Student Spotlight – Yazhi Sun

As Yazhi Sun was schooling for a career in biomedical engineering in her native China, she found a home for her increasing interest in human health topics in the field of public health. Now a second-year student in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, she is using her time at the Yale School of Public Health to sample different approaches to the field. For example, she had her first experience doing field work last summer in Romania where she collected both soil, water, vegetable and biological samples for a long-term project on exposure to heavy metals from a historic gold mine. After her initial coursework, she decided to pursue the public health modeling concentration (which can be pursued from any concentration in the MPH program) when she came to understand how critical data analysis is to research. As she nears the midpoint of her second year, Yazhi is delving more deeply into her thesis, which looks at data from gene databases of colorectal cancer to compare gene expression in different groups of people. Yazhi hopes to pursue a career in research.