When Mikhail Pozin (Baruch, 2012) talks about health, work, burnout and recovery, he does not speak in slogans. He speaks like someone who has spent years following clues.
Those clues have taken him from New York City classrooms to economic development, from workplace wellness to regenerative agriculture, from metabolic health startups to his own difficult medical journey. Today, they have led him to a new mission: helping people on mental health leave get more support, more structure and a better path back to themselves.
Pozin was born in Russia and came to the United States in 1994 as part of what he describes as “the big Russian Jewish exodus.” He grew up mostly in New York City and went on to study business at Baruch, where he earned a BBA in Industrial Organizational Psychology and joined AEPi’s Beta Sigma chapter.
His path to AEPi was also part of his Jewish journey. After attending a Modern Orthodox Jewish day school, Pozin said he had moved away from religion during high school. College gave him a different entry point.
“I’m still curious,” he remembered thinking. “I want to explore.”
AEPi and Hillel helped give him a new way to connect with Judaism, one centered less on obligation and more on brotherhood, shared experience and exploration. “That was a place like, ‘Hey, I get to explore with folks who are like-minded, like-spirited,” Pozin said. “That was a good brotherhood to have.”
At Baruch, where many students lived at home and commuted, building community required effort. Pozin helped organize mixers and events, looking for ways to bring brothers together and connect with nearby chapters and sororities. That experience of gathering people would become an early influence on his professional life.
His first college friend was a musician. They joined AEPi together. Soon, Pozin was managing him, helping book gigs, open mics and shows across New York City. Other brothers came out to support the performances, brought friends and helped build what Pozin described as “a little movement.”
“It kind of came from having met in school and then having this brotherhood,” he said. “It was multiple layers of support.”
That early music business did not become his long-term career, but it planted a seed. Watching artists live the demanding late-night lifestyle of the music world made Pozin think more deeply about health, stress and the environments people move through.
“What happens to them if their health isn’t addressed?” he asked. “They planted a seed for me for later on for the work I’m doing now within broader health.”
After graduation, Pozin went on Birthright Israel, then returned to New York and began working as a program manager at the New York City Department of Education during the first broad rollout of a computer science curriculum. From there, he moved into economic development with the Alliance for Downtown New York, where he saw the rise of tech companies and open office culture up close.
That experience helped connect his academic background with his growing interest in wellness. Open offices, he noticed, did not serve everyone equally. Engineers, salespeople and other teams often needed very different environments to do their best work.
“What I was trying to do was combine environmental psych and organizational psychology together,” he said. “How does the environment affect us?”
Pozin became interested in workplace well-being, not just ergonomics, but light, color, noise, mobility, office dynamics and even biophilic design, the idea that people benefit from having more nature around them.
That curiosity eventually led him into agriculture and food systems. He worked with Square Roots, an urban farming company using hydroponic growing systems in Brooklyn and then immersed himself in regenerative agriculture in the Hudson Valley. He spent time at Glynwood, a teaching farm in Cold Spring, New York, and later helped manage an agroforestry medicinal herb farm in Pennsylvania.
For Pozin, agriculture was never only about food. It was about the relationship between soil, plants, animals and people.
“How we treat the soil is eventually impacts how healthy or unhealthy we are,” he said.
His interest in health was also personal. At 17, Pozin was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, mitral valve prolapse. The diagnosis helped explain why he had often felt slower or more easily fatigued than other kids. It also pushed him to pay closer attention to his body, his diet and the decisions that could support long-term health.
That attention deepened as he entered the worlds of biohacking, longevity and metabolic health. Pozin worked with companies focused on yoga, wearable devices, coaching and continuous glucose monitoring. Along the way, he began seeing connections between food, blood sugar, energy, focus, mood and even migraines.
“I started seeing relationships between my mood, energy, and mental health, my procrastination, my motivation, even my migraines,” he said.
The turning point came after he experienced burnout, layoffs and then heart surgery in 2024. The surgery brought serious complications, including a second surgery, powerful antibiotics, recurring autoimmune issues and severe brain fog. Pozin said his recovery was shaped by everything he had learned about metabolic health.
“I feel very fortunate that everything I learned about metabolic psychiatry and mental and metabolic health is going to bring us back to ninth grade biology class,” he said.
As he recovered, Pozin began asking a broader question: What if burnout is not only emotional or psychological, but also physiological?
He spoke with more than 200 people who had experienced burnout in some form. Again and again, he saw patterns: people overwhelmed by work and life, struggling with sleep, stress, health issues, family obligations and the uncertainty of medical leave. Many had therapy or psychiatry, but little day-to-day structure during the long hours in between.
“When we’re burnt out, it’s not just mental,” Pozin said.
That insight is now the foundation of his current work. Pozin is building a nationwide coaching program for people dealing with burnout and mental health leave, with a long-term goal of working with disability insurance carriers so that people on leave have access to more comprehensive support.
He is careful to clarify that what he is building is not simply an app.
“Right now, it’s more of telehealth or telecoaching than an app,” he said. “There’s like app components, but that’s not the central part.”
The mission is to help people navigate leave, understand paperwork, build structure, and address health factors that may not be covered by traditional mental health care alone. Pozin sees mental health leave as a critical moment when someone may finally have both the need and the opportunity to make meaningful changes.
“We’re trying to redefine the mental health leave window as the most important inflection point in someone’s health journey,” he said.
His long-term vision is to make this kind of support part of the standard disability leave process. “Ideally, we are embedded within disability insurance carriers so that whenever someone goes out on leave, the carrier says, ‘Hey, we have this option for you,’” Pozin said.
AEPi has continued to play a role in that journey. Pozin said that networking with brothers around the world on Facebook has been “huge,” especially as he has connected with brothers about burnout, benefits and the disability space. One AEPi brother, Supreme Governor Mark Prine, who he met through Facebook, also has a background in industrial-organizational psychology, helped Pozin better understand how benefits consultants think and talk about leave, workplace support and employee needs.
He also still keeps in touch with his Big Brother from his undergraduate days. The relationship grew even stronger during Pozin’s time farming, a reminder that AEPi brotherhood does not end at graduation or stay confined to campus.
From Baruch mixers to Brooklyn music venues, from New York offices to Pennsylvania farms, from heart surgery recovery to helping others navigate burnout, Pozin’s story is one of connection, between people, environments, food, health, work and community.
It is also a reminder of the power of brotherhood at the right moment. AEPi helped Pozin reconnect with Jewish life on his own terms. It gave him brothers who showed up for his earliest entrepreneurial efforts. Years later, it remains a network of support, advice and shared purpose.
For Pozin, that purpose is now clear: help people who are burned out, overwhelmed and unsure what comes next find a healthier way forward.
“The goal is we are tackling the mental health crisis from an angle that’s overlooked,” he said, “during the time period that people need it the most.”
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(Editor’s Note: June is Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month and AEPi urges all of our brothers, family and friends to use this month as a reminder to check in on each other, to encourage conversation and provide support and a helping hand when needed. Around 10% of men experience daily depression or anxiety, but less than half receive treatment. Only 41.6% of men with any mental illness seek professional help, compared to 56.9% of women. It is our responsibility to Be Our Brothers’ Keeper and help identify concerns and encourage each other to seek professional help when appropriate).