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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.
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.
Could that researcher in goggles sitting in a lab really be an anthropologist? And how much adventure will they actually have? From the top of the Himalayas and the Andes to the insides of cells, Ainash Childebayeva has combined anthropology, genetics, and public health to uncover secrets of human history and keep today’s vulnerable populations healthy.
Theresa Gorman witnessed firsthand the clean up at Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks and how rescue and recovery workers began to suffer from respiratory problems. She has built a career around ensuring environmental and worker health and urges public health professionals to see their role in disaster preparedness and response.
Long before the dangers of global warming were clear to us, public health researchers were pursuing protective measures for our most basic and valuable environmental resources and linking that work to concerns about health equity and environmental justice.
Alextia Armstrong earned an MPH in Environmental Health Sciences in the Environment, Sustainability, and Heath program. She interned at the Ann Arbor Water Treatment Plant, where she conducted water quality tests, analyzed data, and worked on a sustainability project with City Hall.