From water sanitation in South Africa to suicide prevention in Missouri schools, students explore public health in summer program

In its first summer as a fully fledged school, the Andrew M. and Jane M. Bursky School of Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis hosted a summer program for students to cultivate the next generation of public health leaders. Twenty students — 10 WashU undergrads and 10 MPH students from Bursky Public Health and elsewhere — took part in the eight-week program, which combined mentored public health research or practice with professional development opportunities and social events. 

“We’re working to provide as rich an experience as possible for the students,” said Morven McLean, PhD, the associate dean for innovation at Bursky Public Health and a professor of practice at the school. The program was developed by the school’s Office of Innovation, which McLean directs. “We want our students to understand the importance of being part of an interdisciplinary public health environment, to learn from it, and become champions for it.”

Students took part in one of five tracks — planetary health, global health, health communication, health policy or food and agriculture — and they worked on projects ranging from lead contamination in soil to food insecurity to community engagement. The diversity of projects was part of a deliberate effort to encourage students to think beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries and appreciate how public health intersects with many other fields.

Maggie Kim, an undergrad at WashU majoring in architecture, studied water sanitation in 19^th and early 20^th century South Africa under the mentorship of Kristin Brig-Ortiz, PhD, the director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Public Health & Society at Arts & Sciences and a member of the Bursky Public Health secondary faculty.

Through a painstaking analysis of handwritten historical documents, Kim helped uncover how drainage, sanitation and disease became intertwined with colonial racial ideologies. 

 “I was really interested in how these colonial public health officers profited from and relied on the labor of nonwhite communities, but at the same time designated them as harmful actors to the concept of colonial public health,” Kim said. “They thought being in proximity to nonwhites would cause disease. That may have led to the formation of racialized public health policies as well as societal segregation.”

Kim signed up for the program — known as the Office of Innovation Summer Experience Program — mostly because it seemed like an interesting way to spend a few weeks. But the experience has made her rethink her career goals. She is now considering doing a dual major in architecture and public health while pursuing a career that, she said, “leverages architectural design to produce positive social change.” 

Introducing undergraduates to public health is one of the main goals of the program, said Jen Mandeville, MS, a member of the Office of Innovation team. Mandeville helped organize the overall program and ran the planetary health track. 

“The initial idea was to introduce WashU undergraduates to the world of public health, since they don’t have many opportunities to do public health research as undergrads,” Mandeville said. “Our central theme is that to succeed in public health, we need everyone, and everyone has a place in public health.”

As an additional incentive, Bursky Public Health will provide a 25% tuition discount for any undergrads who took part in the program this year and who apply for and get accepted into the school’s MPH program.

WashU undergrad Danielle Cheong spent her summer testing soil samples for lead contamination as part of Bursky Public Health’s Summer Experience Program. Led by the school’s Office of Innovation, the program is designed to cultivate the next generation of public health leaders. (Credit: Zachary Linhares/WashU Bursky Public Health)

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“We want our summer research participants to know that we see them as part of our Bursky Public Health community and that we are invested in their success,” said Angela Hobson, MPH, PhD, the associate dean of education and a teaching professor. “They are talented, enthusiastic, and have great potential for impact. We would be honored for them to come back and engage with us further.”

Half the students were MPH students who are already committed to a career in public health. For them, the program served as a way to complete their required applied practice experience by participating in community-engaged research or connecting research to public health practice. 

In addition to developing relationships with their mentors and their cohort, the students were invited to weekly Lunch & Learn professional development sessions. Representatives from WashU’s Office of Public Scholarship, which helps WashU scholars translate research to audiences beyond academia; WashU Law’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic, which takes on environmental and community health cases pro bono; the MOST Policy Initiative, a nonpartisan organization working to connect science to policy at the state level in Missouri; and other organizations came to share a meal with the students and explain how their work intersects with public health. Additional seminars, open to all participants in the program, were offered through the global health track. These seminars introduced the students to even more aspects of public health research. 

“The main point was to just expose these students to different aspects of research, like research ethics; different methodologies, like today’s lecture on mixed methods; and to different areas of public health research, including cardiology, nutrition and environmental health,” said Joshua Bogus, MPH, a member of the Office of Innovation team and the leader of the global health track, speaking during an interview in July. “We wanted to give students the opportunity to explore the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary aspects of public health.”

All students were given a stipend to cover living expenses for the duration. The stipend has a dual benefit: Students can focus on learning without undue financial stress, and faculty members obtain help with their research at no financial cost, a boon for junior faculty who might otherwise struggle to pay for research assistance out of their grant funding.  

Marian Ofori, MD, an MPH student at Bursky Public Health who participated in the summer program’s global health track, worked with Massy Mutumba, MPH, PhD, an assistant professor, to study school-based efforts to prevent suicide among youth in Missouri.

“The state of Missouri has had a school suicide prevention policy in place since 2016, but not all schools are implementing it yet,” Ofori said. “We’re looking at gaps and challenges at those schools to find out why they haven’t done that.” 

Mutumba plans to use insights from this work to inform the development of school-based suicide prevention approaches in St. Louis, with potential for adaptation and extension to schools in Uganda.

The program wrapped up at the end of July with a two-day symposium. Students presented on their summer projects and competed in a competition called “Research that Resonates” that encouraged the presenters to creatively communicate the public health impact of their research. Awards were given for innovative science communication, demonstrated intellectual curiosity, audience engagement and overall excellence in research communication. 

“I’m really happy with how this first year turned out,” Mandeville said. “I think the mix of students we had — graduate, undergraduate, the diversity of majors — has really helped the students understand that public health doesn’t just happen in a school of public health and it doesn’t just involve people who have PH in their credentials. I have two engineers in the planetary health track, and you could see them begin to understand how engineers are needed to answer public health questions.”

MPH student Gifty Ntoni spent her summer working to improve St. Louisans’ access to healthy foods. A participant in Bursky Public Health’s Summer Experience program, Ntoni was placed with Operation Food Search and supported the operation’s mobile market program, which brings groceries at reduced prices to neighborhoods with limited access to fresh food. (Credit: Zachary Linhares/WashU Bursky Public Health)

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Added Hobson, “We very much look forward to refining and expanding the programs to provide additional learning opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in summers to come.”

Tamara Schneider, MPH, PhD, is the assistant director of communications and senior science writer at Bursky Public Health. She holds a bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics & biochemistry and in sociology from Yale University, a master’s in public health from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in biomedical science from the University of California, San Diego. She joined WashU as a science writer in 2016.

Mark Sampson is a freelance science writer. Before becoming a freelancer, he worked as a science writer at the American Chemical Society and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).