Whitney Peoples, the school’s inaugural director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, has taught, researched, and published on matters at the intersections of race, gender, and health. As a field of scholarship and practice, public health has always been close to her work.
As alum and public health professor Rohan Jeremiah knows well, public health does its best work when it remembers the inherent strengths and unique qualities of the communities it seeks to serve. This means paying close attention to local cultures and thinking creatively about ways to turn challenges into opportunities.
Amani Echols' chose public health because she wanted to make the most impact for the most people. As a co-founder of the Health Equity High School summit, and a staff member at doula program, Dial-A-Doula, she's working directly to combat health inequity and inspire new leaders.
When Pahriya Ashrap sees people in need, she imagines opportunities to help—whether she’s in an Ann Arbor lab or online with a math mentee on the other side of the world. Her simple, powerful dream of making a positive impact has motivated her on her long road to public health, where she works to build bridges of culture and science.
When Aubree Gordon quit a doctoral program in biology, she at first felt like she was going off the road. Looking back at her long path to field epidemiology and the value of her vaccine research to people around the world, these difficult transitions begin making a lot more sense.
Personal connections and community support can keep researchers going on tough days in the lab. Evan Hill draws inspiration from those connections as he discovers more about breast cancer and obesity and shares those discoveries broadly.