her mentors said her skills would be a great fit for the complex cardiovascular world. It was coming full circle, taking her back to her first love: Medicine. She worked in business development, developing and growing outreach clinics across five states with cardiologists and vascular surgeons, and then had the opportunity to do service line work at the corporate level before going “back home” to the cardiovascular service line when she joined Portsmouth Regional Hospital in 2018. It’s no surprise that the people she works with are her favorite part of the job.
When Kristin thinks about her career path, there is one constant: Learning. Learning new things, taking on new challenges, and analyzing people. It’s why she is happy that she finally landed in healthcare. There’s always a new challenge and new opportunities to learn, and like her days in counter-terrorism, the end goal is always about service and people: Protecting them, and helping them to live better lives.
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