Just what do public health professional do?
Minority high school students from the New Haven area learned that the profession offers an unusually wide variety of opportunity, from testing the safety of pharmaceuticals to improving access to clean water to studying why African-Americans are more likely to suffer from a range of chronic health conditions.
Nearly 30 students paid close attention as Dean Paul Cleary, two faculty members, several current Yale public health students and an alumna talked about their journeys to public health and how their work has taken them as far away as Indonesia, Thailand and Ethiopia. The researchers also sought to demystify the profession—and college—for the teenagers, explaining terms such as epidemiologist, biostatistics and dean.
“I can’t imagine having picked a better career. I think you would find it a very exciting thing to do,” Cleary told the students gathered in Winslow Auditorium as part of the Yale School of Public Health’s Ninth Annual Diversity Day earlier this month.
Cleary explained how public health workers are seeking to reduce the spread of HIV, studying the origins of different cancers and working to eliminate health disparities between different ethnic groups in the United States.
Melinda M. Pettigrew, an associate professor, explained that unlike doctors who have a one-on-one relationship with patients, public health practitioners help large groups or even whole populations at once. Disease vaccinations, public safety laws and a cleaner environment are just some of the successful results.
“We’re interested in prevention,” Pettigrew said. “If you want to do something that helps people, this is the field for you. There’s a lot of work to do and there will always be jobs.”
Assistant professor Tené Lewis traced her journey from her hometown of Detroit to Yale, and how she become interested in the issue of health and race. She told the students that African-Americans, on average, live four years less than their white peers and explained a range of factors that contribute to this disparity. “It’s not right that the color of your skin determines how long you live in this country,” she said.
The high school students are part of the Health Professional Recruitment and Enhancement Program (HPREP), a national initiative that provides minority students with a glimpse into medical education to foster an interest in a health care field. The local student group is mentored by two students from the Yale School of Medicine.
Trang Thach, a current School of Public Health student, told the group how nervous she was when coming to Yale. Those feelings quickly dissipated. “Everyone was so welcoming,” she said. Thach has since traveled to Romania and China as part of her education and characterized her public health training as a challenging and rewarding experience.
As a case study in public health, alumna Maya Hanna, M.P.H. ’07, told how her studies in biostatistics allowed her to get a job at Pfizer pharmaceuticals in nearby Groton. Hanna, who once participated in HPREP, now supports toxicology studies to determine if drugs in the development pipeline are safe for the public. It can take up to 15 years of testing before a drug is released to the public. “A degree in public health will enable you to impact people in many ways,” she said.