Senior plans to build career in construction safety
Siena Ellis, BS ’26
Public Health Sciences
By Bob Cunningham
Siena Ellis, BS ’26, is going to trade her graduation cap for a hard hat after she walks across the stage at historic Hill Auditorium on April 30.
The University of Michigan School of Public Health senior has accepted a job as a safety coordinator with Clark Construction Group, one of the nation’s largest construction companies, where she will be based in the Washington, DC, metro area.
It’s not a career path most people picture when they think of a public health degree, but for Ellis the road from a San Jose suburb to a construction job site makes perfect sense.
A random conversation leads to public health
Ellis, who grew up in Los Gatos, California, always knew she wanted to go somewhere big—a school with great sports, real academic challenges, and a campus with energy. She had her heart set on the University of California, Berkeley, where her father went to school.
But then she fell in love with the University of Michigan.
She was accepted through the university’s early action process, finding out during a high school club meeting. She saw confetti pop up on her screen and could hardly believe it.
I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today without Dr. Neitzel.”
— Siena Ellis
She visited Ann Arbor with her family, found a roommate on Instagram and decided Michigan was the place.
Ellis originally planned to study psychology like her father, and she liked AP Psychology in high school. It seemed like a safe bet.
But it didn’t stick. By the end of her freshman year, she wasn’t enjoying her psychology classes. She also was working at Taste Kitchen, a high-end restaurant near campus where she spent her shifts rolling silverware and waiting tables.
One night, a master’s student in Economics was so short-staffed that he brought his girlfriend in to help. That girlfriend happened to be earning a master’s degree in Epidemiology from Michigan Public Health. Ellis started talking about how frustrated she felt, and the woman stopped her.
“She said, ‘Have you heard of the School of Public Health? It sounds like you might be a good candidate,’” Ellis recalled. “That conversation literally changed my life. It was just so random.”
Ellis enrolled in Public Health 200 the following semester and she was hooked. She applied to the School of Public Health, got accepted, and never looked back.
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Finding her lane in a big field
Choosing public health was only the first step. The harder part was figuring out what kind of public health work she wanted to do.
Many of her classmates were pre-med, but Ellis knew that wasn’t her path. She had to work to resist the urge to compare herself to everyone around her.
“I wasn’t cut out to be pre-med,” she said. “So why would I compare myself to them?”
Rick Neitzel, professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Global Public Health, teaches Public Health 305. He introduced Ellis to the fields of industrial hygiene and occupational health and safety, areas focused on protecting workers from on-the-job dangers like toxic chemicals, dangerous equipment and unsafe working conditions.
Neitzel is also the director of the Center for Occupational Health and Safety Engineering. He pointed Ellis toward Michigan Public Health's Environmental Health Sciences graduate program in industrial hygiene, helped her map out the courses she would need, flagged an internship opportunity, and wrote her a letter of recommendation to go with her application.
“Siena is a great example of exactly the qualities we need in our occupational health and safety workforce,” Neitzel said. “She’s smart, dedicated, passionate and highly motivated to make sure workers get the protections they need to do their jobs safely."
“I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today without Dr. Neitzel,” Ellis said.
The summer before her senior year, Ellis interned with SAIF Corporation—the State Accident Insurance Fund—in Salem, Oregon. SAIF is a workers’ compensation insurance provider that covers nearly 90% of Oregon businesses and offers free safety consulting to its policyholders.
All summer long, Ellis shadowed safety consultants as they visited businesses of all kinds—police stations, manufacturing plants, home healthcare agencies. She helped write safety reports, produced educational videos about workplace health, and learned how to talk to business owners about OSHA regulations.
One visit stood out above all the others.
Ellis and a safety consultant visited a small construction company that had been struggling with a high rate of worker injuries. The owner had taken over the business from his father. His wife was handling safety, payroll, and just about everything else that was not actual construction work.
When the safety consultant began going over the company’s issues, the wife started crying.
“She said, ‘I’m trying so hard, and it's just not enough,’” Ellis recalled. “And we said, ‘What can we do to help you?’”
The company invited them back. The team delivered a bilingual workplace safety presentation and helped the owners start making real changes. Seeing that impact—and the close-knit community the construction crew had built together—made Ellis want to pursue construction safety specifically.
“It was the most dynamic workspace I had ever seen,” she said. “And seeing the community they had was really refreshing.”
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Siena is a great example of exactly the qualities we need in our occupational health and safety workforce. She’s smart, dedicated, passionate and highly motivated to make sure workers get the protections they need to do their jobs safely."
— Rick Neitzel, professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Global Public Health and director of the Industrial Hygiene program
Landing a job with Clark Construction
Ellis applied to several construction companies after her internship. Clark Construction Group stood out.
Clark flew her to the DC area for an in-person interview that included a full tour of an active job site. She was struck by how much the company prioritizes safety, not just as a legal requirement, but as a core part of its culture. Clark built Chase Center in San Francisco, where the Golden State Warriors play. The company is currently working on a new Washington metro station and renovations to Capital One Arena, home of the Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards.
What sealed the deal for Ellis was a company policy requiring every project manager to serve as a safety coordinator before taking over a job site. In other words, she said, everyone in a leadership role at Clark has to understand safety from the inside out.
“There’s no ‘that’s not my job’ mentality,” she said. “You know exactly what should and shouldn’t be happening.”
She will start as one of several safety coordinators on a single large job site in the DC metro area. Her goal is to earn professional certifications, including her Associate Safety Professional credential, and eventually become a Certified Safety Professional.
For Ellis, construction safety is ultimately an expression of a core public health value, that every person deserves to live and work with dignity.
“I don’t know if you can feel that way if you’re always worried about your safety, always looking over your shoulder, wondering if your boss actually cares about you,” she said. “My goal is to build real relationships with the people I work with and be invested in them as people. That’s what public health is, really: meeting people where they are and making sure they know someone has their back.”
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