Undergraduate Student Assistance Fund
The School of Public Health has launched an Undergraduate Student Assistance Fund to aid students from diverse backgrounds. The awards support students who have overcome economic and educational disadvantages or personal adversity in their pursuit of higher education.
Inaugural winners for the 2015–2016 year:
- Jocelyn Castillo, Public Health Major
- Brian Cedeno-Betancourt, Public Health Major
- Daysha Gunther, Public Health Major
- Phillip Milligan, Health Informatics and Health Information Management
- Christine Perez Delgado, Public Health Major
UW Graduate School Latino/a Scholars Graduate School Fellowship
These fellowships provide one-time awards to students with a demonstrated commitment to Latino communities, regardless of documented status.
Janeth Sanchez, PhD student in Health Services, and Maria Blancas, an MPH student in Health Services (Community Oriented Public Health Practice Program), were cited for their academic research, work, and/or service benefiting Latino communities.
SPH Endowed Fellowship
The SPH Endowed Fellowship rewards graduate students who demonstrate outstanding academic merit and leadership potential in the field of public health.
Vivian Lyons, a second-year MPH student in Epidemiology (Maternal & Child Health), is a research assistant at the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, where she studies the unmet needs of students returning to school after traumatic brain injuries. Winning the fellowship “opens up a lot of time for me so I can focus on my independent research and my thesis,” Lyons says. Her thesis looks at whether arrests have an impact on intimate partner violence. Her independent project is about whether current gestational weight-gain guidelines should be revised. Vivian received her BS in Public Health from SPH in 2013.
Rattlinggourd Scholarship
The 2015–2016 Rattlinggourd Scholarship is dedicated to fostering public health advances in Native American & Alaska Native communities by providing support to SPH students.
Curtis Rodgers, a senior majoring in Environmental Health, will use the Rattlinggourd Scholarship to help pay tuition. He spent last summer working as an environmental health officer for the Indian Health Service in New Mexico, inspecting food and conducting education campaigns about such issues as child passenger safety and tularemia (rabbit fever). “I came to the UW because I wanted to find a way to work with communities that were underserved, and I figured Environmental Health was the best way to do that,” Rodgers says. He plans to work in rural communities in Alaska after graduation.