Umaima Abbasi, BA ’20, has encountered many reasons to care about addressing vaccine-preventable diseases. She grew up in Pakistan, where few immunizations were available and several infectious diseases ran rampant in her area, including malaria, dengue and polio. And in 2020, she lost her mom to the COVID-19 pandemic before vaccines were widely distributed.
Sukhman Parhar is pursuing a BS in Public Health Sciences from the School of Public Health. Parhar’s passions and education have influenced his interests in public health and medicine.
Even while wading through rafts of spreadsheets, profit reports, inventory assessments and analyses of retail store efficiencies, Lloyd Lyons, BA ’19, never loses sight of the real reason he is here, working as a manager of customer experience strategy for CVS Health. Lyons is one of the 95 students who made up the first cohort of public health majors at Michigan Public Health in 2019.
Adriana Tejada has transformed firsthand observations of health disparities in her community into a mission for change. Learn how she plans to leverage her online MPH studies and the prestigious Winston Scholarship to bridge communication gaps in public health and empower her community. Adriana reflects on her experience as a Winston Scholar, connecting with health policy leaders and envisioning a future where she serves as a health 'translator' for the diverse communities she holds dear.
To an average kid growing up in Michigan, water might seem abundant. They don’t call it the Great Lakes State for nothing. Only about 3 percent of the Earth’s water is fresh, however, and only about 1 percent can be used as drinking water. If you’re an inquisitive 12-year-old growing up 70 miles south of Flint during one of the country’s worst water crises on record—like Elisabeth Repp, BA ’23 was at the time—it would be natural to question what a lot of people take for granted.
Shichi Dhar is a pre-medical student who one day wants to be involved in delivering a more holistic approach to healthcare. She is a senior in the Bachelor of Science program at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. To Dhar, “traditional medicine can only do so much,” and that’s why public health is so paramount in her eyes.