Student Spotlight – Amelia Hanron

Amelia Hanron has an exuberant and infectious love for science. A Master of Public Health student in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases, she started the program with experience in medical and laboratory science, specifically working in a lab that was developing new tests for HIV and malaria.

What Amelia likes about the field of public health is how varied it is and how many opportunities exist. Her first-year core curriculum classes with students from all sorts of backgrounds and interests — from biostatistics to health policy — helped her broaden her perspective and get to know her classmates. Likewise, she loves the fact that there is a faculty at Yale with amazing expertise at your fingertips. In fact, ready for a fix of bench science this summer, Amelia reached out to the Department of Laboratory Medicine, where she is now doing disease detective work that will potentially result in a rapid diagnostic test for respiratory viruses.

The work is critically important to the effort to combat anti-microbial resistance explains Amelia. Much of the reason our antibiotics are becoming ineffective is from over prescription. If healthcare providers had a quick and accurate way to determine if an infection was viral or bacterial, these drugs would be used more discriminately and lengthen their functional lifespan in the pharmaceutical toolkit.

Amelia’s expertise at Yale has extended to serving as education director for the Haven Free Clinic which provides no cost health care to people in New Haven who do not have health insurance. She also works with the Yale Pathways to Science program for middle and high school students, which tickles her love for teaching and spreading the word about science. During the school year that meant organizing events for local students. This summer it offered the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for the two-week intensive program. Adding to the fun, Amelia’s course was in neuroscience and consciousness, an area just as new and exciting to Amelia as it was to the kids.