Growing up in Ghana, Osei Kwadwo Boateng experienced disparities in rural healthcare infrastructure firsthand. “Someone living in a rural area might walk ten miles or more to a city, just hoping to see a doctor,” he explains. After losing his grandmother—which he says could have been prevented with better access…
At once the blink of an eye and a long enough time for the whole world to change, we have just completed our first five years of instruction. On this anniversary, let’s review what we’ve accomplished and where we’re going. Where We Started Our Master of Public Health (MPH) Program…
Since our Program’s first year, MPH students, faculty, and staff have helped build coalitions with local agencies aiming to improve access to healthy food and education for youth and families in communities surrounding Cornell. Students have conducted needs assessments, written grant proposals, and designed and implemented evaluation plans for Universal…
While training in social sciences in college, Dr. Karla Hanson knew she was interested in engaged learning—“except we didn’t even have the language for it at that time,” she remembers. After a job writing grant proposals for a community health center, she went back to school for a PhD in…
At first thought, forensic pathology may not seem like public health. Working in a coroner’s office in her hometown, however; Maura Benner could see the connections. “A lot of the problems we saw can be explained with the social determinants of health,” she says. She realized that autopsies represented “so…
“Feed the world” might be an over-simplified pop-song lyric, but Dr. Elizabeth Fox, Cornell ’09, ’16, is working hard to explore the complexities of the concept. Dr. Fox joined the MPH Program in 2019, with a focus in food systems and health. More specifically, Fox’s research tackles the real-world issues…
In her sophomore year of college, Avni Patel enrolled in a public health social justice course. The professor focused on feminist theory in public health. “My passion for public health stemmed from my feminism and guided me,” says Patel. After college, she went to India to develop different health curricula…
“I’m most interested in alleviating systems of oppression,” says Dr. Charley Willison, who joined the MPH Program faculty this January, and whose research seeks to understand how policy and politics can improve outcomes for the “overlapping and co-occurring” issues of homelessness, substance use disorders, and disaster response. In public health…
Dr. Irene Sumbele joined the MPH Program as a visiting scholar in 2019, coming to Cornell from the conflict zone of Cameroon as an Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) Fellow. Last year, she was named the 2020 Beau Biden Scholar for her work in “pursuing health equity…
When she applied to Cornell’s MPH Program, Jubi Lin was most curious about the One Health paradigm. “I always wanted to go into human medicine, but had never thought about how it was connected to all these sectors before,” she recalls. She was first drawn to public health after…