Read about SPH people, research and impact.
SPH Blog
Why minor in global health?
Through the Biology Honors program, I enrolled in a course that took a public health approach to HIV/AIDS. The course opened my eyes to global health. I’ve always had an interest in aid work and foreign policy, but I was never able to isolate a specific major or minor, until I found the Global Health Minor. It was exactly what I wanted to do.
Why is war a public health issue?
War is, of course, toxic to health. War produces death, disables people and erodes infrastructure that supports health, yet it is entirely preventable. Public health can serve in a prevention role, not just a cleanup role. We set up refugee camps and clinics, send in vaccination teams and doctors, but we need to do more to prevent conflicts sooner.
A laboratory scientist, fly fisherman and winemaker, Terrance Kavanagh left his native Michigan for the University of Washington in 1985 to be a postdoc in the pathology department. Today, he leads three UW centers, including the Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics and Environment, where researchers work to understand how genetic factors influence human susceptibility to environmental health risks.
A first-generation college student from the Colombian coffee belt, Mauricio Sadinle deviated from the family business to pursue higher education. With help from an unlikely pen pal, he used statistics to quantify the toll of Colombia’s war with rebels. Now, he uses statistics to improve the quality of data and to unlock data's full potential.
Finding passion points and public health pathways
While working as a dietitian in San Francisco, Jessica Jones-Smith noticed trends in how social, environmental and economic factors shaped people’s food choices and, in effect, their health.
If it weren’t for a teacher who pushed her to pursue science, Rhea Coler could have slipped through the cracks as a young girl in Trinidad. Three degrees and five patents later, Coler is shaping the future of vaccine development and mentoring emerging leaders in global health.
Can a woman’s diet, lifestyle, socioeconomic status or environmental exposures affect the course of her pregnancy? How might they affect the occurrence of disease in her child? Do they affect male and female children differently?
“The beauty of mathematics is in the vigorousness of the theory and how you prove it,” Zhou says. “Biostatistics is using math principals to solve real world problems. You can see an impact.”
As a young nursing student attending her required community health nursing class, Betty Bekemeier experienced firsthand the power of a positive role model.
Tell us about your research. What excites you most about your work?
My research looks at how social and environmental stressors such as poverty and air pollution cause cardiovascular disease. These stressors often have a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged populations, and subsequently their health.
Before he earned his MD, Joel Kaufman was a best-selling author — for a week, at least.
In 1982, he took a year off from his studies to work for the consumer advocacy Public Citizen Health Research Group in Washington, D.C. The result was a book, Over the Counter Pills That Don’t Work.
By 8:30 most mornings, Carey Farquhar has already exercised, dropped her kids at school and taken part in at least two calls with colleagues in Kenya. A ground-breaking HIV researcher and long-time mentor, she hopes to develop a more diverse student body as well as launch more fieldwork opportunities for students in Asia.
Devastating floods had just hit Mozambique when Kenny Sherr first arrived in March 2000. Rivers had overflown from heavy rains, killing hundreds and destroying cattle and crops.
“A woman gave birth in a tree,” says Sherr, now an associate professor of global health at the University of Washington School of Public Health. “Rosita, the baby, made international news. Everybody knew about it.”
Jennifer Otten is part of a UW team studying the impact of the minimum-wage increase in Seattle. She's also an expert on food systems, and one of her greatest passions is food waste – we throw out roughly 25 percent of the food we buy, she says. Otten teaches the popular "Food Studies: Harvest to Health" class, which has no textbook and no tests, but lots of videos.
It was Irene Njuguna’s dream to save children from the agonies of childhood disease. But as a pediatric resident in Nairobi, she felt powerless standing by the bedside. She saw gaps in the health care system, from a critical shortage of hospital beds and intravenous lines to low testing rates for HIV.